Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Brian Smith and Bart Pursel in the College of Information Sciences and Technology ask students to investigate the design and potential of video games and online virtual worlds for use in education and business.

In Pursel’s “IST 110 Information, People, and Technology” course, students explore the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com/), developing objects and evaluating how the environment is being used for business purposes. He said that by creating items such as interactive signs and even full-scale buildings on the college’s Second Life island of “Istania,” they learn to use scripting language and 3-D modeling tools. He said, “We’re throwing the kitchen sink at Second Life to see what it works best for.”

Pursel asks students to evaluate as business cases what large companies like IBM and Mercedes-Benz are doing in Second Life. “I want them to try to figure out why these people are sinking all this time and all these resources into this environment,” he said.

In the future, Pursel hopes to present students with a learning game being developed by IBM called Innov8, aimed to teach process management. He said he would like students to evaluate the corporation’s approach, perform beta testing, and provide IBM with feedback.

Smith teaches a graduate design studio course in the College of Education’s Instructional Systems program (INSYS 597A) in which the class is developing a history game for sixth graders. The course centers on prototyping educational materials and the process of proceeding from an idea to a storyboard. “There’s a whole range of techniques I want them to get through that now I’ve embedded in the process of doing game design,” he said.

In the 1990s, Smith was a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Institute for the Learning Sciences at the same time that video games were becoming more prevalent. He said, “We were thinking, here’s software that we’re calling educational, and then this other set that we play every night, and these things seem very different. It was a recognition that there was some experience or motivation that was going on in one sphere that we wanted to get in the other.”

In schools, said Smith, learning subjects such as biology or history has often consisted of memorization, but memorization is not what biologists and historians really do. “One appeal of games is that you can put students into situations where they can actually ‘do.’ We couldn’t walk through ancient Greece today, but you can in simulated worlds.”

“Children, and in fact mammals, learn through play,” observed Smith. “The educational gaming movement is no different than what great educators like Dewey, Froebel, and Montessori recognized many decades ago—promoting meaningful, engaging experiences can facilitate deep learning.” He referred to the intrinsic motivation related to games. “It seems far better to have people accept a challenge and learn how to solve it because they’re committed rather than just trying to get a good grade on a test.”

As far as games being more widely adopted for educational purposes, Smith pointed out, “Every new technology is heralded as a way to fix education. We have to rely on theory and practice to guide the fusion of gaming and learning, but there’s something here worth exploring.”