Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for Chicago Public Schools and the webinar's moderator, noted that gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making.  The webinar was sponsored by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

Studies of the brain have pointed to data suggesting that repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.

Many education groups, such as ISTE and the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) have active communities in Second Life, a program that immerses users into a virtual world, said Claudia L'Amoreaux, a community developer and educator for Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life.

"I call Second Life an engine for creativity," she said.  "Today's teens are creating their own content, uploading photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube, and in Second Life they're making their own games and stepping into them--you could call Second Life a participatory game platform."

This virtual world allows users to create their own virtual avatars, thus defining their own characters, she added.

L'Amoreaux cited a team of students in an internship program studying museum creatorship, who partnered with others for a Second Life activity that involved a recreation of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938 Nazi Germany.  As participants, the students assumed the roles of reporters, exploring the events for themselves. 

"It helps kids get involved in things and use their own interests and explore a part of something they're interested in," she said.

Stan Trevena, the director of information and technology services in California's Modesto City Schools, is at the end of a year-long pilot between four of his district's high school classes and high school students in a private English-learning school in Kyoto, Japan.

One of the first activities involved live interviews between each pair of students--one from the U.S. and one from Japan.  The next day, all of the students met online in their Second Life island and, based on the information that they learned from their partner the day before, had to interview avatars on the island until they found their partner.

The program also involved cultural and history lessons.  Halloween is a curiosity for Japanese students, Trevena said, so the U.S. students sponsored a Halloween event with a haunted house.