Edutainment - Learning from games

[Craig]

I'm a teacher, and I play a lot of games. Games are brilliant teaching devices. They can quickly and intuitively explain to you how a new concept works in a supported way, before pushing you to apply it to a new context. Not only that, they can lead you so it's you that is making the discovery giving a rewarding feedback loop that hides the learning in the fun. Mario games do this exceedingly well.

But after all that, what have you learned? Well, you've learned how to play the game, but nothing applicable outside of that. And that's fine. It's an entertainment product, it's not designed to be teaching you anything useful.

But sometimes you can learn useful things from games, though it's best to separate these into two separate categories - Games where the impetus is learning, and incidental skills or information that you've picked up because of the game, but it the game wasn't necessarily trying to teach you.

For the former, many of us played games using the school computer (singular) which had the main aim of teaching. Math games were popular and easy to set up, but there were also reading, history and geography. I'm sure parents will chime in, but I think the vast majority of these kind of games have migrated to apps. I've certainly used language learning apps over the past few years with various levels of gamification. There's a lot of debate in the education world about how useful these are and I've certainly seen my share of useful and... less than useful. I think the big hurdle is making sure the activities are transferable to outside the game.

For the latter, what have you picked up from regular games? I think guitar hero is probably a good example of this. When playing the plastic guitar, it's not going to help you play regular guitar other than maybe spurring your interest (and that's absolutely fine, it's a game!) but the drums walk the line between fun and education. The hand eye co-ordination you need to develop to play those songs is presented in a nice supported way, which lets you develop transferable skills outside of the game. Neat!

So what do you think about learning from games? The drawbacks? What is something you've learned from a game which wasn't on the face of it educational?

[Flabyo]

Assassin’s Creed Origins added a substantial free dlc that put it into a kind of living encyclopaedia mode. You picked a character and walked through part of the world freely, and the game would tell you interesting facts about what you were seeing. It also had more guided tours that covered specific topics like agriculture and warfare in that time period.

I know at least one friend who used this with his kids to help them learn about Egypt.

I’m really hoping they have something similar lined up for Odyssey.

[KSubzero1000]

Tangential learning is the big one for me. The original God of War games reinvigorated my interest in Greek mythology, the recent reboot did the same for Norse mythology, some Assassin's Creed games have piqued my interest in their respective historical periods, Metal Gear made me look into a great many things including the Cold War and nuclear disarmament, etc... It's not the main reason I play these games, and I can't claim to have become an expert on any of these subjects, but it's certainly a nice side-effect of playing games with a very distinct setting.

I can't really think of any game that has taught me transferable skills, but perhaps I'm missing something. Things like eye-hand coordination and pattern recognition are a staple of many action games, but I can't say that I've ever had any conscious instance of "oh wow, I bet I wouldn't have been able to do that if I didn't play so many video games".

Also, (and I don't think that's what you're asking for) but The Witness is definitely my gold standard in terms of a game effortlessly teaching the player its various rules. The elegance and ingenuity of that game's tutorials / difficulty curve are simply marvelous.

[Alex79]

I'm not sure it's what the thread is really about, but I've often found games have inspired me to learn rather than taught me directly. I read a lot about the Cold War after playing MGS 3, for example. In fact, it's very rare than a game doesn't have me reaching for my phone every once in a while to look something up or find some background info on something. Assassins Creed is another good example.

EDIT: Having read the other replies it looks like I've just copied Ksubs answer, haha. I didn't read it first, honest!!

EDIT 2: This probably isn't a very smart thing to admit, but the Gran Turismo games did teach me a thing or two about driving, finding the best racing line and accelerating out of corners and the like. Practiced only on private roads, of course.

[KSubzero1000]

[Suits]

EDIT 2: This probably isn't a very smart thing to admit, but the Gran Turismo games did teach me a thing or two about driving, finding the best racing line and accelerating out of corners and the like. Practiced only on private roads, of course.

Where do you think the GT Academy came from .

I’ve used driving games a number of times for tracks like Brands, Spa, Silverstone, Nurburgring to learn the tracks and driving lines - to which I’ve then taken to the real life tracks and applied the knowledge too.

Of course there’s a massive difference in application but having a mental knowledge of the circuit is a huge help, especially I’m massively technical tracks like the Nurburgring.

[Flabyo]

My love of the early Dynasty Warriors games got me to read the source material it’s based on, and then go on to learn about the differences between the actual history of that period and the ‘sexed up’ version that most people know. (It has a lot in common with how the Robin Hood and King Arthur mythologies evolved from fact into a more fanciful form, which ends up far better known).

The Total War games have taught me a bunch of stuff I didn’t know as well, those games encourage you to go out and read up on the things that are in them.

[duskvstweak]

I got into Age of Empires in a big way as a kid.

In 6th grade, after years of going over AND over American history, we finally started tackling World History. As soon as I opened my text book and saw we would start learning about ancient Egypt, the Babylonians, Persia, Greece, ect, I was mesmerized. These were the civilizations from the game I loved! It made that class so exciting to me as a kid and opened my mind to learning about history in general.