Public education has always been lambasted for its heavy use of memorization, its reliance on standardized tests as evaluation, and the lack of building student interest. No teacher I've ever had has wanted to "teach to the test" or only focus on memorizing the basics, because the basics aren't the end goal. The end goal of education is to give students the tools to go forth and do something with the knowledge they've gained. Whether this is direct, such as teaching a chemistry student to be able to take more advanced chemistry classes, or indirect, such as allowing a math student to quickly and easily calculate a tip, teachers want their students to be inspired by their subject and go out and do more.
One of the hardest things about this is that public education, by its nature, is mandatory. Anytime you tell a student they have to take a class, they are less likely to enjoy it than if they made that choice themselves. This lack of agency causes students to disengage. The current method of assessment, where you take a test, get a grade, and then move on to the next thing, teaches students to be afraid of failure. To get a question wrong is to have failed, and now your choices are to desperately work on your own to catch up, or fall behind. This is especially true in subjects like math, where subjects constantly build upon each other. In history, if you don't understand all of the motivations behind the Crimean War, just wait and we'll move onto World War One. In math, if you don't understand factorization, then the subject of graphing polynomials is going to be nigh-impossible.
On the other hand, there is already a medium where people are finding agency, where they aren't afraid of failure, and where they are building on basic skills to enrich their own knowledge: gaming.
After you get a grade on a homework assignment, that homework assignment is over. Every student knows the terror of awaiting a bad grade on a project or exam. The worst thing a class can be is "too hard." On the other hand, in games, you are constantly failing. You miss a jump and fall in a pit or get shot by the enemy sniper. In each case, you reload the game, go back, and try a different tactic. Maybe you get a running start before taking the jump or you take a different route through the map, but either way, the response isn't to turn the game off forever. You end up succeeding, not because success was handed to you, but because you kept trying until you did. If everything you tried succeeded, you'd never have any challenge, no reason to go back and try again. In a lot of ways, the worst thing a game can be is "too easy."
There is a lot of knowledge required to play games, and a lot of knowledge the game has to impart. Games are already teaching kids a lot, so what's important is making games that teach them the right thing. A year ago, I was desperately hunting for a shiny Litwick in Pokemon Black. For those of you who are unaware, a "shiny" Pokemon (one with an alternate color scheme) has a 1/8192 chance of showing up in place of a regular Pokemon encounter. A Litwick is a Pokemon.
This can obviously take a very long time, so I got to occupying myself with calculating the probability that I'd encounter it. Obviously, the chance of any given encounter being the shiny Pokemon was still 1/8192, but what if I ran into 100 Pokemon? What about 1000? 8000? I thought about it. If I were to run into two shiny Pokemon in a row, that would be 1/8192 * 1/8192, but that wasn't what I was calculating. What I really wanted to know was the chance that I hadn't run into it yet, and then find the opposite of that. The chance that any given Pokemon would not be shiny was 8191/8192, so the chance that 1000 wouldn't be was (8191/8192) ^ 1000, or about 88.5%. This means that I had a 11.5% chance of running into one in that time.
Later, upon taking a statistics class, I realized that this was binomial distribution, which is a form of probability I still call "Shiny Litwick math."
This kind of tangential learning is very powerful, but can't really be predicted. I can't promise you that every person who played Pokemon got a solid understanding of probability and statistics. What I can promise you is that if you build games around requiring those skills that are compelling enough to make students want to play them, they can overcome any challenge you throw at them. Games provide instantaneous feedback that teachers simply can't, allowing teachers to spend time on students that need extra help or a refresher on a certain topic. Games can also collect data about what portions of the game students are understanding and what portion students are struggling with, allowing the teacher to observe greater trends in the gaps in their teaching. Games eliminate a fear of failure and allow students to focus on exploring a subject and finding the cool ways you can use the things they are learning.
Play is the most natural way to learn, and the most powerful. Figuring out how to incorporate it into our education system is the path toward creating students who loved learning.
For further research, I highly recommend Extra Credits, a YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing games and what they mean for us as a whole. They have an excellent video series on games in education that I particularly recommend.
So what about you? Have you ever learned something playing a video game that came up later in life or in school? Do you think you'd learn better or teach better with games in the classrooms? Let me know!
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