Continuing the topic from yesterday – which again comes out of lots of interesting conversations with Jan Plass and other colleagues – the question always comes up of whether the potential educational benefits of games for learning might run into the coolness problem: kids may not want to play a game that’s supposed to be “good for them”. If you give middle school kids a game that’s really fun, but by playing it they know that they are actually doing math homework, would this awkward fact make the game so uncool that it is actually no longer fun?
Yet how could things be worse than the way they are now? Standard practice today is to give kids ages eleven through thirteen lots of boring homework exercises to hone their math skills. It’s hard to argue that the current approach is the optimal way to win their hearts and minds, or to show them that math can be fun and exciting. The same material covered via well-designed game play could hardly be any worse for motivating learning than the current status quo. In fact, there is every reason to think it would be better.
But still, I am reminded of that wonderful 1928 New Yorker cartoon drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E.B. White:
Old E.B. hit the nail right on the head, didn’t he? Kids know. Kids always know.
So how will this play out? Can games make education more relevant and fun? Or will kids merely look at games in education as a surreptitious attempt to make them eat their vegetables? On the other hand, if our educational system embraces game play properly then perhaps school itself may come to seem a lot cooler.