US SCIENCE CONFERENCE:FAR FROM being a waste of time, computer games are one of the best learning environments for students, according to an academic who lectures in literacy studies.
He urges educators to incorporate gaming strategies into modern education systems if they want to improve learning.
The idea that computer gaming will numb a student's mind is way off the mark, Prof James Gee of Arizona State University told a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Diego. The gaming environment challenges the mind, encourages learning and could transform the standard educational format.
"Commercial video games, the ones that make a lot of money, are nothing but problem-solving spaces," he said yesterday during a session entitled First-Person Solvers? Learning Mathematics in a Video Game.
Prof Gee has been looking at gaming as an educational tool for some years, writing one of the first books on the subject in 2004.
He is not advocating the use of Super Mario, Grand Theft Autoor Resident Evilas a way to learn multiplication tables or Irish history. But he wants to make use of the game structure that allows the gamer to learn. Gaming optimises learning in several ways, he says. For starters, games offer new information to the player only when it is needed and not all at once in the beginning.
"We tend to teach science, for example, by telling you a lot of stuff and then letting you do science," he said. "Games teach the other way. They have you do stuff, and then as you need to know information, they tell it to you."
They also coax the mind to engage with the game, in the process challenging the player to learn and advance. Prof Gee calls it being "pleasantly frustrating" as you attempt to overcome a difficult but doable challenge.
Many games also encourage the player to participate directly in the conduct of the game, to modify the playing environment, a process known as "modding".
This means the player must learn the rules of a system before being given access to the game environment to create a scenario. This is deep learning because the person must know much more than simply how to move around a screen or accomplish a task. "Think about it," said Prof Gee. "If you have to make the game, or a part of the game, you come to a deep understanding of the game as a rule system.
"If I had to mod science - that is, I had to make some of my own curriculum or my own experiments - then I would have an understanding at a deep level of what the rules are."
His arguments are not the wishful thinking of a thwarted gamer who grew up too soon. What he describes is already being put into practice. Prof Brianno Coller of Northern Illinois University uses gaming to help his mechanical engineering students to absorb the difficult mathematics of the subject.
He put together a driving game similar to Need for Speed or Gran Turismo, but driving in this case requires the application of mathematical tools and techniques.