The majority of commercial game designers have used the learning power of digital games to teach people how to play their games … and to encourage them to keep on playing. Players do sometimes learn real-world content, depending on the subject matter of the game, but that’s not usually the primary goal of the game. On the other hand, many educators believe that digital games can actually be used to teach pretty much any subject. Digital games are being used as teaching tools by the military, private industry and now in the classroom. How can games do such a good job of teaching so many different kinds of content? The designers of these ‘learning’ digital games construct the game play so that players can only master the game and have a chance of winning if they actually learn the content that needs to be learned. So if a player has to learn about ratios in order to feed the monsters and free a pet (goals that she’s taken on because of her deep engagement in the game), it turns out that she’s very, very likely to put in the effort to learn about ratios.
The upshot is that digital games are incredibly powerful teaching tools even when their only goal is to teach players how to play the game so they can entertain themselves. But when these tools are used to teach academic content and problem-solving skills that your students absolutely have to learn … we think that the sky’s the limit.
TGI invites our readers to tell us how they have successfully used games to teach and train. Write to [email protected]
