You control the president, a congressman and a Supreme Court justice in the iCivics video game “Branches of Power.”
Without parties, lobbying and budget-setting, the game is a simplified version of reality. Still, the lesson of what each branch of government does and how it checks the others is important. And with only seven percent of eighth-graders able to fill out a table with such information, teachers need to find creative ways to get that lesson across.
Greg Toppo, the national K-12 education reporter for USA Today and a teacher for eight years, sought to find how video games could enhance learning. The end result is published in a new book, titled The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. The book tells the story of various game developers who are getting students more engaged in education through video games.
It’s easy to see how video games can teach math, science, and social studies. With some creativity, even English and literature can be taught through video games.
At a Fordham Institute event on Tuesday, Toppo gave the example of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which is simulated in “Walden, a Game.” Still in development, the game immerses players in a 3-D simulation of Walden Pond in the summer of 1845. The point isn’t to “win” the game, merely to put the player in Thoreau’s living environment.
“The game follows the loose narrative of Thoreau’s first year in the woods, with each season holding its own challenges for survival and possibilities for inspiration,” its website says. “The game offers more opportunities for reflective play than strategic challenge.” As a result, students can gain a better understanding of how Thoreau lived in the woods than they might have by reading the original book.
This isn’t to say that video games should replace literature or science experiments in the classroom, but they can be a useful supplement. “Teachers’ judgement always has to be first and foremost,” Toppo said. “The ‘next big thing’ in education always sucks. … I hope [gaming is] the next small thing, and it just keeps going.”
The book is convincing some education traditionalists to take a second look at video games in the classroom. “I’m a little bit of an ed-technology skeptic,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Fordham Institute, said. “I’m not ready to completely abandon my skepticism about education technology and gaming, but Greg has written a strong and very persuasive book.”
Even Toppo himself isn’t a big gamer. He originally set out to write a book about reading, but said “I couldn’t escape this gravity of games. Games were sort of becoming an amazing cultural force that you couldn’t escape.”
It’s well documented that education in the United States is broken and in need of improvement. With no silver bullet that can save the system, educators and policymakers should look to try different solutions and see what works. It’s still too soon to see if gaming can boost overall student achievement, but the early results are promising.
