Games and Learning

Professor and author Jordan Shapiro took to the stage last week to argue that game-based learning could help address the need to evolve education here and abroad.

His talk, “Critical Thinking And Video Games: Scalable Pedagogy For The Future,” was delivered at the Global Education And Skills Forum in Dubai.

During his talk, he stressed the need to separate the possibility of video games to teach from some of the other concepts it is often connected to – gamification and edtech.

Video games are really good teachers, they are extraordinary teachers. I want you to think about how quickly even the smallest child can learn the rules of a really complex game. How kids will play for hours until they master a game, until they discover the patterns. They talk about the game with their friends. They share tips with their friends. They learn together.

Professor Jordan Shapiro

You can watch the full video here:

Here’s Why We Need Video Games In Every Classroom – Jordan Shapiro from Jordan Shapiro on Vimeo.

Here are some other highlights from his talk:

On Gamification:
“Gamification is really popular in advertising, in human resources, in coffee shop loyalty programs, pretty much everywhere. They gamify schools today by replacing grades with levels, merit badges, where learning becomes about accumulating rewards, leveling up and overcoming danger…

“Gamification is one of the most convoluted, nonsensical, illogical things I can imagine. Gamification is built on the assumption that what we need is better competitive, commodified motivation systems…

“That’s the kind of thinking that lead to a global education crisis.”

On the education crisis in America:
“At least in the U.S. this is the crisis: The students have internalized the wrong message. They have trouble imagining that the purpose of school may have more to do with learning and experiencing than it does with ranking and grading.

“Think about that, these kids spend hours learning the underlying system of a video game. These kids will die and hit replay thousands of times… They won’t dive into learning about the real world in a classroom without being terrified of failing. That’s terrible. Game-based learning can fix this.”

On the differences between game-based learning and edtech:
“Game-based learning is not gamification. It is about what I see when I see my own kids play video games. And guess what, they don’t pay attention to the score, they don’t pay attention to the rewards, they don’t pay attention to the points. They don’t even care about leveling up. The only thing they care about leveling up is it offers new challenges. It gets fun again…

“Game-based learning is not an innovation. It’s not heroism. It’s not a 21st Century conquest. Educational technology does not change learning. Instead it gives us a tool to make great teaching scalable.”