If your parents were anything like mine growing up, convincing them video games were anything but a waste of time was no easy task.
Although research has shown that gaming can actually improve fine motor skills as well as visual acuity and attention, significantly less attention has been focused on how games are able to foster problem solving strategies akin to those involved in the sciences.
For a democratic society to exist its population must be able to competently engage the issues of major concern. Increasingly, these issues are scientific in nature: stem cells, cloning, public education, healthcare and so on. The pressing need for a more scientifically literate society develops directly out of this current state of the affairs. Yet, by most measures, science literacy in our schools has dwindled over the years, or at best, remained fairly stable. Indeed, only one in five Americans are considered to be scientifically literate despite years of mandatory science instruction [1]. Recent studies of science classrooms have shown that exercises that emphasize finding the single “right” answer (i.e. that of the teacher’s) and just “rerunning” the experiment until you get it, considered to be standard “inquiry” activities, not only fail to teach science but in fact end up fostering dispositions toward how knowledge gets made that are directly antithetical to the project of science itself [2].
There is a growing body of research now demonstrating that game technologies (and the kind of communities that seem to come with them) may be a viable alternative – not to teachers and classrooms but to textbooks and science labs. In fact, research by Constance Steinkuehler and others (2006), have shown that much of the conversation between players within the communities of massively multiplayer online games (such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft) have consisted of what can easily be described as social knowledge construction [3]. That is, exploring and testing the boundaries and rules of complex game systems by relying upon defined methods such as model-based reasoning and displaying evaluative epistemologies where grounded knowledge is subjected to an open-ended process of continual empirical evaluation and argumentation. These researchers have argued that these emergent forms of scientific reasoning, informal science literacy, and scientific habits of mind represent the cultural norms that develop naturally within online community fandom.
The potential for games as vehicles for learning have not gone unnoticed, and the last two years have witnessed a marked rise in interest across various academies in leveraging game technologies toward educational ends: the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Serious Games Initiative, the Games, Learning and Society program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Education Arcade project at MIT, and the Games for Social Change Movement, to name a few.
Related: Can ‘World of Warcraft; make you smarter? by Steve LeBlanc, MSNBC Aug.18 2008
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References
- Miller, JD. Public understanding of, and attitudes toward, scientific research: What we know and what we need to know. Public Understanding of Science, 2004. 13(3), 273-294.
- Chinn, CA and Malhotra, B. Epistemologically authentic inquiry in schools: A theoretical framework for evaluating inquiry tasks. Science Education, 2002. 86(2) 175-218.
- Steinkuehler, C and Chmiel, M. Fostering scientific habits of mind in the context of online play. In S.A. Barab, K.E. Hay, N.B. Songer, & D.T. Hickey (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, 2006 (pp 723-729). Mahwah NJ: Erlbuam.
