Games and Learning

Temple University’s Jordan Shapiro recently took to Forbes to write, as he often does, about the intersection of high tech and higher learning. His point seemed fairly clear from the headline: “We Need More EdTech, But Less Technology In The Classroom.”

Shapiro’s focus on how technology fits into one’s overall education actually raises important questions for teachers using (or not using) technology. As he wrote, “we need to learn to embrace edtech for what it strengthens and rise up with empathetic excellence where it falls short. Just as Google’s predictive dialogue box has forced me to reconsider the essence of human intuition (after all, according to ordinary definitions, Google has better intuition than any human), so technological ways of knowing have forced me to reconsider the essence of teaching.”

We decided to get him on the phone and talk a bit more about how technology connects to education at the collegiate and K-12 level and more specifically where games might fit.

Listen to the full interview:

The following is a partial transcript of our conversation.

Jordan Shapiro: I think with games we are introducing something else entirely… with games we have the opportunity to give us more kinds of knowledge, right? Yes, we can drill things, but we can also do that in adaptable ways… ways that adapt to individual students. That’s why it works so well in terms of the cognitive skills, at least from what I’ve read. Its ability to adapt to individual students and give them the kind of content they need or the kind of pure skill set they need. So if we’re talking about a mathematical operation, the game can make them solve the same puzzle, the same kind of puzzle over and over and over again until the game is convinced they’ve done it quickly enough and with enough skill that they can do it any time and then they can move on to the next kind.

Then we get to the interpersonal skills… you know, I am a little doubtful that interpersonal is the right language. Yes, [the game] teaches cooperation, but I think we can even divide interpersonal skills into different kinds of things. There’s an interpersonal skill involved in the kind of communication I do in a short email or text message, but there is also the interpersonal skill that is person to person and it has to be live. We’re going to have the opportunity through games to split that up even further and I think that will be a good thing when we start to realize what are the shortcomings.

And then we can be more efficient with both things. I can be much more efficient in the classroom when I know exactly what it is I have to teach rather than some vague term which is “interpersonal skills.” Communication is one thing and that can be done … through writing, but then there is also the reading of body language and those kinds of things that you are not going to learn on the Internet.

***

My kids are six and eight and most of when I am evaluating games and looking at what they are teaching, I am often asking about much younger kids and I more interested in an epistemological question which is how are we teaching them to think about what knowledge is… Once we start to teach more with video games, we’re not just going to change how we teach we are also going to be changing what we teach.  Different things become privileged depending on what your method of transference is…

In K-12 we are kind of in the formative stages of people understanding what intelligence means, what knowledge means. This big question of what does it mean to be smart? What does it mean to have wisdom? And I am fascinated with the question of how does that change when we switch from blackboards and pop quizzes and workbooks to a digital transformation?… For better or worse it is happening and there is nothing that can be done to stop that, but we can be really intentional and really think about the additional things we are teaching with our methods and make sure we are teaching the things we want to teach and make sure this transition happens in a mindful way…

So much of our educational system is built to make an industrial society work. It teaches you: you have to move when the bell rings, you have to line up and you have to sit and listen to the person in the front. A lot of those things are the unintentional lessons. We think we are just teaching math. We think we are just teaching geometry. We are also teaching people ways to think about who knows the most about geometry, who knows the most about history, who knows the most about English. Things will change once we change how we teach.

Lee Banville: It does seem to be a change that has affected all industries, my industry of journalism, the industry of education, any time that knowledge is supposed to be disseminated or transferred, it has been affected by this technology and I guess I am curious… as a game developer or someone who wanted to build these transfer mechanisms or, more importantly, build the sort of complex tools you were just talking about, where gaming can do more than simply transfer knowledge, but also elicit and test other skills, what advice would you have for them when it comes to building those tools that a teacher or professor would be more likely to use…?

Jordan Shapiro:

The one thing I would say to any game developer and I have said to many of them is it is really important to remember that the medium is indistinct from the message. They both matter.

You have kids so you can appreciate this, the amount of times I have found myself where I suddenly catch myself screaming at my kids to stop screaming. Right? It doesn’t make any sense. You’re not going to teach quiet, compassion, mindfulness by yelling. You can’t drill that into someone with a stick. It has to be modeled at the same time.

What I would say is to make sure the mechanics of the game, to make sure the … procedural rhetoric of the game matches what it is you want to teach, so that it’s not just “hey, the skill is arithmetic so we can do anything we want to make arithmetic click.” Realize that no matter what we do, what mechanics we use to teach arithmetic, we will are also going to be teaching them ways to imagine what arithmetic is and it is really important to make sure those things are consistent. The game won’t work if it’s inconsistent… The teacher, even on some unconscious level, is totally aware of whether it’s consistent, whether the mechanics are consistent with the objectives and often they’re not in a lot of games that I see.

Lee Banville: So you can’t trick kids into learning certain things?…

Jordan Shapiro: Well, you can certainly trick them into learning, but they’re also learning it is a trick. When you use chocolate covered broccoli, to use the cliche, what kids learn is broccoli stinks unless it is covered in chocolate. They don’t learn that broccoli is good.