Video Games in the Classroom

Video games have evolved as an entertainment medium, and educational values continue to evolve with it. While video games have a lot of controversy for being “junk for your brain” and influential on violent behaviour, there are a myriad of games that can be fostered for educational learning.

I will break down the dimensions of how video games can be approached in a classroom to give you an idea of how video games can help serve students and learning. In the end of each section, I will list the major theme, examples of games in this area, and certain concepts to consider.

1. In a modern classroom, learning has evolved to be especially considerate and sensitive to the diversity of the learner. There are those who struggle with exceptionalities, and require special education for a variety of physical, behavioural, and mental disabilities. For these students, video games can fall under the guise of assistive technology, which is to say that special education students can use certain tools to assist in their disability.

For example, braille books or a wheelchair can be considered assistive technology for blind students, or students that lack mobility. But how do video games assist students in this way? Well, the answer here is that video games in a classroom are generally understood as assistive. Exactly what the benefit is, is broken down into the rest of the categories in this blog. But to give an idea of how video games can help special education students, you have to consider the special education exceptionalities: there is blindness, physical, deafness, and behavioural. Suppose you have a student who is hard of hearing. What does this student look like? You can assume for one that they lack proper speech, struggling to sound out words and carry conversations. A game like Rock Band, where a student plays vocals, can help develop confidence in using speech. Another example includes behavioural exceptionalities. A student with problems with temper and anger management can be aided with a game like Journey.

Students with special needs also lack certain basic skills, like management of time, or organizing and focusing on tasks. A wealth of management games exist, across mobile and PC, and consoles, that help develop these skills in an engaging and relatively stress-free way.

There is another kind of exceptionality that is often overlooked: giftedness. Gifted students struggle in different ways, mainly to do with boredom and lacking a challenge in the classroom. Again, games as assistive technology help these kinds of students stay engaged. Puzzle games like EcoChrome, for example, require a certain kind of thinking and complexity in visualizing concepts and shapes. It is both challenging and rewarding. More traditional games like Chess also exist, as well as Sudoku.

These are particular ways in which special education students can use video games to help inspire confidence in their abilities, and educators can and do use these games as assistive technologies, to provide for student exceptionalities.

In this way, video games can be assistive technology.

Games include: Rollercoaster Tycoon, Rock Band, Journey, Chess, EcoChrome.
Concepts: Rehabilitation, therapeutic, assistive, confidence, impulse behaviour

2. The classroom is more than the class itself. What do you think of when you imagine a classroom? Usually, the rudimentary image is that of a room dedicated to assessment and standardized testing. But the classroom is more than learning curriculum and practicing for standardized testing. The classroom is social, and the activities a student participates in extends past the classroom. Video games are an activity that promotes the social growth of a learner. The student is more than a container that knowledge is poured into. If the student were a painting, knowledge would be like the black and white lines and geometry that shapes the image. But what's a painting without colour? The social development of a student is a crucial component to learning and growing. Without a health social dimension, students lack the colour of life, a sad realization that affects learning. What does video gaming offer in the social context?

As you can imagine, a lot! Multiplayer games, or even single player games, bridge together various people of age, creed, and skill to promote learning together. Tackling goals together is done by working together, as various individuals contribute their skills in a meaningful way that promotes and inspires confidence in their abilities. The most obvious social factor here is communication, where players lend their opinions to each other to help build or complete an objective. This shapes the learner by building social skills that are brought into the classroom with their peers, and also helps build confidence that is more practical in every day life. Leadership roles, and a stress-free way to follow orders are other skills that are built in this context, while differences in age or learning skill are made into a melting pot that plays off each other to help shape or complete a goal (or in other words, everybody is different but can exercise their strengths and weaknesses as they see fit, and this all helps contribute to completing a task!)

Even playing games individually, social skills can be exercised. Think back to the child who is hard of hearing, who becomes more social by playing Rock Band, and who develops confidence by playing a game that asks them to use their voice (something that may not really be asked or expected of them in most other situations)

Or think of the behavioural student who is impulsive or reacts immediately to a situation, without giving much thought process to what they are responding to (ask a child to multiply 5 by 2, and they may simply shout out an answer without processing the problem).

The design of a video game is tailored fundamentally to give feedback to solving a puzzle or problem. You defeat enemies by utilizing your weapons in God of War. You solve a puzzle in Grim Fandango before progressing the story further. Games are played more basically with a “good” or “bad” stimuli, and working through a game promotes this kind of interaction and problem solving, that helps curb impulsive behaviour.

In this way, video games are social.

Games Include: LittleBigPlanet, Portal, Minecraft
Concepts: Stimuli, Impulse, Social Interaction, Leadership

3. What makes video games different from movies? Inherently, it's the user input: interaction. While not every game is dependent on the unscripted actions of a player, the minute-to-minute inputs of a player can vary wildly from player to player. Walking down a hallway in Uncharted may have scripted set-pieces and ultimately end in a scripted outcome, but how a player approaches this hallway, and how they input commands to clear the hallway of enemies is different from player to player.

In a classroom environment, this interaction has experimental potential. Interacting with the environment and moulding the actions on-screen narrates a visualization that has implications to understanding. Put aside the idea of a AAA action game, and imagine something more basic. Imagine a math problem that is presented with a visualization. Suppose you have to find the difference in speed ball A and ball B, both of which are thrown at different speeds. Having a visualization of this that has some interactivity (changing the speed of ball A, or creating a goal or objective that requires adjusting the math behind the scenario), helps learning become more engaging.

Video games in this sense can help inspire students, by having visual interactivity that can help make more difficult concepts easier to understand. A student who lacks the language skills to understand a math question like determining the speed of two different balls is in trouble: Math requires more than an understanding of numbers, it requires an understanding of language and problem solving skills.

Interactive games help visualize these math problems. What does it look like to visualize a ball traveling a certain speed, compared to a ball traveling another certain speed? What does it look like when you change variables that affect speed, angle, and hang time? Since some students are better visual learners, programs that help create math problems in an interactive medium, are creating games at the most basic level. This further makes math more engaging, as experimentation comes to life: no longer are numbers stuck in formulas or in the question itself, but they can be experimented with and moulded by the student. This kind of learning can be crucial, and without it, students can become easily dismayed by the lack of an option to understand a subject in a way that best helps them.

In this way, video games develop understanding.

Games include: Math Rescue, Word Rescue, Scribblenauts, Minecraft
Concepts: Visualization, Experimentation, Interaction

Conclusion:

The classroom is a place of learning and assessing the basic subjects: mathematics, science, language. Children develop a set of skills and critical reasoning techniques that help shape their education in these subjects. We expect students to be critical thinkers, assess word problems, structure ideas, and deduce problem solving techniques. While surprising to some, there is room for video games to help assist (but not replace) in developing these skills.

Video games have a long way to go in becoming introduced and properly implemented into a school, but I hope I've shown how and why they ought to be. Social values of leadership and confidence, psychological benefits of therapeutic and rehabilitation, critical development in conceptualizing and experimenting are all valuable skills that children need to develop, and video games are a big part of our society. The importance of harnessing this medium into something educational is ripe with potential, and it is my hope as an educator that gaming continues to help aid in understanding our ability to learn