Therefore, I suspect this activity is going to segue into the next topic - using games for educational purposes - so I'll muse for a bit on what value I think games can bring to the classroom and see how that ends up jiving with our class next Monday.
When I think of games in the school context, I immediately think of Dr. Brain. This was a computer game I played in school around fourth grade. It was a suite of activities led by "Dr. Brain," who for some reason was an old mouse with a weird, creaky voice. I don't remember what all the activities are, but I know precisely what two of them were. One was logic puzzles, the kind where you're provided a situation and a set of clues, and you have to figure out how various variables match up using logical deductions. I LOVED these puzzles. I devoured them like candy. I still do them for fun sometimes, and I don't think I was doing particularly easy ones back then (I'm pretty sure there were examples with three categories and five elements per category, which I still find marvelously fun to this day), but when the knowledge needed is logical, not factual, there isn't really an age limit. I'm sure the hours I spent doing those puzzles gave me all kinds of mental skills.
Another part of Dr. Brain that left an indelible mark on me was a matching game involving the symbols of elements. The creaky old mouse would say "Molybdenum!" or "Tungsten!" and you would have to think of the corresponding symbol (Mo or W, respectively), see if you had it on the board, and place the same symbols side by side to match them up and move them off the board. For some reason I absolutely loved this game. I leveraged my status as a "faculty kid" (my dad taught fifth grade at the time) to get a copy of the CD to play on our home computer. (Can you tell I was an über nerd from the very beginning?) Incredibly, when I think of some elements, particularly some obscure ones (Actinium!) I still hear Dr. Brain's voice in my head! There are some element symbols I know cold entirely thanks to Dr. Brain. I played that game 17+ years ago! But gosh, I played it a lot.
All of this is to say I think games, when designed well, have enormous potential as educational tools. I think Dr. Brain was a spectacularly designed game. Now that I look at the screenshots, I remember that I liked playing pretty much all of the types of puzzles, and I spent hours happily enriching my own brain. Doesn't that sound preferable to kids endlessly flinging birds at pigs or babbling to each other on social media? I think so! It's certainly one very exciting application of technology. It has a high chance of buy in, and a high chance for rich payoffs.
Maybe I'm being optimistic. I was, after all, the kind of kid who thought learning itself was fun, no matter the context (thanks Dad!). But I think, when applied judiciously, games can be an enriching and positive force in the classroom. I look forward to hearing what others think next week!
One comment you made in this post stood out to me, and that was, "I still hear Dr. Brain's voice in my head!" This is one great benefit of using games as educational tools. Kids have such amazing memories when it comes to material they WANT to remember. Think about how quickly they memorize all the words to the songs in a new Disney movie, or how quickly they memorize all the short cuts and bonus levels in a video game. If we can tap into this as teachers, we can find ways to get kids to remember stuff that's truly valuable, like the logic skills and scientific elements you learned with Dr. Brain. This can even be done so that the kids might not even know that we're trying to get them to LEARN things.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there are many benefits to using games for educational purposes, I would be careful not to overuse them in a learning environment. I think that they are most useful as educational supplements, not replacements.