More great coverage of the GDC and Serious Games Summit from Thomas and Cola. Today they talked with Dan Roy, who presented Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games at the summit.

Dan is an educational game designer with MIT’s Education Arcade, and has been studying games for more than 15 years. In the interview, Cola asks for his views on video games as a learning tool for children. Here are some excerpts:

When asked about the relationship between learning and video games, Mr. Roy compared the learning process in schools to the learning process in games. Too many students get turned off by traditional school, homework, social pressure, etc. But video games can help people see the relevancy of a topic, give them motivation, and help them enjoy learning and see it as a fun activity. And not every challenge in a game is necessarily “fun”, but once you get hooked on a problem, you want to solve it.

Dan says one of the primary reasons that games don’t get used more in schools is that the current educational structure is very focused on testing due to the No Child Left Behind act. We need to explore how games can be used to measure what people are learning if we want greater acceptance in schools. We don’t really know how to “test” a student via games, even though the way games work this would not be hard to do. (ed: See How Computer Games Help Children Learn for more about our educational system and how computer games can help to improve it.)

What can developers do to make games both fun and educational? Well, Mr. Roy says that past approaches were built on the thought - hey, let’s take something fun, then we’ll break it up and put some learning in there every so often. This can really take away from the playability of the game and people choose to play the fun games instead. He says we need an approach where the #1 goal - learning - is integrated with the fun. He goes on to provide some examples of how they are having teams of players interact with each other during the game, while learning to write and express their ideas better.

Be sure to listen to the podcast to hear Podcast: Interview with Dan Roy. (4:17)

Thanks for your time and insights Dan!

Share This