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Teaching with Games
Russell Hunter sent me a link to this article about using games in the classroom. As I mentioned earlier, this is an issue that I’ve grown a little concerned about.
In the article David McDivitt, a high school teacher from Indiana, talks about a controlled experiment he did with his 20th century history class. 65 students were taught a subject (status of Europe prior to WWII) using classroom discussions and video games and 45 were taught the same subject using traditional methods including a textbook and classroom discussions. All were given test before and after the week-long experiment.
The results show that students learned more using the video games than they did using other methods. Not surprisingly, they were more engaged, more willing to work extra hours, and had more out-of-class discussion. They lived the history rather than merely reading about it.
Posted by windley on May 26, 2006 3:33 AM
Comment from Peter Abilla at May 26, 2006 10:24 AM
Phil,
You might be interested in the following talk by Luis Von Ahn of CMU (he's the inventor of captchas). Here is his talk.
This talk is about how you can make people do useful things for free by making it fun and turning it into a game:
Luis talks about two games: ESP and
Peekaboom
In sum, if you have a problem that is very hard for computers to solve but easy for people to solve, see if you can make it a game. If it is fun, a lot of people will do it for free.
Luis' team is also about to release a new game called verbosity.
Peter Abilla
www.shmula.com
Comment from Peter Abilla at May 26, 2006 10:31 AM
Phil,
My previous comment didn't show any of the URL's I included. Here they are:
Talk: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=484
Esp:
http://espgame.org
Peekaboom:
http://peekaboom.org
Verbosity:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/Verbosity.pdf
Enjoy!