While gaming has shown promise in academic circles,
education-specific games may not be the best products for the classroom,
according to an eCampus News interview with two game-based-learning professors.
According to Sherry Jones, philosophy, rhetoric, and
game studies instructor, University of Colorado, Denver, educators who use
gaming in their classrooms are either passionate gamers in the first place,
nongamers looking at games as a way to teach concepts, or nongamers who hire designers
to build educational games from scratch. She found that the most successful games
in the classroom were the ones available to all consumers, such as Angry Birds
or World of Warcraft.
“Educational games designed specifically around a
concept, especially custom-built ones, impose a certain way of teaching a
concept on game designers, whose job it is to make games fun and interesting,” Jones
said. “Educational games can be inflexible and very boring to play. Students
don’t like them and then the whole process falls apart.”
She suggested that instructors need to spend more time finding
out how games work and how they can work in the classroom. Karen Novack,
instructional designer at Front Range Community College, Westminster, CO, said
faculty should inform students why a particular game was chosen and provide
them with the learning objectives of the game.
“Anytime you use a commercial game, or really with any
kind of change, you get resistance, and because we’re higher-ed, our students
run the gamut from 16-year-olds who are getting early college credits to
retired adults,” she said. “So you need to be explicit with students about why
you’re using these games in this course and how learning this game will benefit
their education.”
Faculty must also be willing to get it wrong from time
to time.
“Present the class with the game and the parameters
they need to go unpack the game,” Jones said. “Survey the class to see how they
liked it and if the game was more effective in assessing their understanding of
the concepts. The best way to determine if it’s going to be effective is to do
it.”
