2 posts tagged “education”

As a graduate student, I consume knowledge like I consume cake: ravenously and without thought to my general well-being. It's supposed to be a useful trait, or so I'm told. However, I am one of the very few people who are like this. It's believed less than 1% of the population gets a PhD, and for good reason. This is a career, and it isn't for everyone. That said, I'm not one of those people that think university is entirely for academic pursuits either.

There is a constant push and pull between academics and students. Academics believe that they're creating the workers of the future. Giving them the building blocks for fundamental understanding is much more important than giving them experience in the vocational tools they'll use in the short-term. Universities create engineers, vocational apprenticeships create car mechanics. There's nothing wrong with creating mechanics. The world needs all types of people. However, the farther up the university quality food-chain you go, the harder it is to convince anyone that a vocational course has a use.

With Computer Science, and video games especially, this tension reaches a breaking point. I've sat in many classes where I've felt the academics have severely impeded my learning... I needed to know the "hows" and not the "whys". I didn't care how the naïve Bayes algorithm was derived, just what it did. Even at graduate level, I run into the same things.

The added difficulty with video games is that game studios are constantly pushing on universities to be a training farm for them: teach undergraduates C++, XNA and 3D Studio Max and get them out (the irony being that game developers then say in Edge that the Computer Science graduates are preferable to those with "lesser" games degrees). This is what the academics rightly push back on, but it seems many go too far. It is important to give undergraduates an idea of what a commercial toolset looks like. Neglecting that for some idealistic wrongheadedness that forces students to always use open-source software, work by themselves (teamwork is hard!) and be damned with the real world is hurting everyone.

A moderate approach is needed: the strong basics that Computer Science has always had, coupled with an idea of what the hard road of video game development is like. A class on XNA can only benefit, an entire curriculum based around it hurts everyone. This sounds obvious (at least to me), but you would be surprised about the number of professors for whom even this is a worrying proposition.

I trawled Google looking for a relevant quote to end with, and found this by Lawrence J Peter: "Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices."

That'll do.

Note: When I talk about education, I mean in the terms of learning something that you might learn at school, not the process of learning something that you might never experience at school, but can do so in the video game realm.

Gee's book, "What Video Game Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy", is a great treatment of the field of games as educators, but he specifically focuses on real games, that real gamers, play. A whole chapter is devoted to Deus Ex! My heart was all a-flutter.

The discussion in the group was interesting, and I wanted to note down my thoughts and feelings.

When we discuss the value of learning at school, what do we mean? What does it mean to be able to use algebra in Mathematics, when we know most people will never use it ever again? What does it mean to be good at geography, for a society that is becoming ever more focused on indoor, rather than outdoor, pursuits? Most thoughtful people would realize that we are teaching transferable skills, finding the pliability of numbers, or understanding how to read maps. If we acknowledge those skills as being at the core of learning, then we can properly acknowledge the role of video game as teacher. Take Far Cry 2, which uses a paper map as primary means of navigation. Players soon decipher the symbolism of contour lines, lakes and roads, checkpoints and safe houses. Far Cry 2 is an orienteering simulator and the map-reading skills of players appears to get better over time. Gamers are instinctively learning in order to be better at the game, yet they have never read a map like this in geography class. They're learning the core idea of map as representation and how to interpret that representation.

This is probably the most important thing video games in their current form teaches, yet many non-gamers don't realize this. They hear about the hand-to-eye co-ordination, but they look for educational value in the content of the game. Thus a tedious simulation about the sailing of Columbus, imparting nothing but bland facts, would be of more value than Far Cry 2, despite the arguably more educational content in the latter. The ESA needs to champion this in the media and to teachers, show them what games have to teach already.

Games are already educational. Now, the industry has to educate others.