Learning mechanics
The risks, challenges and rewards of using games for education under lockdown
Discover the ways games are boosting lockdown learning
One way of defining games is that they’re teaching machines. Before they can transport us to new worlds, after all, they must put across basic principles of interaction and motivate players to apply them, whether in the form of a literal tutorial or as part of the narrative. “That’s something we know that games are great at – that onboarding and introducing you to how to play,” Minecraft Atlas general manager Deirdre Quarnstrom observes. In the age of lockdown, this quality has attracted educational organisations struggling to reach children sheltering at home. At Ubisoft’s Keys To Learn conference this winter, a few of those educators came together to discuss ways of turning games into teaching platforms.
There have been some dazzling pedagogical experiments, many preserved as lesson plans on Minecraft’s Education portal or Ubisoft’s Discovery Mode site. UKIE’s Digital Schoolhouse group, for example, has turned Just
Dance into a programming workshop, titled Just Dance
With The Algorithm. “It’s this idea that a dance is a strictly choreographed routine,” programme director Shahneila Saeed says. “And if you start to break it up, you can turn it into a flowchart and teach algorithmic thinking through that.” A more prosaic example is the Quebec history teacher who streamed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to their pupils as a substitute for a cancelled field trip to Greece. The game’s Discovery Mode lets you enjoy the historical setting. It includes support for multiple languages and a photo mode that lends itself to show-and-tell.
With its DIY ethos and co-op features, Minecraft is a particularly effective tool for online learning. Teachers have used it to do everything from recreating Romeo And Juliet to exploring the insides of atoms. “[There’s a] Minecraft version of the Bohr Model that we probably all remember from a chemistry class,” Quarnstrom elaborates. “You’ve got the nucleus, your protons and neutrons, the electron shells, and using sliders you can craft all the elements in the periodic table.” It’s a fun alternative to physical laboratory work, especially if NPCs try to intervene. “[You] can make a latex balloon from the chemical elements, put helium in that, and attach that balloon to a Minecraft mob and have it fly away.”
Other teachers are using Minecraft to explore social issues. Take Lessons In Good Trouble, a Minecraft world that represents social justice movements, from the suffragettes to Gandhi. “It’s based on the teachings of US Congressman John Lewis about how sometimes we need to get into ‘good trouble’ to effect change,” Quarnstrom says. Collaborating in Minecraft helps students develop empathy and teamwork skills, she adds. “Those skills, almost even more than the concepts [you’re teaching], become the lasting takeaways from gamebased learning.” Many of the best ideas come from students themselves. Advocacy organisation Girls Who Code has helped students develop their own games to help peers learn about gender inequality, racism and climate change.
So what are the drawbacks of using games to educate? Well, for one thing, teachers are unlikely to be as tech-savvy as their pupils. They may also have to overcome lingering parental preconceptions about games – that girls don’t play them,
Teachers have used Minecraft to do everything from recreating Romeo And Juliet to exploring atoms
for example, or that they’re simply a waste of time and brainpower.
Children from low-income backgrounds may not have access to either the game in question or a device that runs it, though as Shahneila Saeed points out, streaming mitigates this problem. Broadly, she adds, it’s hard to imagine games ever being a complete substitute for a classroom. “There’s lots of different pedagogical styles, and [our] teachers do their jobs really well – they’re very creative face-to-face. You cannot just lift and replicate all that online.”
If games can be robust teaching environments, we should also remember that few are devised with this in mind. Calling them classrooms risks abetting a steady privatisation of digital education that has been linked by groups such as the UK’s National Education Union to lower standards and a lack of accountability. Commercial games also express values that may slide into children’s heads unexamined if the game is treated as a neutral backdrop for learning. As Ubisoft’s world design director Maxime Durand notes of using the conquest-driven Assassin’s Creed to teach history, “There needs to be room for critical thinking, asking them why is it represented the way it is?”
Still, given that under lockdown many kids are spending much more time playing games, it’s appropriate to consider their educational applications. A broader positive consequence may be a greater understanding of why kids find games enticing, and how they use them for more than just recreation. Quarnstrom argues that the pandemic has led not only to “a growing respect” among school leaders for game-based learning, but “a renewed appreciation for youth, their voices and messages, and how they use gaming platforms to communicate”.