The major role of video games in teaching and training young U.S. military recruits is described in a featured article in Live Science. The picture the reader gets is of an effective new methodology for engaging adolescents and training them in battlefield skills. New games are being developed that aim to prepare the mind for war by simulating distressing battlefield situations and walking players through handling these crises.
Once established education shakes itself loose from its analog preconceptions — and someday it will — digital gaming will play a big role in future teaching and training. For now, the military, not the educators, are inventing this new venue for learning.
Why not the massively multiplayer mathematical game, where players are armed with calculus and trig? Or the Medieval Wars of Europe game in which player avatars are historical characters like Charlemagne or Macbeth — constrained in the playing by the facts of history and their own personalities? One supposes an adolescent playing a game like these would learn a lot more about the subjects involved than by for cramming for a high school standards test in math or history.
Sure, developing such games would cost a lot of money. But the scale to student in the open internet makes them very cheap. If a game cost $10 million and were made available to every student in the public schools of New York City, the per-student cost would be one dollar. (There are about a million students in the NYC system.) If the game were openly online and went viral, the per-player cost would plummet to almost nothing.
And while we are musing about the potential of gaming as schooling: Games may diminish the appetite of the new global gaming generation for war if they are playing each other virtually. The Live Science article includes discussion of how military games encounter the stressful reality of actual war. Perhaps the world’s youngest generation will learn to settle its disagreements virtually and live in actual peace.
All optimists raise your hands and say: “Yes!”
Kathy Barker says:
@judybreck WIsh I could be an optimist, but video games have been horribly successful as military recruiting tools. For several years, the Army experience Center in a Philadelphia mall replaced the old-fashioned recruiting center: it was just full of games games games. Under big pressure from activists it was closed, but many smaller recruiting stations offer a war game night as an inducement to come into the station. At job fairs, army recruiters set up booths for kids to play war games, but require them to give their home contact information. etc, lots of etc….
20th August 2010 at 8:30 pm
leonard waks says:
Hi, Judy. One difference between these war games and multi-player math or histiry is that the players don’t need any pre-requisite knowledge to get involved. They may need to learn something after they get past the earlier stages. About this I do not know. But the state of knowledge of history among teens and young adults, even among university graduates, is simply unbelievably low. They could never get started, and would gravitate to something where they could– maybe war games. And out of a thousand teens and young adults, how manhy have even a clue about calculus?
The key insight of handschooling is that they could learn all they want about these subject materrs without a teacher, any time they wish. But first they have to want to learn, and they won’t unless someone somewhere sends out a spark.
Your friend Len
20th August 2010 at 10:10 pm
Judy Breck says:
It just seems to me that the success the military has had demonstrates some underlying mechanisms in video gaming that are effective at teaching. The advancement in these games from one level to another is a sort of motivational mechanism. I agree with all of Kathy and Len’s points. But could not some of the underlying mechanisms of competing in virtual games be harnessed for learning other subjects than war?
The military uses the fun and fascination of games for recruiting. Since schooling has made academic subjects deadly dull for myriad kids, we need to find a road back to where they will engage the fun and fascination of thinking. If some smart people would think about games that way, I bet they will get some young minds stirred up — and in the process makes some money. How about diverting a $ billion or two now spent on printed textbooks to a project like this.
20th August 2010 at 10:27 am