Digital Game-Based Learning

It’s not every day that we go to a lecture and play computer games, but that’s exactly how we started out on this occasion. I played Bemuse, an online, web-based rhythm game, played by pressing the correct keys on the keyboard along with the music, with the score achieved based on accuracy. I have since downloaded and played Guitar Band Battle. Other similar rhythm games include Rock Hero, Tap Tap Revenge, Guitar Hero, and Rock Smith. While Guitar Hero uses a guitar-based controller, Rock Smith allows you to play by connecting your own guitar.

My children would play games on their devices all day if I allowed them to; instead, I am constantly telling them to get off their screens. I have never before considered what makes games so appealing that children are voluntarily learning anything and everything about them so as to improve their strategies and scores, and attain higher levels. Voluntary participation, voluntary learning. . . So how, then, do we take the benefits of game mechanics and apply them in an educational context?

As noted by our lecturer and music teacher, Rebecca Ly, school is not a well-designed game: students are coerced into playing the game; discipline comes before motivation; rules are limiting; mistakes are punished; there are no rewards for trying; and the result awarded is final. In contrast, in a game: participation is voluntary; arbitrary rules are willingly accepted; motivation and engagement come first; players learn by making mistakes and are rewarded for effort; challenge is fun; your result is not final – you can reform or start again at zero as many times as you want.

Lee Sheldon, a researcher, teacher and game designer, has taken the world of gaming and applied it in real classroom contexts. The class itself becomes a multiplayer game – “played out in real-time in the real world of the classroom with students as players and the teacher as Game Master” (Sheldon, 2011). Students learn through play and experience. All the elements of a game are present: avatars, quests, levels, guilds, defeating monsters, crafting, earning their way through points (instead of grades), and options for bonus points. Teaching in this way, Sheldon observes that learning became fun, grades improved and class attendance increased.

Gee and Gee (2017) draw commonalities between real and virtual worlds. They describe how, in the real world, humans learn from experience, and use this experience to mentally simulate possibilities for future experiences that enable decision making and problem solving to occur. Through “acting in the world and having the world ‘talk back’” (ie. recognising consequences of our actions through responses from our interactions with the world), we test our understandings,

evaluate our experiences, and modify our future actions. This is not unlike the ‘conversations’ that we have in a virtual world. To advertise their game Portal, Valve states: “The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment” (Valve, cited in Gee & Gee, 2017). Gee and Gee imagine this as a perfect “vision statement” for an educational institution.

In the virtual world, learning is achieved through the interacting parts of the ‘game’ itself, but is then further heightened by interactions within social networks of like-minded people which surround the ‘game’, interactions which provide additional teaching and learning opportunities. Gee and Gee refer to these networks as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems (DTLS). The argue that in the real world, DTALS provide endless opportunities for teaching and learning, and “constitute a true 21st century curriculum based in passion, innovation, production, participation and collaboration” (Gee & Gee, 2017). Games provide a deep model for teaching and learning which can positively influence and even innovate our forward-looking approach to education.

References

Sheldon, Lee. (2011). Multiplayer classroom: Designing coursework as a game. Course Technology.

Gee, E. & Gee, J. (2017). Games as distributed teaching and learning systems. Teachers College Record, 119 (12), 1-22.