Pushing the buttons of education

Video games, whether you realize it or not, are a big deal. From their humble beginnings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on an old radar display to today's 3-D modeled masterpieces, video games have become bigger business than both movies and music, worth billions annually.\nMost of those billions go toward games like Halo or Madden NFL Football, but Clinical Associate Professor Bob Appelman and others in the Instructional Systems Technology division of the School of Education are working to change that. Appelman and his colleagues study video and computer games, researching why people play them and what the games do to the players. They then use the findings to improve on the educational possibilities of existing games or to create new games with an emphasis on learning.\nImagine if your homework were to pick up a game controller and blow things up for an hour. In a sense, that's what Appelman is trying to accomplish.\n"We are trying to find ways in which the student can be engaged in educational content," he said. "We look at home, and we say, 'My God, they're at home, spending nearly 40 hours a week on games. They're engaged, in the zone, so engaged that they're non-communicative.'"\nIn his and others' studies of human interaction with games, Appelman said he found that games help to train players in many different physical and psychological skills. Hand-eye coordination and quick thinking are just a few of the skills seemingly bolstered by gaming.\n"There is a natural competition to know these environments," he said. "There is a socio-collaborative process going on between these people, telling each other how to get to the different levels."\nTo study those socio-collaborative processes, the IST department set up a gamer's dream-room complete with a PlayStation 2, an XBox, a Game Cube and a big screen television. There is also a high-end computer on which to play the latest PC games. \nBut that's just half the lab. The other half of the lab has video equipment used to analyze player response to certain on-screen stimuli. For example, during a game of first-person shooters, researchers can view players eyes and hands to track what they are looking at and how they are responding to on-screen stimuli.\nAppelman cited Electronic Arts' "Medal of Honor" series as an example.\n"One of the problems is there are less consequences in virtual than in real life," he said. "In games you can fail as many times as you want. In life, often, you only fail once. That was a problem in Iraq. Like in 'Medal of Honor,' they were a little bit blasé. You can hide behind a wall, but you have to keep looking around, or you're going to get wiped out. Commanders had to say, 'Look guys, this isn't a game. You can't reset it.'"\nThat ability to reset, though potentially damaging to young soldiers, can actually benefit the educator. Young learners can make mistakes and continually get feedback on how to correct them. Sasha Barab, another professor in IST, is one of the main creators of a program called "Quest Atlantis," a virtual world where elementary-age schoolchildren explore another world to learn more about their own.\nBarab said his new virtual landscape makes games more appropriate for school.\n"It sits at the intersection of education, entertainment and social commitments," he said.\nFinanced through a multi-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, the "Quest Atlantis" game is run through a Web site where students log in and walk around virtual worlds. Kids from all over the world interact with each other and get "quests" from the people of Atlantis. One such quest has Atlanteans tell the students of impending water quality problems and asks the students how their own world leaders solve those problems. When the students gather all the information, they report back to the Atlanteans through the Web site.\nBarab said the game has brought discernible changes in the children's learning.\n"We've had significant learning gains in the areas of social studies, science and language arts," he said. "It's also effective in the sense that we have hundreds of kids doing educational activities in their free time."\nUsing the lessons they learned from mainstream games, Barab and Appelman have taken techniques from those games and tried to implement them into the learning process.\n"There is engagement, and we're trying to study the engagement and quantify it, such as game storylines," Appelman said. "We want learning material to be engaging, and we'll say, 'Hey, we need a good story in it.'"\nGraduate student Yadi Ziaeehezarjeribi said the games themselves are models for how to hold an attention span.\n"The level of engagement you get in games is something you can't get in a book," he said. "Plus, you're trying to accomplish mastery over the levels."\nTeachers and parents, however, see games differently, and part of the challenge for educational games is convincing the adults to believe in them.\n"We have a problem with schools: They won't let games in because they view them as negative," Appelman said. "They blame games for Columbine, but my view is games are symbolic of what students are focusing on, and if no one pays attention, things can get out of control. They don't know what the games are. They assume that all games are too clicky, too fast and that none have good content in them."\nThere are already games that have plenty of educational value. Games like the "Zoo Tycoon," where students build a zoo, and Sid Meier's "Gettysburg" all have real facts and science built into them. But for many young kids, those games are slow and fall short of the intense action of a shooter or sports game.\nBarab said he does hold hope for the future of games in education.\n"There's whole conferences on this now, and there are many educational games there," he said. "The problem is how do you compete with the game developers when you don't have $10 million to invest in a game?"\nFor the hundreds of elementary students playing "Quest Atlantis" across the world, Barab and Appelman's work is certainly a start.\n-- Contact Weekend features editor George Lyle IV at glyle@indiana.edu.