Play to Learn
Video games in the classroom

By Mark Riechers

Deep in the heart of a sunken metropolis, Dr. Rich Halverson slinks through the steerage connecting different parts of the once-great city when he hears a horrible sound: a room-shaking growl that paralyzes him with fear, followed by thunderous metal-clad footsteps. He cowers in a dark corner as he sees the enraged Big Daddy, an angry monster hidden behind a deep-sea diving suit of armor. He does not dare assault the foe without sizing up the surrounding area and setting some traps to level the playing field. “At that moment, I was scared witless,” Halverson confesses to the crowd of memorized educators and researchers.

This undersea protagonist is the keynote speaker at “Play at Pyle,” an event sponsored by the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Information Technology. Part of their “Engage” initiative, which provides professors on campus small grants to fund technology–based education projects, “Play at Pyle” is a venue for educators around campus to show off how they have devised ways to use video games to enhance learning.

Author of the forthcoming book “The Second Technological Revolution: How Tech is Changing Education and Learning,” Halverson applied technology trends to education to see how learning can be supplemented by technology.

“Video games are expanding the way we are telling stories,” Halverson says. He believes the new and unique ways that game developers are engaging with players can be used to get students to engage with their education, both in and outside the classroom.

Similarly, with his project “C’est la (seconde) vie!” French professor Tom Armbrecht used the online world simulator “Second Life” to create a digital learning space for his students to interact with real French speakers across the globe. This allows them to practice their speaking skills and gain direct exposure to French-speaking cultures.

Other simulations went further, like Rich Hartel’s recreation of the day-to-day operations of the Babcock Ice Cream Plant, giving players an inside look at the Food Science Department’s sanitation and quality assurance processes involved in creating their favorite dairy treat. Each project was a variation on Halverson’s theme: games, which can address topics from angles that are not possible in a lecture or a text.

Video games do not have to be tailored to the classroom to provide learning experiences to their players. Constance Steinkuehler, a UW School of Education researcher, was featured in Wired magazine for her work in “Lineage” and “World of Warcraft.” As she played along with questing groups of young players, she noticed that the most adept warriors had a very procedural method to tackling each game’s bosses – they compiled strengths and weaknesses in spreadsheets, then would posit a strategy for taking down the “boss” efficiently, evaluate the results and repeat when necessary. A rudimentary scientific method emerged in these players, and all because they were presented with an in-game problem to solve.

These impassioned researchers found a home for academic game research in 2004, when Halverson and a group of researchers, game developers and government and industry leaders interested in gaming’s impact on education founded Games+Learning+Society, or GLS. Working within the UW School of Education and employing faculty members from MIT, UW-Madison and UW–Milwaukee, the group studies ways existing games can be used to enhance or supplement learning in the classroom and works with game developers to design games that support learning.

The idea at work here is that games are part of what researchers are calling “digital literacy,” a skill set beyond the traditional skills of reading and writing that is needed to harness new technology.

“Video games do systems-based thinking effortlessly,” Halverson says. “I’m willing to bet that 20-something gamers came up with these arcane systems within hedge funds [that are now collapsing]. That’s what gamers do, they manipulate systems.”

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