Educational Gaming

The reading that interested me most out of this set was Gee's "Is playing video games a waste of time," which explored what people actually learn when they game. As Gee describes his son's experience learning new strategies and approaches to the game Pikmin, he says, "What we are dealing with here is talk and thinking about the (internal) design of the game, about the game as a complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways. This is metalevel thinking, thinking about the game as a system and a designed space, and not just playing within the game moment by moment" (42).

I had this afternoon free thanks to a canceled class, and I convinced a friend to let me try out his Playstation 3. He suggested I try playing Madagascar, which is based on the Dreamworks children's movie of the same name, so I did. I immediately got sucked in by the learning design built into the game; it gives you an opportunity to play each character before you really get into the "story" behind the game. It reminded me very much of software workshops I've done in the past for software; it's useless to tell people which button does what if they have no frame of reference for it. I always come up with some exercise for them to do, using real data and producing real documents.

When I think about the potential for gaming as an educational tool, I'm primarily thinking in terms of teaching critical thinking about technology, especially software. I've been trying to hammer it into my students' heads all semester to use the Help function and Google to figure out how to do what they want to do in Word and Excel, but not many of them do.

Gaming has the potential to teach people to use trial and error, to look things up and to get help from other people using the same technology for whatever purpose (pleasure or work, or both). It's one of those learning-how-to-learn things, focused on a particular view of (and comfort with) technology.