Games and Learning

Milton Chen chairs the Games and Learning Publishing Council

The new survey “Level Up Learning: A National Survey of Teaching with Digital Games“ can trace its origins to a long history in the design of games for learning at Sesame Workshop. As early as its first season in 1969, Sesame Street incorporated a classification game for preschoolers: who doesn’t know the music and lyrics from “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other?” A later segment, circa 1987, from the Workshop’s Square One TV, used a game-show format to display a panel of shirts and slacks, and asked, “How many outfits can be created?” Combinatorial mathematics was thus placed within reach of an 8-year-old.

By the mid-80s, the first educational computer games were being introduced into classrooms. Veteran educators (and young parents) will remember Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and Rocky’s Boots, used by a small number of innovative teachers to enliven their classrooms through characters, graphics, and sound.

However, the technology trailed far behind the vision of “microworlds” employing full-motion video, rich sound effects and music, as well as creative applications across the curriculum.

In those days before the Internet, the majority of schools had fewer than 10 computers. With the exponential increases in multimedia capacity and dramatic decreases in price, today’s digital games offer much more than an occasional game for reinforcement or reward alongside the “basic curriculum.” Immersive and complex games are demonstrating their potential to transform that curriculum and launch it on a new trajectory that harnesses story, simulation, and stimulation, along with competition and collaboration, to achieve higher standards and deeper learning.

This study provides an important snapshot of how far we are along that trajectory. As a single survey, its findings are necessarily limited by sample size and self-reporting. However, two fundamental findings should capture the attention of all educators, developers, funders, and policymakers: a majority of teachers are using digital games in their classrooms, and games are increasingly played on mobile devices that travel with their students.

In sheer numbers of teachers and students using games of all types, the “games movement” is now mainstream, achieving the Holy Grail of educational innovation: getting to scale. However, much remains to be done to reach that higher trajectory, in professional development and communication to teachers, in the supply side of developing more creative and complex games, and in research on outcomes.

Milton Chen

Through this study, teachers are indicating their growing receptivity to using games
and a game’s power for student engagement. The momentum to date has been largely fueled by bottom-up professional development—teachers spreading the word and teaching each other about games—rather than formal, district-led training tied to state standards.

Teachers in this survey are telling us that they are also learners and ready for more in-depth and comprehensive PD about games. The study’s typology of game-using teachers—the Dabblers, Players, Barrier Busters, and Naturals—can prompt more powerful, peer-based approaches to professional learning.

Education, more familiar with a glacial pace of change, is now picking up the pace. It is fitting that this report is brought to you by the letters G, L, P, and C, an activity of the Joan Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, an institution known for making learning engaging and, dare we say it, joyful. There is cause for optimism here and for redoubling our efforts to give teachers the support they need and students the learning they deserve.

To learn more, visit our page on the report or download the entire survey from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.