Games in higher education

Wisconsin Week, the University of Wisconsin newspaper, ran an interview with David this week on simulations and games in higher education:

College students love to play computer and video games. A 2003 survey for the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 65% of them are regular or occasional game players. Seeking entertainment and recreation, they spent $6.2 billion in 2004 on Halo, Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and other computer and video games, according to the NPD Group.

But can other benefits of computer simulations and games, “their potential for interactivity and collaboration, their ability to engage players, their capacity to stimulate analytical thinking, imagination and creativity,’ be adapted for use in an educational setting?

It’s already happening, says David Williamson Shaffer, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. “Simulations and games have been used in higher education for years,” Shaffer says. “Now we can use games in even more powerful ways with new technology.”

A simulation, Shaffer explains, is “a model that simplifies or recreates another world, real or imagined.” Any game is built on a simulation. “In a game, you take on a defined role to interact with the virtual world of some simulation,” he says. “You follow a certain set of rules about how you can interact with the simulation. In Gran Turismo 4, for example, you interact with a driving simulation as a race car driver. In Sim City, you interact with a model of a city as an enlightened urban despot.”

“That matters,” Shaffer says, “because when you ask a student to interact with a simulation in some particular way, you are creating a game. For example, you can have a student act as a scientist while using a quantum mechanics simulation. To do that, the student has to use a scientist’s skills, know things a scientist knows, and to think and act in a particular way, the way a scientist does.”

Shaffer argues that in this way a game can link students to the epistemology, or the way of thinking, in a discipline. “Chemists look at the world in a particular way that is related to, but different from, the way chemical engineers do,” he explains. “They study some of the same things, but ask different questions and answer them in different ways. Games can help players learn to think in these different ways.”

Critics contend that games have no substance, are too violent, or are frivolous and expensive. “Of course, you can find examples of good games and bad games,” Shaffer responds, “just as you can find good and bad books. But games can be based on sound principles of learning, and people at UW and around the country are building and studying games that do just that.”

“It is clear that games have great potential as tools for learning,” Shaffer says. “The next step in this new field is to turn that potential into a reality. UW has taken a leadership role in studying games for learning, and I hope that will continue in the coming years.”