Halverson argues allowing for play outside the classroom allows students to uncover their own lessons through play, but the steady hand of willing educators facilitates these new ways of learning and places them in context. He cites a need for third spaces, a place where students can reflect on and discuss game goals and how they apply to what they are trying to learn.

Kurt Squire, a GLS member and UW-Madison associate professor of education, says, “I’m interested in how forms of thinking happening outside of school like games may or may not be used for learning.” Squire wrote his dissertation on how “Civilization,” a history-based strategy game, can be used to show younger students how international issues like the environment and foreign affairs operate within a model global system.

While using existing games is a big part of their research, GLS also has original game projects within their portfolio. Squire is working with local developer Filament Games to develop a new game designed to improve scientific literacy in school-age children. In turn, the developer looks to some of the research GLS conducts for ideas to use in more commercial projects for the business side of their operations, creating what Halverson calls a “hot-house of ideas.”

Idealism seems to be the impetus behind a lot of the passionate researchers in this field, but like the Big Daddy’s fearsome metal bore, the crushing force of realism sets in when they try to get the games into classrooms off of the UW campus.

“Most personal communication and entertainment technologies developed in the last 10 years have been disruptive for structured learning environments,” Halverson explains. “They produce plagiarism, porn and school shootings, with few positive outcomes, in the minds of administrators.”

Despite the influence of research going on nearby at the UW-Madison School of Education, the Madison Metropolitan School District currently employs only one video game in any classroom setting: Dance Dance Revolution, a rhythm game that challenges players to dance in time to the music on screen. Elementary schools use the game in their physical education programs.

Public schools are more likely to embrace technology in areas that are not considered traditional subject areas, since those are heavily regulated by the stringent guidelines of the No Child Left Behind school accountability laws. School offices are quickly adopting technology for front offices and teacher communications, but classrooms remain largely unchanged.

“A game like DDR fits into the curriculum better, seeing as the subject is less traditional,” Halverson says, but , he notes, “There’s little room for innovation or technology elsewhere.”

The current climate of K-12 schools simply does not work well with the types of teaching that games can provide. “Games aren’t good for teaching anything but games – they have different goals than schools,” Halverson says.

“Teachers, [by contrast], are really eager to try new things. They see the disconnect between kids' lives and that of school,” Squire says.

Schools need technologies that fit into their current strategies but introduce more technology into what they do to move toward the larger shifts Halverson and the GLS crew hope to see in the next wave of K-12 schooling, Halverson says. For example, Halverson is working on an iPhone application that helps teachers gather data on students in the classroom. He says that online learning tools like Desire2Learn, the technology behind UW’s “Learn@UW” system could also help.

But Halverson insists it could be a long wait before Zelda and Mario get in on actual instruction – possibly until the gamers themselves are making the policies. “Actually putting games into schools seems as remote as 10 years ago. It really is a generational challenge,” Halverson explains. “All they see [now] is the potential damage.”

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