Video games on the brain
May. 29th, 2012 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moominmollyI just got back from an idyllic loooong weekend on the beach, where I stayed up late, played lots of games, ate junk food, swam in the ocean, and rollerbladed six miles with D and N (SIX MILES). So, I was particularly primed to read this article about video games and learning, which has an interesting assertion:
There are plenty of other interesting bits in there - including the idea that games encourage risk-taking, teach problem solving, and encourage kids to love challenges - but that bit above is the one I'm chewing on.
Thoughts? :)
VIDEO GAMES OBVIATE TESTING. The current assessment system forces teachers to teach to the test. Video games hold out a different way of thinking about assessments: namely, that we don’t need it. Compare a student who’s taken 12 weeks of algebra classes to one who’s played the video game Halo on the most challenging setting. The algebra student must take a test to assess what he knows on the day of the test. The Halo player has mastered the skills needed to get to the final level – and that’s his ultimate goal. No need for a test in that context. “Learning and assessment are exactly the same thing,” Gee said. “If you design learning so you can’t get out of one level until you complete the last one, there’s no need for a test. There would be no Bell Curve. It’s unethical to test a student based on one day’s knowledge. We have to change the attitude about testing on a government level.”
There are plenty of other interesting bits in there - including the idea that games encourage risk-taking, teach problem solving, and encourage kids to love challenges - but that bit above is the one I'm chewing on.
Thoughts? :)
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 09:50 pm (UTC)Quest to Learn (http://www.q2l.org/mission/)
One could argue that the typical structure of big villain fights or a significant challenge at the end of a given level or adventure before you can advance is a test by another name. But it's a test that you're almost guaranteed to fail the first time or the first 10 times mostly. I think that's a pretty good lesson right there, though. Take a beating. Learn. Return.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 12:19 am (UTC)I could see periodic tests being used in a game-ified education system as additional markers of what students are and aren't learning. The scores (if any) wouldn't affect the final grade, but would only inform subsequent lesson plans.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 05:05 am (UTC)On the other hand, if you can just take "school" as a whole, and call each grade a level of a video game, and convince the school that since that's what's going on they don't need to spend weeks out of every year doings standardized tests and instead they can do some Big Boss Projects with their whole class whacking away at it over and over again for a few week.... that you could sell me on.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 06:52 am (UTC)My understanding, and I recognize it might be wrong, is that video games have a Goal, and there's a Way to Get To It. You can fail/die/whatever over and over again, and each time what you're learning is how the game is designed. So next time you get back to the place in the game you shoot the blue guy first then the red guy because whenever you shoot the red guy first the blue guy shoots you... or whatever. It's narrowing in on the correct approach.
To me, this sounds pretty much the opposite of what I want education to be, and not really very far from "teaching to the test." In some ways, by making the test part of the teaching it sounds worse because there's no point in which doing something completely new and unexpected is really valuable, either for the student or the teacher. Playing an adventure or quest or simulation game sounds to me like teaching students to narrow down the way they examine possibilities over and over until they way they consider the world is as similar as possible to the way the game-writers/test-writers did.
Again, I may be way out of date with video games. And maybe this is pretty much what much of secondary school education looks like these days? Obviously I'm also way out of touch with that! But it seems to me like this mentality toward teaching would, if it worked, over time produce a set of final papers, projects, presentations, etc. that looked more and more similar to each other as students learned quickly what was expected of them, and how to pass a level with the minimal effort. How to play the game "right." Which to me is what I would want education to get away from, not entrench further into.
What am I missing here? Is there a way this is way better than it sounds to me?
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 03:16 pm (UTC)Do modern video games tend to have multiple, divergent ways to utilize Tools and Strategies to reach the Goals or Rewarding Experiences? I remember back in the day it was more about figuring out the One Way, learning the one sequence of maneuvers (or one of a small set of sequences) that progressed you to finishing a level. But that was a long time ago.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 04:42 pm (UTC)In some games, there's a limited set of discrete actions, and in a given situation only one is right. Or I mean, more than one could be, but nothing is right unless it was specifically blessed by the designer. Old games like Zork or King's Quest were like this. You have to give the banana to the guard or he won't let you through, and there's only one way to give him the banana-- you click the hand icon and then the banana and then the guard. Or whatever. Games like that still exist.
But what I first thought you meant (maybe because you mentioned shooting, which is more of an "action game" sort of thing) was that, for example, you could memorize patterns for Pac-Man that were guaranteed to be the best possible choices. When you first play Pac-Man, it seems like you might be honing some general skill, right? It's a limited system (walls, ghosts, pellets) but it seems like you should be able to fiddle around and find general principles to get good at it. It's like learning to slice a tomato-- not the deepest activity in the world, but there are a few general approaches and lots of little techniques, and eventually you are Good At Slicing Tomatoes even if the next tomato is a tomato you've never seen before. And then it turns out that's not true about Pac-Man! It's all memorization!
So THAT is far less true of games now than it was then. But more importantly, it was never true for most people. Most people, if they learned any Pac-Mac skills at all, picked up a few techniques (turn a lot of corners! wait until the ghosts are lined up behind you before eating a power pill!) and left it at that. The fact that any substantial number of people found it worth memorizing Pac-Man patterns in the first place was a weird distortion caused by the relatively small number of video games in existence. Nowadays, if you run into a game that's programmed simply enough for memorization to be an option, it's probably a game you're going to play once on a website, or for a few days on your phone, not something you spend years perfecting. And so you'll never realize memorization is even an option, because general techniques will make you good enough at the game, and learning techniques is faster and more fun than memorization.
Anyway, part of what I'm confused about is that you seem to think it's a bad thing for students to come to see the world the way their teacher does. In a lot of subjects, it seems like that's exactly the goal-- the only question is how you do it.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 05:19 pm (UTC)I meant to say: I don't really have any idea what's good for education. Video games are excellent these days at teaching people to play video games, and sometimes skills are exportable (playing the drums!) but I don't know how widely applicable it is. I was just trying to fill in some of what you said you were missing about whether video games have changed.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 06:59 pm (UTC)As for
Anyway, part of what I'm confused about is that you seem to think it's a bad thing for students to come to see the world the way their teacher does. In a lot of subjects, it seems like that's exactly the goal-- the only question is how you do it.
On that topic I have a lot of strong feelings and opinions, both personal and professional, which I think would be better explored in conversation than in LJ-comments, but the brief summary is that I see it differently.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 10:53 pm (UTC)