“A social worker took the kids away”: the power of games to help children learn
October 2009
Kim Thomas
For many parents, computer games are a cause of anxiety. They worry that spending too much time in front of a screen – whether it’s a PC, a Nintendo DS, or a Sony Playstation – will dull their children’s brains and inhibit the development of social skills.
Not so, says David Shaffer, an academic and former teacher who has researched the impact of playing computer games on children. Well-designed games, argues David, can help children develop skills that are valuable in the real world and are hard to teach any other way. This can be true even with very small children, he says. Board games such as snakes-and-ladders, for example, are a valuable way of helping children understand the rules governing certain social situations. But a computer version of the game can be even more effective than the board game itself: “When you’re a really little kid, it’s hard to figure out that taking turns, only moving as much as you’re supposed to, and going back down the snake when you land on a snake, is more fun than simply moving your piece all over the board until you get to the end. The advantage of the computer is that there’s no-one for them to argue with.”
The current schooling system, says David, hasn’t fundamentally changed since it was designed 150 years ago to meet the needs of an industrial economy: “It does a very good job of teaching very basic skills, basic literacy, basic numeracy to people who are going to be factory workers. It does an even better job of teaching them to do boring and mindless tasks, to follow rules no matter how silly they are, to show up on time and to do things according to the clock. The problem is those skills aren’t necessarily the most important things about being knowledge workers in an age of global competition.”
In a modern economy, he argues, the skills that are needed include the ability to solve problems, to work in teams and to communicate clearly. Children in school learn how to write book reviews and essays but nothing, for example, about scientific communication: “What’s happening is that school is based on the idea that there are very few fundamental ways of knowing. We call these the academic subjects – maths and history and science and languages – and these are the fundamental building blocks of any kind of thinking in the world. The idea is that you have to master these first and then you’ll be prepared to go on and do more complex thinking.”
In practice, says David, it doesn’t work like that. Far from using those subjects as building blocks, children get through school by acquiring the knowledge to pass standardised tests and are then unable to apply that knowledge usefully in the outside world. More importantly, he says, the really crucial skills used in the real world can’t be taught by traditional methods: “When we study people who solve complex problems in the real world, those problems don’t have standardised answers that can be addressed by standardised tests. People like doctors and lawyers and architects and engineers and urban planners solve problems that are different every time – you don’t make a doctor by taking three quarts of science, a jigger of history, two grams of English, shake well and pour.”
Teaching children to think like an urban planner or a doctor, however, is difficult. This is where computer games can be particularly useful, says David; they can use simulations of the way people make decisions in real life: “What computer games let us do is give kids the opportunity to solve problems the way a doctor solves problems, the way an architect solves problems, the way a lawyer solves problems, from very early in their academic careers, because those are ways of thinking about the world that are fundamentally connected to the kinds of problems and issues that they’ll face in life after school.”
These kinds of computer games create what David, after the educationist Seymour Papert, refers to as a “microworld”, in which children acquire “the kinds of experiences that are going to help them understand something that’s important in the real world.”
As an example, David cites The Sims, a game that his own children learnt to play when they were small. He initially played the game with them, but the first time they played it themselves, they created a family with a mother, father and children. But the “family” accidentally left something on the kitchen stove for too long: “They had forgotten to buy smoke detectors for the house, the house caught fire, the father of the family died in the fire, and then a social worker came and took the kids away.” Not the most desirable of outcomes – but, as David says, “I’d much rather have those outcomes in the Sims game than in real life.”
It would be wrong to assume, however, that a child will learn simply by being given a computer game. Not all computer games are good, just as not all books are good, and if children are to use games to learn effectively, they need adult help and guidance. Just as a parent will read books or watch films with their children and discuss them afterwards, they need to help children understand what they’ve learnt from a computer game so they can apply it to the real world. This is equally true of older children and adults, says David: “What our studies of real world thinking show is that the way people learn to solve complex problems is by working on those problems, stepping back from the problems and talking about what they’ve done – what worked, what didn’t work, and why – with more experienced peers, with their own peers, with mentors and with adults. That’s what turns playing the game into learning for the real world."
David and his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now working on building their own epistemic games: computer games designed specifically to help learners acquire particular skills. One game his group has developed, and continues to work on, is called Urban Science. By enabling children to become urban planners and redesign their neighbourhoods, they learn about the economics and ecology of the city: “The idea of the game is that kids have the opportunity to learn to think about problems the way an urban planner does. What our research shows is that when they redesign parts of their city, they don’t just learn about the game, they learn about how cities work more generally.”
Far from turning children into passive zombies, computer games have the power to help children acquire critical thinking skills in a way that is still unusual in school. Used intelligently, such games could make an enormous difference to the teaching and learning of subjects such as biology, says David: “You could easily imagine a biology curriculum that was built in part around simulations or games where you’re being a doctor. And you were curing patients and making diagnoses and performing tests, so instead of learning about the Krebs cycle and memorising it, you would understand the pieces of biology that are really going to matter late in life.”