Two Reports But Now What?
Michelle Lucy-Roper of Federation of American Scientists and Alicia Sanchez, a researcher from University of Central Florida talk on two studies on the use of serious games and what this means for the future.
At the beginning of the lecture, Michelle Lucy-Roper started by talking about a report done on how to make it easier and more effective to learn. They started the research in 2001 on different ways to help in learning. At a summit on education, they worked on deciding different ways to educate and discussed how to make people want to learn the material and recieve the skill set that employers want. One thing they decided to work on was the use of gaming as gaming has no racial divide.
The creation of Educational Games is very risky she continued explaing that these games must have the following items. One, Government, Business, and Educational roles must be included when in the research and development stages. Two, Skills found in the game should be transfered to their education. Three, Teachers should take advantage of educational gaming and be able to pick which games they want for their class.
Next, Alicia Sanchez came up and spoke about a one year study on the use of games in the classroom. Her findings said that 72% of teachers have never played video games while 82% of the students have. 37% of teachers and 22% of students thought video games should not be used in the classroom and that students are more motivated when playing the game instead of watching the game. The problems that they found are technical problems (computer crashes), the length of time classes are placed in, and that the students needed more help in preparation for the game. (some students would need assistance from the teacher about things in the games. An example would be the physics of a roller coaster.) The study used off the shelf games.
Recommendations that came out of this talk were that games are not the magic bullet in teaching, that there needs to be more technical support, and that game makers who create serious games should look into creating more teaching aides for the teachers and creating clearer learning objectives.
