Can Video Games Replace College?

Returning to the same well twice, learning.now blogger Andy Carvin has an interesting new post up about a panel at this year's South by Southwest Interactive (Disclosures: Ed Arcade Advisor and CMS big cheese Henry Jenkins was one of the keynote speakers at SXSWi this year and writes about it here. Less relevantly, I helped program the narrative shorts and features for the 2001 and 2002 SXSW Film festivals.). The panel, entitled "Let's Get Serious: Could Video Games Replace College?," advertises that:

"Our panel brings together a game designer, an education professor, a high school gamer, and an instructional designer to explore these questions. Together, we'll explore the essential elements of games that may (not) transfer to educational settings; the institutional imperatives and sea-changes required; and whether the serious games movement is real or merely a band in search of a wagon."

Carvin's account reflects that, of the participants, the most skeptical panelist was Game Designer Mike McShaffry, which is saying something as other panelists included Michael Anderson of the University of Texas System Telecampus and Aliza Gold of the UT-Austin Digital Media Collaboratory. According to Carvin, Anderson was painting pie-in-the-sky scenarios:

"Imagine sitting in a classroom, you’re inside a game and actually living it. And you’re making decisions and seeing the ramifications. Instead of taking a 100 question multiple-choice test, you’ve leveled up. And instead of asking your instructor for answers, you ask your fellow gamers. Imagine having a game about how to not start wars, rather than starting battles."

while McShaffry was trying to bring things down to earth:

“College is going to be around for a long time. If they’re lucky they’ll incorporate games but games will never replace them.”

This is somewhat a unsurprising discussion, as the Education Arcade perspective tends to be that games could be a useful tool in the classroom, not a whole and sole replacement for classroom learning. Carvin's first commenter, Sherman Dorn, chimes in to point out, "Didn’t Thomas Edison assure us all that movies would replace textbooks? And didn’t folks try arcade-games-as-skill-drill programs a few decades ago? " From our point of view, there are not yet any sufficient technologies to replace a good teacher facilitating learning in the classroom. From Carvin's excerpts, Gold seems to have expressed an opinion that we've held to be true, "it’s possible that videogames could be used to help people learn curriculum in a real world sort of way." McShaffry also identified what might be the central mistake of most bad educational games: "'The biggest mistake educational game designers make, he said, is forcing a square peg into a round hole - using a gaming experience that has nothing to do with what it’s simulating.'" Leave it to a designer to know what products can and can't do, and what they're best at, eh?

McShaffry also seemingly led the panel to what Carvin rightly agrees is an exciting potential development - students developing their own games, identifying Microsoft's decision to make their XNA developer platform available as a real opportunity for some cutting edge educators and students to start making their own games and simulations. This is definitely a great opportunity for learning, as any designer has to have a solid understanding of a system in order to represent its tensions accurately. But outside of XNA, there are already a number of game design platforms out there for students to design their own games and simulations. Game Maker and Torque are some of the more popular engines and some creative Googling could find you more.

But I should highlight that our own Starlogo TNG is a great place for students to develop an introductory understanding to programming while also creating their own simulations and games. It's already being notably used in The Santa Fe Institute's NSF-funded Project GUTS as a means to enable student learning around complex systems through simulation. On their site you can take a look at student simulations around epidemiology, emergency egress, traffic flow, pollution and ecosystems (among others).