Games and Education

The primary function of a game is amusement. You play games to entertain yourselves, but games can be used for other purposes too. Education is an example to that. Thanks to the competitive, entertaining, challenging nature of games, we can use them for educational purposes and to engage with students. Because, you know... everybody loves games.

There are many types of games: board games, card games, video games. They can all be used for education, but what I am going to focus on is the most popular one nowadays: video games.

When we say "educational games" it can refer to two types of games. One type is the games that are specifically designed for educational purposes, the other type is the games that are created for commercial use but has educational values.

There are a lot of games that are specifically designed for education. One example is Big Brain Academy for Wii. There are games about math, science, memory, puzzles, history, geography etc.

Here is a case study about the usage of video games in education, in this example, the teacher uses "Minecraft" for educational purposes:

America's Army

• Developed by the United States Army for education and training, and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment.
• First released on July 4, 2002
• Since then, there have been over 26 versions released
• Dozens of government training and simulation applications using the America's Army platform have been developed to train and educate U.S. Army soldiers.
• Versions for Xbox and Xbox 360, arcade, and mobile applications

                

            Civilization

          

•         A Dickinson College class on the history of imperialism used Civilization. Ed Webb selected the game for his teaching, and Todd Bryant modified it to fit professor Webb’s course-specific requirements.  This Dickinson team published their notes to the Web.

—Tim Burke, Swarthmore College, “Did teach with it once (along with Sid Meier’s Civil War game) as examples of representations of history.”

Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin-Madison,  based his dissertation on teaching with the game, Replaying History: Learning World History through playing Civilization III(2004).

• Mark Grimsley, Ohio State University, taught history with the game.