Good News for Real Ed Reform

The headline in the January 12th New York Times read, At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard. The article described how introductory physics lectures have been replaced by the TEAL (Technology-Enhanced Active Learning) program, in which students work in clusters around workstations in a lab setting, engaged in hands-on, interactive collaboration. The story—which reports that TEAL has resulted in higher attendance and lower failure rates among students—must have hit a responsive chord, as it remained one of the Times most e-mailed articles for a week.

The article caused me a small dose of frustration, and a large amount of pleasure. My small frustration was that the article never connected TEAL’s success with the larger question of education reform. Sadly, in the public’s mind, the whole notion of reform has been reduced to how rigorously we apply standards-based tests, and whether we use those tests to hold schools accountable. Too few readers understand that before No Child Left Behind, education reform meant making classrooms more like the TEAL labs at MIT. This article offered a “teachable moment,” in which a broader public could have been introduced to the argument for constructivist learning, so I was slightly annoyed that the moment was lost.

That omission aside, those of us who care about learning games can only be cheered by the article’s prominence and widespread dissemination. Though explicitly a pedagogical strategy for the classroom, TEAL represents the very approach to learning embedded in the games we champion.
The article quotes Professor Eric Mazur on the way traditional lectures only served the most hard-core physics students:

“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ”

But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

What is a game if not an exercise in hands-on inquiry? In the typical game, players encounter situations that appear chaotic and incomprehensible. Only by observation and probing, followed by deductive reasoning, hypothesis formation and experimentation do players come to understand the game’s “phenomena” and master them. We have long argued that it’s not much of a stretch to design games in which the player takes the same approach to real scientific content. From the Education Arcade’s early prototype SUPERCHARGED, through our numerous augmented reality games and our recent efforts on LABYRINTH and KIDS SURVEY NETWORK, we have been demonstrating how STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) content lends itself to gaming. If the interest in the Times article is any indication, perhaps a larger public is ready to receive this message.