Gaming, Opinion - Thursday, October 2, 2008 16:29

Education + Gaming, but not Educational Gaming

For quite some time, I’ve held the belief that Educational Video Games and Christian Rock-N-Roll share a two common characteristics: their intent may be positive and the implementation sucks.

There’s a periphery hobby related to my journey into the world of game development– the conceptual reverse engineering of existing video games as applied to modern day primary education. This idea came about while on holiday in London, and my oldest son was griping about being bored during the tour of the Tower of London. I snarked back at him, that if it wasn’t for actual castles, dungeons, and such, Mario would have no place to rescue a princess from, other than say, a parking lot, and seriously, how much fun would that be?

While ours is a gaming household, the duration of game-time is probably much more strict than others (I’ve not done even an anecdotal survey of my peers). No game playing during the school week at all. It’s a weekend thing. Period. However, gaming conversations exist, as does the analog manifestation of gaming does (drawing levels, recreating the entire game from scratch on paper, or playing Super Mario on the playground).

My oldest son was sharing that he loved math and hated geography– which was actually a huge surprise. After all, doesn’t everyone hate math and LOVE geography?  We talked about geography and why he hates it. As it turned out, he believes the subject matter is difficult, until he realized how much geography exists in every single game he plays.

From Pokemon to Mario Worlds, Sim City and beyond, his understanding (and love) of geography was greater than he realized. After all, the use of maps in many games is almost standard and true to form. Lakes, mountains, roads, landscapes, rock formations– the list goes on– is all part of many types of modern games. We talked about how what he’s learning in school (I read his textbooks) is somewhat the same thing he understands (to a degree) from his favorite games. For me, the next step is monitoring his enthusiasm towards the subject, while not being overly ‘educational’ in all the conversations– something that plagues many educational game titles.

The challenge that exists is creating a shared understanding of the positive sides of video games, the high-level understanding of what’s in a game, and how it relates to our children. Teachers and parents may only have passive awareness of games, reluctance to learn, or an ambivalent acceptance of the headlines they hear about the Evils Of Video Games. Kids on the other hand, can recite nearly all 400+ Pokemon in reverse alphabetical order, in context with the three stages of growth of each individual species (while refusing to read a short story for a book report, heh).

When my kids start learning geometry, I might remind them (and perhaps a teacher or two), that they’ve begun to understand the spatial relationship of objects and the X,Y,Z coordinates from a simple Nintendo Wii title like My Sims.

This is an opportunity for those of between the social and academic genres of life to share our understanding. It’s not to say to our fellow parents or teachers that ‘games! can! teach!’ Instead, it’s more of recognizing what our kids are doing in play and in work, and what common themes exist.

Instead of fighting or succumbing, let’s all work hard leveraging. We all have something to gain.

Bonus: If your kids hate geography, whip out an iPhone with Google Maps or download Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. Show them satellite imagery of your house and neighborhood. Find Hidden Mickeys in the terrain at Disneyworld. Technology + Quality Time together = time well spent!