Feedback - Video games in education

Why are games considered fun, but school is not? Why does the term video game in most people's mind evoke feelings of waste of time even though they are one of the best learning tools around?

How can we as teachers engage our audience (e.g. the students) to participate for longer than a few minutes?

For the final semester of my Masters in Digital Media, I have chosen to do an independent study on this topic. My supervisor is the fantastic Dr. Karen Meyer at the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC. The final work could be used to improve the classroom experience for students and teachers alike. By taking a closer look at how games integrate fun, feedback, interaction and reward systems, this project focuses on breaking down assumptions and defying myths surrounding video games, and highlights possibilities how each area can feed and enrich the other.

I strongly believe that the same theory of fun in games holds true for the field of education. Aside from entertaining us, games teach about such things as how to act in a particular world, how to familiarize oneself with a specific environment and have been used to teach and improve interpersonal skills among players.

As a part-time instructor at BCIT, I have noticed the ever increasing challenge to hold the attention of my students for any extended period. The students in my course in particular are of the Facebook and IM generation, and the average attention span during the lessons is getting shorter and shorter. At the same time, after school, children and young adults are devouring new information, complex concepts, and various skills by playing games with patience and endurance, immersing themselves for hours on end in a fictitious digital world. By playing video games, players seem to experience a much more powerful and engaging form of learning as in the classroom.