Video Games for Learning
Course
Games Make Us More Productive [7:22]
If we can make the work in our classroom meaningful to our students, then it stands to reason that they will be more productive in our classes.
All of this is work and work that is meaningless outside of the context of the video game itself. Yet, gamers commit hours and hours to doing this sort of productivity all the time. So that raises the question, how can we get them to do this sort of behavior in the classroom and in the library? How do games motivate with mundane tasks when our classrooms often fail to engage kids in meaningful, or at least meaningful to the teacher and to the school, type tasks? Well, as I said, we do meaningful work in games.
Take for example the hugely popular open world game Skyrim, where the gamer would quest all throughout this huge world looking for different resources, following different storylines, and seeking to explore and unlock new regions of that area. Many gamers spend upwards of 80+ hours in this game alone just to finish the main story and accomplish some of the side quests. When is that ever something that happens in the context of the classroom? Well, it's not that it can't happen in our class, it's that perhaps we're not structuring our library instruction to reflect opportunities for that to happen.
Because, remember, the work is meaningful to a gamer. If we can make the work in our classroom meaningful to our students, not just to us and not just to the overall curriculum, but meaningful, truly meaningful to them, then it stands to reason that they will be more productive in our classes. So let's take what we just discussed about productivity and games and consider what this could look like in your library.
There's this fantastic website called Wandoo Planet, which is created by Evance Games. And in this website, they seek to invite the user, the child playing it, to explore their interests and sort of determine their interests and announce their interests through this game in order to help teach the computer what you like so that it can recommend materials to you and content to you, books to you. The more work you complete in Wandoo Planet, the greater the feedback is on your interests.
This is exactly the same sort of algorithm that Amazon uses to recommend products to you when you go to purchase something online and yet, here it is as a gamified platform connecting children with the content that they love, that also ties back to books that they may or may not already know about. It is enhancing the reading experience by gamifying that situation. You're challenging students to commit time in order to articulate the things that they like. That's not something that's easy to draw out of children, having them talk to you at length about the things that they like, about the myriad of things that they like and don't like. But here, in this context of this game, they do and they do it willingly because there's a payout that benefits them. The benefit is that they get to find more content that they're interested in.
The same concept of productivity though, doesn't need to have a video game to make it work, of course. We can motivate children, and even adults, through any sort of meaningful work as long as that person sees it as meaningful. We have to consider why should a kid care about the concept that we're teaching them? What does it matter to them in the greater context of their life? Certainly, I think we could make an argument that everything we're doing with them has great meaning, at least it does to us, but that might not be so easily recognizable to the students.
I teach citation through a boot camp style lesson in which I've contextualized learning how to cite sources and create bibliographies through the rigor and accuracy of boot camp. I expect something directly accurate to come out of the work that they're doing. No way that this will be some sort of grey area for doing the work. It's going to be black and white. You either accomplish it or you don't.
The children really enjoy being in a boot camp setting because it takes them out of the classroom setting and allows them to think beyond that. It's that sort of work that allows me to get more productivity out of them. They are part of the play, they want to be continuing in this experience and so, they do more work to do our experience and let it extend. There's a couple of things coming up in the upcoming lessons that may challenge the way you've thought about video games. Maybe you think, or you thought, that video games are just for boys and that's just not the case. Really, we have almost an equal part boys and girls and people of all ages playing video games.
Perhaps you think that video games are making kids more violent and that, again, is not the case. There is violent content that children have access to all the time, whether it be on television or through music or through video games or through any other media. It's what content we put in front of these children that matters. Perhaps you think it's too expensive to have video games in a library and while that can be the case, other materials can be expensive too. It really comes down to, where do you think the best investment of your money is. And I think you can find that there are great resources out there in video games that are very cost-effective for the payout you'll get with your students.
Maybe you're worried about how you monitor what all of the kids are playing at once and that comes down to just good teaching skills and making sure that you've structured the class the right way. Maybe you're worried about if the content is appropriate, and perhaps even more, if the video game is detracting from reading. Well, it's true that it can detract from reading, but I'd actually like to make the argument that it can enhance what we're doing in reading as long as it's engaging the child.
Many, many games, just like instructional resources, you will need to explore the games first and determine which ones are best for your students and the instructional goals. But I want to emphasize that you do not need to play video games regularly or use video games regularly in your library/classroom in order to think like a gamer and in order to plan instruction using games-based principles.
Videogaming efforts are productive for gamers, though it is likely that this interpretation of "productive" may be new to teachers or librarians. For gamers, dedication to game levels, stories, challenges, resource hunts, and quests may mean hours of what is to them meaningful activity, with desired goals and outcomes driving the work. This is a level of engagement and productivity worth trying to replicate in classroom and library instruction. The key is that the work—the reading, the inquiry, the exercise, whatever it may be—must be made meaningful to the lives and interests of the students.
To begin this workshop, jot down a list of questions that you currently have about the idea of using video games in instruction. You might include the practical (the how) and philosophical (the why).
Next, review the Frequently Asked Questions about Using Video Games, provided in the Resources. Were any of your questions answered here? Were new questions introduced?
MLA Citation
Morris, Rebecca J. "Video Games for Learning: Posing Questions about Video Games in Instruction." School Library Connection, November 2024, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985412?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903.
Entry ID: 2122882
Additional Resources
About the Author
MLA Citation
Winner, Matthew C. "Video Games for Learning. Games Make Us More Productive [7:22]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, November 2015, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985412?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985412?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 1985412