More great coverage of the GDC and Serious Games Summit from Thomas and Cola. Today they talked with Dan Roy, who presented Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games at the summit.

Dan is an educational game designer with MIT’s Education Arcade, and has been studying games for more than 15 years. In the interview, Cola asks for his views on video games as a learning tool for children. Here are some excerpts:

When asked about the relationship between learning and video games, Mr. Roy compared the learning process in schools to the learning process in games. Too many students get turned off by traditional school, homework, social pressure, etc. But video games can help people see the relevancy of a topic, give them motivation, and help them enjoy learning and see it as a fun activity. And not every challenge in a game is necessarily “fun”, but once you get hooked on a problem, you want to solve it.

Dan says one of the primary reasons that games don’t get used more in schools is that the current educational structure is very focused on testing due to the No Child Left Behind act. We need to explore how games can be used to measure what people are learning if we want greater acceptance in schools. We don’t really know how to “test” a student via games, even though the way games work this would not be hard to do. (ed: See How Computer Games Help Children Learn for more about our educational system and how computer games can help to improve it.)

What can developers do to make games both fun and educational? Well, Mr. Roy says that past approaches were built on the thought - hey, let’s take something fun, then we’ll break it up and put some learning in there every so often. This can really take away from the playability of the game and people choose to play the fun games instead. He says we need an approach where the #1 goal - learning - is integrated with the fun. He goes on to provide some examples of how they are having teams of players interact with each other during the game, while learning to write and express their ideas better.

Be sure to listen to the podcast to hear Podcast: Interview with Dan Roy. (4:17)

Thanks for your time and insights Dan!

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In Thomas and Cola’s continued coverage of the GDC in San Francisco, their second interview is with Jessica Hammer, Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University. Ms. Hammer’s presentation today was titled Serious Games: A Preparation for Future Learning Approach.

Thomas and Cola caught up with Jessica after her presentation for this interview where they asked for her views on video games as a learning tool for children. I’ve included some excerpts of the interview below, but be sure to listen to podcast: Interview with Jessica Hammer for the full interview (8:23).

Ms. Hammer has worked as a game designer and social software consultant. She saw the potential of video games as a learning tool right away while working on Zoo Media Rescue: an adventure game that teaches kids basic math skills (ed: sorry, I can’t find a link to the game.) Jessica says that games have an underlying structure; a set of rules, ideas and objects that have complex relationships to each other and can model some things from real life.

But game play doesn’t have to be educational in terms of modeling. She observes that the way passionate game players engage with games can be very powerful. They do research, talk with friends, and in some cases bring the scientific method to life in a way that most kids don’t do in other aspects of life. Part of the reason is that in the real world, the stakes for failure are very high. In video games, it is ok to try things over and over until you get it right. People who are engaged in games not only learn what the game itself teaches, but they also learn a lot by the way they engage with the game.

I’ve seen this in my own experience with my 7 year old daughter, Abby. We’ve been playing a game called Viva Pinata on the XBox 360. In this game you are put in charge of building and cultivating a garden as conditions change. As you plant certain seeds and things grow, they attract different types of cute Pinata creatures who may become “residents” of your garden and make it their home. Well, you also attract some not-so-nice creatures to the garden, including one fellow named “Dastardos” who can mess up your garden and make things difficult for you.

We set limits on how much time she can spend playing video games, and in between the times she actually gets to play, she is constantly thinking about new strategies and ideas for her next session. She asks me things like “How can we get rid of Dastardos?” “What kind of seeds do we need to plant to attract a Sparrowmint?” We even did some research on the web together to find out that we could create a jack-o-lantern out of a pumpkin to tame a Sherbat, to hold off Dastardos. It was a fun way to do some “problem solving” and “research” together, and it never felt like work to either of us!

Indeed, as Ms. Hammer said in the interview, “Video games can provide experiences just as rich socially and intellectually as other types of activities.”

Thanks for your time and insights Jessica!

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Thomas and Cola are on site at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco interviewing many of the key presenters of the Serious Games Summit that is being held concurrently there. Their first interview is with Dr. Debbie Denise Reese, who presented a session titled Designing Selene: Theory-based Game Design and Data Mining. Dr. Reese is a Senior Educational Researcher at the Center for Educational Technologies, and the principal researcher and project manager for the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future’s learning and assessment in videogames project.

Here are a few excerpts from the interview (I’m paraphrasing). You’ll want to listen to the podcast: Interview with Dr. Debbie Denise Reese (3:34) to hear more of what she has to say:

Our research has shown us that games have the potential to be an environment that helps people to learn many things. However, they must be adequately specified and designed based on sound theory.

Video games are an ideal platform for learning, they have an underlying relational structure that is identical to targeted learning and making cognitive connections via goal orientation.

Her vision is that we all need to come together - educators, researchers, and game designers to create games based on sound learning principals that truly enhance learning for children.

I think that is consistent with the goal of epistemic games - where many researchers are interested in building these types of games. They describe themselves like this: “Based on more than a decade of research in technology, game science, and education, epistemic games revolutionize the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of digital learning to show the future of education in the digital age.”

Hearing this kind of thing is music to our ears at KidConfidence. Our mission is to help build self esteem and confidence in children, and video games will be increasingly instrumental in this goal.

Thanks for your time and insights Dr. Reese!

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Here is a very interesting podcast from Gamasutra - it is a recording of the panel called “Do Videogames Help Kids Learn?” from the Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s initiative on Digital Learning. The panelists include Sasha Barab, Nichole Pinkard, and David Williamson Shaffer, author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn.

From the GDC site: In the podcast, “Sasha Barab of Indiana University, demos his latest project, Quest Atlantis, which uses an immersive online world to teach environmental impact and science to junior high school students. Nichole Pinkard, Director of Technology at the University of Chicago also shares her experience creating an innovative digital media after school program for Chicago’s Center for Urban School improvement. And David Williamson Shaffer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn, discusses his latest research on games and learning.”

This is well worth listening to if you’ve ever asked the question, are “video games good for my child”?, or if you are curious about the effects of video games on children. As we’ve said before, we believe here at KidConfidence that the right video games can help children learn, and can play a key role in building confidence in children as well.

The podcast is hosted at GDCRadio.net and can be downloaded directly here. There is also a webcast on the MacArthur Foundation web site called “Do Video Games Help Kids Learn?” that you may be interested in.

Trust us - both of them are worth your time!

Editor’s note: A podcast is really just an .mp3 audio file that you can download and play on any computer, so don’t be afraid to click the link and listen to it!

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Today’s children are bombarded with a fast-paced world delivered in high-speed and high definition, leaving most parents scrambling to find television shows and video games that pack an educational punch, allowing them to sidestep the violence and bad language, while providing children with learning tools that deliver real-life results.

In fact, in the recently-released book “How Computer Games Help Children Learn,” author and former teacher, curriculum developer, teacher trainer, and school technology specialist, David Williamson Shaffer makes a convincing case for the educational power of intelligently crafted games that can serve as tools to help children think and learn about every day problems and solutions.

According to the book, the key is in finding fun video games that provide an immersive entertainment experience with learning fundamentals built in.

Many parents are already doing this with television shows, such as Dora the Explorer and the spin-off show about her younger cousin Diego. Watching these fun, educational shows, children learn about other languages, how to treat each other, about animals and the environment, and so much more.

“They’re having so much fun that they don’t realize they are learning,” explains Dawn Walker, who is completing her Master’s in Early Childhood Education and is also a mother of two-and-a-half-year-old twin boys. (more…)

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