Should Video Games Carry Educational Content Advice?
By Alistair Owens www.keen2learn.co.uk
Food labels are now awash with details of the ingredients, what’s good and bad, high in this, low in that and percentages of daily allowances. Could this extend to video games to show the percentage of educational content contained in the games.
The skills of the games developer have grown immeasurably over the years. Graphics and realism matched to the growing power of the computer and the demand of the consumer. This is a huge market where the development costs of a game are equally large. It is this that prevents the full adoption of the techniques in most educational games where the volume of sales is proportionately lower and cost recovery less feasible.
As a consequence the amazing skill of the games developer is predominately lost to education. Yet this is the one area where an amazing breakthrough could be achieved. Certain manufactures are making incursions such as Wii, Nintendo and Microsoft. The danger is that their commercial might could swamp the smaller and potentially more innovative developer. The risk of a PC versus Mac, VHS versus Betamax battle emerging, where the better version lost out, could develop. Equally the possibility of a paradigm shift in educational games should be welcomed. The situation needs both encouragement and control.
The advent of the iPod took the market established by the Sony Walkman and turned it on its head. Perhaps Apple never dreamed of the influence and market changes that would occur. The music industry has spun through vinyl records, cassettes; CD’s to downloads in 10 years. The application now is huge and versatile; even churches are using iPods to play organ music during services where organists have disappeared. But strangely all is not what it seems. There are compromises. The sound mixers from the original recording have apoplexy when the final version is released. The original master recording quality has to be exceptional to support the reproduction process. But whilst the sound quality of a vinyl recording is very high, technological difficulties means a CD has to clip the wave form reducing the quality. An iPod clips it further. We have “lost something in the translationâ€.
The control of educational content needs equal care. It is pointless if the established skill of the educationalist is clipped in the final reproduction of an educational game. It is safe to assume market forces will drive some existing educational games companies under. Unable to afford the huge development costs to enter the mass market potential they will simply disappear swamped by the big guns. This phenomenal knowledge base will be lost.
The better solution would be to harness skills from both the games developer and educationalist camps. In reality the end product has to have commercial potential and become an inevitable compromise. Maybe the ideal solution would involve legislation that insists on a minimum educational content in all games. This could be revealed on the packaging in similar fashion to food ingredients. Minimum content, recommended daily doses and key benefits clearly stated in coloured bands.
We are at a crossroads in education. Conventional teaching has developed skills that could be better applied through new technologies. The current approach is not necessarily working. Changes in society, disruptive children, the manipulative effect of targets, SAT’s and GCSE conspire to confuse and divert the impact of teaching. We are no further advanced in the overall achievement than 30 years ago.
Whilst technology has advanced at the speed of light, learning appears to have moved at the speed of sound. There is huge potential to embrace educational games, or educational content in video games as a means of “learning in disguise.†Playing games on the modern platforms now available, and those yet to emerge, means that some of the 85% of time children spend outside of school can be captured. Practice has the greatest influence in retention of learning. What better way than to make it fun.
