– Barriers to adoption: These include curriculum requirements, attitudes of parents and educators, logistics of game integration in the classroom, support for teachers, assessment, evidence that games make a difference in learning, limited uses of games for all subjects, limited views of the games currently available today, and social and cultural structures that hinder school innovation.
– Barriers to design and development: These include high development costs for games, a labor-intensive development process that normally doesn’t include input from teachers or education specialists, the lack of pilots in schools, and limited sources of funding to develop educational games.
– Barriers to sustainability: These include fickle gamer loyalty to games for long periods of time, quickly outdated technology, and maintenance and support funding from schools.
– Barriers to innovation: These include limited data of how games affect learning in schools, limited pedagogical paradigms, limited research, and limited ambition on all fronts.
“Experts in the field agree that kids love playing , but the research has not fully demonstrated with precision why or how they work, as well as how to design them for specific learning goals,” says the Joan Ganz Cooney report.
The report lists issues that educators and game developers need to address, such as deepening knowledge about the benefits and limitations of games for children’s learning; designing games that increase learning, whether about health, literacy, science, history, or problem-solving; identifying what elements (which setting, program interventions, or types of adult guidance) make game-playing more effective; and determining how games can best be integrated into the classroom and other learning environments.
Specifically, the report notes that research and investment in video game-playing needs to establish priorities for the research or student, or scale up the innovation in this area, and disseminate evidence of what works—more than just what’s in scientific journals.
Solid design for better learning
While more research is needed on gaming in education, researchers are learning what constitutes good gaming design, especially for education. However, many products claiming to be educational gaming for students today might not be the best solutions.
According to MIT’s report, the process of designing and creating educational games can be much like the baking process.
“There are many attempts by a growing number of health-conscious cooks to make things that are both yummy and healthy. It isn’t easy to balance these two qualities … and there is likely no universal solution,” the report says. “Some recipes work really well for some groups of people, in certain contexts, with certain expectations. Similarly, in creating experiences that are both fun and filled with learning, the success of different recipes, such as mixing media, immersion, game styles, learning goals, and mixtures of content, depends quite a bit on the audience, context, content, goals, and facilitation.”
The report warns that injecting content learning into a game where it doesn’t fit might create experiences that are entertaining, but their educational value is suspect.
“If your spaceship requires you to answer a math problem before you can use your blasters, chances are you’ll hate the game and the math. This is the strategy taken by most of the legacy edutainment games (Math Blaster), as well as many of the new attempts to create commercially viable learning games today (immersive 3-D math game, Dimension M),” the report says.
Another mistake game developers make, says the MIT report, is to take educational content and make it look like a game; for example, putting algebra problems in a 3-D virtual world, or placing the periodic table of elements in a shooting arcade.
When creating games, there are a number of principles that must be followed, the MIT researchers say:
- #4: 25 education trends for 2018 - December 26, 2018
- Video of the Week: Dealing with digital distraction in the classroom - February 23, 2018
- Secrets from the library lines: 5 ways schools can boost digital engagement - January 2, 2018