Journey to MAGFest – (Part 2) Using Video Games in the Classroom

In a panel I attended at MAGFest, 6 university professors lead conversation on how they use video games in the classroom. I will break this segment into two blogs: this one talking about educational gaming, and the next on applying game design outside of just making video games.

A View from the panel I attended

When we think of educational games, there seems to be an inverse relationship between fun and learning. Given the choice between the two, most of us would choose the game that doesn’t have us repeating math problems or pointing out grammar. But we want learning to be fun, and so game designers try to make the education and gameplay more seamless and this is good. Unfortunately, administrators as a whole don’t take to this very lightly. One of the professors at this panel had mentioned how they wanted to use a sports gaming to teach management and got bad looks.

But time has been kind, and video games are more an integrated part of society than it was, even 10 years ago. So now there is less resistance from administrators and more teachers can use this games/technology to teach in a way never done before. However, this doesn’t come without its fair share of problems.

For example, would assigning students to play a video game be unfair? Certainly by the time is in high school or college, this isn’t an issue, but at an early age there are many who kids don’t play games. And thus we have this literacy bound of sorts, which varies among all the students. Unlike grammar or math, these students aren’t all on the same level with regards to playing games (compare to getting your grandparents to play a game).

So how about instead of having everyone play, we can have a playthrough in the classroom. Well this is great, but there are many students, and only one controller. And so we have a barrier in medium that still hasn’t been quite figured out yet. In general, video games are just too new for any teacher to be able to utilize its potential.

The panel jumped around a bit, and so this segment will too, but the discussion shifted to the question of what would constitute a bad educational game? One of the panelist’s noted a thing called “Farmville Syndrome” in which a test was done with people playing Farmville. When asked to recall what they have done in the game for the past hour, they couldn’t give any meaningful response. For an educational game, we don’t want the player to go through the motions and not come out forgetting everything that was learned. And so when designing a game, it’s important to make it not monotonous.

I will continue what I learned in Part 3 so stay tuned.

Source: Live (Event Page Here: https://guidebook.com/guide/57875/event/13028154/)

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2 Responses to Journey to MAGFest – (Part 2) Using Video Games in the Classroom

  1. Nate Crow says:

    Your last paragraph about “Farmville Syndrome” definitely stood out to me because I have experienced this myself a bit in using Duolingo.

    For those who don’t know, Duolingo is an app and website that helps users learn languages. For each language they have a skill tree and each skill contains lessons which are a series of exercises (multiple choice, translating sentences, typing what you hear, speaking exercises, etc.). After you complete all the lessons for a skill then that skill turns gold and you unlock the next level of skills in the tree. Over time skills will decay and you must complete strengthening exercises where you practice your weaker words to re-gild your skills.

    I don’t think Duolingo is really a game per se, but it incorporates a lot of gamification concepts like user levels for each language, streaks (how many days in a row you practice), and rewarding players with lingots, which is the app’s form of online currency used to buy bonus skills, extra practice lessons, and power-ups.

    Anyway, I’ve been using Duolingo this semester to brush up on my Spanish and I was learning German with it earlier, and I often find myself rushing through lessons as fast as possible so that I can quickly re-gild my skills or unlock new ones. For me this focus on re-gilding or unlocking new skills detracts from my focus of actually learning the language well because I just monotonously rush through lessons instead of letting the words and grammar sink in. Plus it is actually pretty stressful for me to log in and see so many decayed skills because I feel the urge to re-gild my whole tree, even though I’ve realized that is totally unrealistic because skills decay too fast. Sometimes I even use Google Translate for words or sentences I am not sure about, because if you use the hints that Duolingo provides, then the words decay faster which leads to more decayed skills and thus more stress, which I want to avoid as much as possible. But again, this leads to monotonous achievement-seeking which detracts from actually trying to learn the language well.

  2. Kaitlyn Nicole Ekdahl says:

    I think this is an interesting topic, especially when considering the idea that video games become less fun when forced upon someone. Many streamers and YouTubers bring this up, claiming that video games aren’t always entertaining when they become a career.

    In the same sense, educators risk their students becoming jaded when incorporating video games in the classroom. I actually had a first-hand experience with this when I took the online Astro course here at Penn State. For those who are unfamiliar, the course was essentially modelled as a video game in which you play through to learn basic astronomy concepts. There was a lot of reading and tedious mini-games, and by the end of the semester, I was less concerned with learning the material and resorted to skipping over everything, just to get it over with.

    I personally don’t think educational video games are the best approach to get students to learn, regardless of their age. They almost act as a ploy to engage students with a “learning is fun” attitude, but usually end up being just another assignment.

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