The topics I raised in my essay I was very interested in and I thought this came through and would add to the quality and the content.
Overall I think I learned a great deal during this essay about the digital games in education and the systematics of education itself.
I'm looking forward to looking into these topics further for my graduation project and finding more avenues to pursue for my primary research, I would love to try and get an interview with Katie Salen and will be trying me by to make this happen for my dissertation
The topic of digital games in education is one that is still evolving now and as more and more schools begin to invest in this new area then there will be a lot more to research and discuss in future.
Academics are now arguing a completely different case regarding digital games and their influence on learning and education, academics such as Prensky (2007) who writes “It is possible to combine computer and video games with a wide variety of educational content, achieving as good or better results as traditional learning methods in the process.” The arguments against video games and it’s adverse influence on children’s learning has been long ongoing but in later years these arguments such as “Digital games can cause the child to be more isolated and anti-social” [online, 2011] are becoming weaker as researchers look into ways that digital games can actually increase the social interactivity in children. Indeed in 2010 a school called Quest2Lean has been set-up by Katie Salen et al and partially funded by the Gates Foundation which uses digital games as core tool with which all subjects are taught. The aim of the school is to prove that game-based learning can be used as an intelligent way to engage students and get them to think creatively and technically without the need of traditional methods. According to Salen “The school has really been designed as a school that uses games as a pedagogical kind of structure. [online, 2010] Salen continues to explain that children engage with the subject lesson and context far greater as they are designing digital games revolving around it rather than simply reading about it. Therefore it becomes a kind of technological multi-role play instead of a cold text-book.Unfortunately it is hard to compare the grades of the Qiest2Learn students against other 6-8th graders in others schools as the pedagogy is not the only thing different about the school, they also grade differently. Students are awarded a scale from pre-novice to expert depending on their attainments.
It would have been interesting for my research to look into comparative grades but the school's unconventional way of grading makes that impossible.
Below is an interview with Salen on Game Design and learning...
Since the 1980’s when digital games first started becoming more widely distributed and more popular, several scholars have suggested that digital games have had a largely negative impact on the child’s growing mind and equally their education. However it is only in the last 8 years that this same technology is being embraced not only as a resource but as effective educational tool both in the home and more notably in the classroom.
This change is something that many researchers and ideologists are now looking into. Although the arguments both for and against digital game’s influence on children has been widely discussed, I think it is worthwhile to look at the issue briefly although as I previously mentioned this had already been discussed before in many books and papers so I didn't want to go into that area in any great detail.
A report online states...
Bad Effects of Video Games
Most of the bad effects of video games are blamed on the violence they contain. Children who play more violent video games are more likely to have increased aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and decreased prosocial helping, according to a scientific study (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). The effect of video game violence in kids is worsened by the games’ interactive nature. In many games, kids are rewarded for being more violent. The act of violence is done repeatedly. The child is in control of the violence and experiences the violence in his own eyes (killings, kicking, stabbing and shooting). This active participation, repetition and reward are effective tools for learning behavior. Indeed, many studies seem to indicate that violent video games may be related to aggressive behavior (such as Anderson & Dill, 2000; Gentile, Lynch & Walsh, 2004). However, the evidence is not consistent and this issue is far from settled.
Too much video game playing makes your kid socially isolated. Also, he may spend less time in other activities such as doing homework, reading, sports, and interacting with the family and friends.
Video games do not exercise your kid’s imaginative thinking. Using imagination may be important in developing creativity.
Some video games teach kids the wrong values. Violent behavior, vengeance and aggression are rewarded. Negotiating and other nonviolent solutions are often not options. Women are often portrayed as weaker characters that are helpless or sexually provocative.
Games can confuse reality and fantasy.
Academic achievement may be negatively related to over-all time spent playing video games. Studies have shown that the more time a kid spends playing video games, the poorer is his performance in school. (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Gentile, Lynch & Walsh, 2004)
Video games may also have bad effects on some children’s health, including obesity, video-induced seizures. and postural, muscular and skeletal disorders, such as tendonitis, nerve compression, carpal tunnel syndrome.
When playing online, your kid can pick up bad language and behavior from other people, and may make your kid vulnerable to online dangers.
A study by the Minneapolis-based National Institute for Media and the Family suggests that video games can be addictive for kids, and that the kids' addiction to video games increases their depression and anxiety levels. Addicted kids also exhibit social phobias. Not surprisingly, kids addicted to video games see their school performance suffer.
I want to argue against these points briefly in my essay as they encapsulate the topic.
Along with my questionnaire, I also sent out emails to several companies and individuals who design digital games for schools. Unfortunately not many replied but I did manage to get an interview with the creator of Kent ICT Games, one of the large providers of digital games for schools.
However I felt that this along with any other interviews I might get would be better suited for my 'dissertation' in the third year as larger themes were brought up, such as the lack of digital games for secondary schools as opposed to primary, and I would not have the amount of words available to be able to go into them.
These would be excellent topics and areas to look into later on and I was promised more interviews at a later date.
There were other areas I could only touch on in the 1000 words such as digital games as a educational tool for people with learning disabilities i.e dyslexia and autism, aspergers.
For my essay, I wanted to have as much original information and thoughts as I could on the subject and so I realised I would need firsthand information in order to do this so I devised a simple questionnaire and send it out to as many primary schools as I could so that I would at least get a few responses.
Thankfully I got a good number of responses and the majority of the answers I received perfectly backed up my thoughts.
Below are the questions I asked..
1) Which age group do you teach
2) Do you use digital games to support your teaching
3) How often do you use digital games within your classroom/setting
4) What digital games do you use?
5) Are children able to access digital games independently within the setting?
8) What subjects do you use digital games in conjunction with?
7) Do you think digital games promote learning across the curriculum? If yes, how?
One of my avenues of research led me to Katie Salen, author of several digital game books such as 'Rules of Play and 'The ecology of games' and a game design pioneer. In 2010 Salen along with a small group of others had set up a school in New York whose whole pedagogy was based around digital games and games design. I found a short interview online...
Question: What is the mission behind the Quest2Learn school you founded? Katie Salen: Quest2Learn is this new public school that we opened in New York City in the fall. It’ll eventually be a sixth grade through 12th grade public school. Right now we just have sixth graders. And it’s a school that has been designed from the ground up to try to pay attention to the notion that we have a whole generation of digital kids. And more specifically that... because my interest is in game design, and there’s been increasing kind of research around the fact that kids playing games today are learning to see the world in some pretty interesting way, that we wanted to not only tap into the digital generation in the design of the school, but also to think about, well, how can the structures of games be used to design a school in a way that was really engaging for kids, really got at content expertise, but also began to work on some of these 21st century skills that people are talking about—collaboration, working in teams, complex problem-solving, systems thinking, being able to kind of design and find resources. And so the school has really been designed as a school that uses games as a pedagogical kind of structure.
So, it’s not a school where kids are playing video games all day, which is a common misperception, but it’s a school that uses game-like learning. Question: What's different about the teaching tools Quest2Learn uses? Katie Salen: There’s many different kinds of tools that we use. So, sometimes we do board game design with kids, sometimes we have been doing mobile game design with kids, so kids designing games with cell phones. And so they may be using Bluetooth technology, they may be using something called QR code or Semi code technology, which are visual bar codes that cameras take pictures of. And they design games in the environment that use these bar codes. Question: Why are games effective for teaching?
If you tell a kid, "Well you need to learn about predator/prey, and we’re going to like read about it in a textbook or we’re going to watch it on a film," you know, then they may get interested in it, they may feel like they’re "doing school." But if you tell them, "Listen, we’re going to—your challenge is to design a game about a predator and prey." Those kids will spend hours and hours researching what’s an interesting predator and prey they want to work with? What are the specific relationships that they know they need to develop? They start drawing the elements of the game so the characters, so that maybe they choose a rabbit and a wolf. They begin to really understand the landscape and they go deep, deep, deep into that content and really become experts at it. Because to design a game, you have to really know what you’re talking about in order to create a system that models that idea.
So kids got deep in the content when they design the games about something. The second thing is that, because games require a player, from the outset the designer has to think about their user. And this is actually very different than a lot of other different areas of design.
With a game, you bring a player in right away, even when you just have a paper prototype of it. And that player starts playing with your game and they tell you what they think. And for kids, this is a profound moment where they suddenly begin to understand the notions of point of view, they really begin to understand ideas and empathy. So, "How do I step outside of myself and what I want and begin to listen about what the player is telling me about their experience in this game?" And that for me also was a very eye-opening situation to begin to think about kinds of civics curriculum, ways for teachers to begin to use game design as a way to get kids to think more broadly about opinions outside their own, ways of collaborating... And those are the two really big things that I find game design gives kids when they have the opportunity to do it. Question: How does game-based education equip students for the future? Katie Salen: One of the arguments that we make around game design and also just the way that play happens in games, is that you have to learn how to problem-solve and iterate and things are constantly changing. So, I mean you try something out and it doesn’t quite work and so you try something new; you look for a certain kind of resource and it’s there, and then it’s gone, and so you have to find another kind of resource. And so that ability to resource intelligently; the ability to find stuff when you need it, knowing who to go to; the ability to understand that everything is in process, that nothing is really ever a final solution; that certain kinds of tools are effective in one moment and maybe less effective at another moment.
Technology is changing all the time. We have to constantly learn how to do new stuff every day. If we don’t equip kids with an ability to understand that and know how to do it, they’re not just going to, like, learn it on their own; schools actually have a pretty important role in helping kids do that. Question: How did your own math and science education inspire you to become a game designer? Katie Salen: I had some great math teachers in high school. And I was a kid that was interested in conceptual things and so I loved things like geometry and I loved things like trigonometry and calculus and doing proofs was something that I got incredible pleasure doing. And I think it was because it was about solving problems and it was about thinking through how you can sequence a set of ideas in such a way that you actually arrived at a pretty interesting conclusion.
I have a friend, a great game designer named Frank Lance, and he talks about game design as math sex. Because in essence, when you are designing a game, you are dealing with all kinds of issues of mathematics and programming. You’re trying to discover what combinations of resources, when combined together will lead to certain kinds of results and that when you work in computer games that eventually comes down to doing math. Developing algorithms, trying to figure out procedurally what might happen in a game, dealing with lots of "if then" statements. So, that work in calculus was actually a pretty great practice space for the kind of thing you do when you design games, which is again, trying to figure out, well, if my game player does this and then they do this, what kind of event does that give rise too? And then what new opportunities might be there to continue to build on that argument.
This school was an interesting topic to look at and would be great to research for my essay.
I also found the following report on learning via digital games...
I began looking into the role of games in education and there was a large amount of research and in the form of books, papers and studies that I could utilize. Books which were very helpful were...
Digital game-based learning -- Marc Prensky, Sivasailam Thiagarajan
How Computer Games Help Children Learn -- David Williamson Shaffer, James Paul Gee
What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy -- James Paul Gee
Everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter --
Steven Johnson
Digital game-based learning -- Marc Prensky
Why video games are good for your soul: pleasure and learning -- James Paul Gee
Video games in education: can they really teach our children? -- Kyle Lince
Videogames and education -- Harry J. Brown
Unfortunately many of those spent their time dispelling the 'digital games rot kids minds' myth rather than discussing the effects and role of digital games in education and learning. However there was still more than enough information around to be able to write my essay and I felt that as my particular angle on the essay wasn't one that had been looked at too often, it would make for a more original work and perhaps lead to say something that hasn't been said before.
Once we had our brief I started to think of potential essay questions and areas of research. There were several ones that were of interest to me and all which related to influntial games and changing the world such as the future of games, the fantasy/reality boundaries in games and the effect of social gaming. There were several other areas but many I thought had been academically discussed too much already such as the Ludology/Narratology debate and the 'Are games art?' discussion.
One topic I was interested in was games in education.
However I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach the topic, I could either discuss it with regards to it's capacity to be a true area for study, i.e in higher education or it's role in primary education.
After some deliberation, I decided on the latter as I thought there was more research and it was a subject I was greatly interested in.
