World of Borecraft–NOT!
A friend just forwarded me a link to an article by Justin Peters from several months ago on Slate about serious games. The article is titled “World of Borecraft,” and you might guess, it criticized a number of educational games for being boring–and it is absolutely the case that many educational games are boring.
In saying that, I am not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with Peters’ assessment of any specific game in the article. In fact, one of the things that I see over and over is that my own kids (not surprisingly!) like a lot of games that I think are quite boring–including some of the ones that Peters talks about in his article. But I certainly concur that there are plenty of boring educational games out there to be found.
In the article, though, Peters raises a bigger issue about games and learning.
Real world skills in a game
Here’s an interesting story making the rounds on the net. (A student in my Tools for Thought class pointed it out from switched.com):
Hans Jorgen Olsen and his sister got into a spot of trouble when they encroached on the territory of one of these antlered cold weather staples (otherwise known as a moose). When the beast went on the offensive, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was taunt it so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. “Taunting” is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.
Once he was a target, Hans remember another skill he’d picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ — he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate Hans and wandered off into the woods. When he was safely alone Hans ran back home to share his tale of video game-inspired survival.
It is hard to tell from the online source whether the story is a new urban legend or not, but if true, it is certainly one more piece of evidence (albeit anecdotal) that things learned in games can be used in other contexts.
Lagging again
This one I can post almost without comment. The latest report from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment shows, once again, that the United States has done poorly in science education. On average in the OECD, 80% of 15-year-olds have at least basic competence in science. In the US, only 75% do. Not to mention that US performance in science overall is lower than the international average of all countries included in the study. From a summary of the report, in the US:
Schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak students.
The system is breaking. Will we wait until it collapses before we start fixing it?
Epistemic games and school
I recently had an experience talking with one young player of an epistemic game that captured the distinction between epistemic games and school as most of us experienced it.
In How Computer Games Help Children Learn, David Williamson Shaffer describes how epistemic games are designed to do something very different than schools today. Today’s schools were designed, he points out, at the turn of the century to avert social strife in rapidly expanding cities by socializing young people to a new industrial order: essentially, they were designed to prepare factory workers. But we don’t need to train children to work in an industrial society anymore. Instead, we need children to be able to think in creative and innovative ways. And epistemic games are designed to do just that.
Maria was one of twelve students who played the game Urban Science this summer. As part of our study, I interviewed all of the players last month, after they had finished the game and were back in school for a few months.
In her interview, I asked Maria if she had thought about Urban Science during the last three months. She told me a really interesting story about an assignment she completed in school’ how she had thought like a planner, and what happened (or didn’t happen) as a result. Continue reading »
The challenge of social science
There’s an interesting article in the most recent issue of Technology Review (free registration required) about financial engineers (or “quants”) and the role they played in the financial market meltdown this past summer.
The specifics aren’t relevant here, so I won’t summarize the article (although it makes interesting reading), except to point out that quants are often highly-trained academics in fields like economics, mathematics, and physics that use sophisticated statistical techniques. They who create billions of dollars of wealth by building quantitative models of the stock market and using them to predict (and then act on) the changing prices of stocks. This summer’s financial meltdown was caused in part, the article suggests, because of problems in these models.
The key point in this context was a description of how one of the quants explained the problem:
Emanuel Derman remembers dreaming of such a unified financial theory in the early 1990s, a little after he had made the leap from the university to the Street. But those dreams, he says, are dead. Quantitative finance “superficially resembles physics,” he says, “but the efficacy is very different. In physics, you can do things to 10 significant figures and get the right answer. In finance, you’re lucky if you can tell up from down.”
But by comparison to, say, educational psychology, the quants have it easy. After all:
There are billions of dollars at stake–and therefore much more invested in the work they do;
Unlike in education, the outcomes are clear and well-accepted: either you make money or you don’t;
The data is recorded in reams in the form of stock prices over time, not to mention a host of other indicators that are collected about companies, the economy, and the market;
And most of the data is in the public record, so there are no human subjects issues.
I’m not making apologies for social science, but if it is an accomplishment for them to tell up from down, I’m feeling like handing out a lot of pats on the back at the next conference I go to.
Or billions of dollars, if I have them by then.
