How can video games can help educators redesign classroom-based learning environments?

Nichole Pinkard asks Can Videogames Inspire a Different Design for Classroom Learning?

What can video games tell us about designing classroom-based learning experiences? Understanding how video games engage kids to continuously work through a problem without giving up is a lesson that can have great impact for classroom instruction. This fall the University of Chicago’s North Kenwood Oakland Middle School and the Center for Urban School Improvement’s Digital Youth Network team used principles such as those outlined by Jim Gee in his book, What Video Games Tell Us about Learning and Literacy, to design a real-life simulation for our incoming sixth grade students.

The challenge we chose to accept was to use video game design principles to design a course to develop students’ digital media skills, media critique skills and overall computer literacy. If successful teachers could effectively take advantage of the resources afforded by the school’s 1:1 computing environment. Our solution - a 90 minute weekly media arts class set up as a simulated record label taught by two members of the Digital Youth after school staff who are involved in the music industry. Each sixth grade class was given the goal of creating by the end of the school year; 2 recording groups, 7 songs, 2 music videos, a publicity campaign that included a 30 second radio promo, a website and a CD. The culminating activity for this Media Arts class is a record label launch party.

To achieve their goals, students have to play the roles of musician, poets, artists, writers, producers, directors, managers, sound engineers, publicists, graphic artists, videographers, and media critics. In addition, they have to learn how to collaborate, work on an individual piece of a project, critique each other’s work, work under deadlines, and work from a plan. The teachers are using a variety of scaffolds/learning aids to support students including mini lessons; weekly media critique sessions, visiting artists, and journaling assignments that require students to reflect on messages in today’s media through creating their own original poems, song lyrics and collages.

Where are we five months into this project? The students are on track to complete their tasks. Many students are spending time before school, after school, during lunch and on the weekends working on their products. According to the school staff, the sixth graders’ media skills rival those of the 7th graders in the school that did not have the luxury of their own media arts class. Several students have discovered a digital media passion through attending the class and are exploring their interest through membership in the Digital Youth Network Program. The students are learning the significance of continuously reworking a product over time until they achieve their goal of producing a product that truly represents their thoughts and ideas. This is a new experience, considering the fact that it is positioned during the school day and resembles students experience with video games of trying to get to the next game level.

In closing, while it is important to focus on using video games in classrooms we need to also take this opportunity to examine how the design principles used to create video games can inform the redesign of classroom learning environments.

Comments

[Dave LaMorte]

Nice post.

I think the pedagogy is already built into the game as well. Just as you have to learn to write before you can write an essay, you need to learn to stomp your enemies to save the princess. G

[Alan moore]

Dear Dave,

Saving the princess has always been an over riding need for myself.

Thanks for stopping by

[Margarita]

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