Learning Value in Video Games

I just published an article titled Video Games Rant on one of my other blogs.  Most of the article is not directly related to education, otherwise I would have published it here instead.  As I was writing the last few paragraphs of this rant, I considered some opposing viewpoints and had an interesting revelation about video games.  That revelation is directly related to education, so I think it is appropriate to discuss it in a little more detail here.

I have asserted the value of video games in brain development many times.  I have also done a lot of research on the subject, and so far I have found no explanation for why video games are so effective for learning, except that they tend to be more motivating that traditional teaching practices.  While this is true, it is actually just one element of the brain science behind learning.  It turns out that video games are more effective for learning because they conform better to the way the brain is designed to learn.

The question I asked in the other article is how ancient humans got by without the benefits of video games, if video games are so good for us.  The answer was, "They lived them!"  This might sound counter-intuitive, but it is true.  Modern video games help develop mapping skills by including an element of risk with getting lost.  In ancient times, humans learned mapping skills in a very similar way.  Video games improve perception by including elements that are difficult to see, but which either offer benefits or reduce risks if discovered.  In ancient times, missing small details, like a stalking predator, could result in serious injury or death.  Video games improve quick decision making skills by putting players into situations where acting too slow has strong negative consequences.  Similarly, ancient humans often had to deal with situations where quick action was necessary for survival.  One of the biggest benefits of video games is developing good problem solving skills.  Ancient humans learned problem solving skills by trying to find ways to make life less dangerous and difficult.  Now, however, many humans have very poor mapping skills, decision making skills, perception, and problem solving skills.  Unfortunately, successfully making life much less dangerous and far easier has not eliminated the need for these skills.  The strong need for more engineers in the U.S. is evidence of this.  In addition, mapping skills are important for getting around in big cities and even suburbs.  Perception is extremely important in activities like driving.  Problem solving skills are important in nearly every aspect of life.  We still need these skills, and it turns out that video games are the most effective way to get them, if you do not count living with the constant threat of death.

The point of all of this is that thousands or more years of natural selection have produced human brains that are ideally suited to learning in exactly the way that video games teach (which explains the attraction).  Video games have one additional benefit over real life experience: The penalty for failure is low.  Failing in real life used to result in death, severe injury, or at least pain.  Even in the most strict video games, the highest penalty for failure is having to start over from nothing.  In most modern video games, the worst penalty is having to redo a little bit of work.  This reduces fear of failure, which increases motivation to try new things.  Trying new things is one very important way of learning.  Failing is also a very good learning experience.  When the cost of failure is low, the fear of failure is reduced, which encourages trying risky things that will likely end in failure, but which will sometimes result in awesome success.  Even the failures themselves have value, because they will always teach what does not work.  In short, reducing the cost of failure helps increase motivation to learn by experience.  While natural selection may have suited our brains to learn by experience, we can use video games to make the consequences of failure acceptable.  Video games are actually better for effective learning than the conditions that suited our brains to learn from video games so well.

We can take advantage of this knowledge.  It is possible that there is no classroom teaching style that could be as effective as video games for teaching.  If this is the case (and research aught to be conducted to discover if it is), then we should  be spending a lot more effort figuring out how to effectively use video games as learning tools for real life subjects.  People like Salman Khan and Ananth Pai have already started using game elements for learning with great success.  Armed with a better understanding of why games work so well for learning though, we should be able to do much better.  There are millions of people in the U.S. that spend inordinate amounts of time playing video games.  If we can sneak some real education into video games, without reducing motivation to play them, we could educate the people of the U.S. at minimal cost.  It is even possible that well engineered video games could dramatically reduce the need for a large public education system.  The evidence is very strong that video games have huge potential as teaching tools.  We need to put resources into learning how to use them most effectively.

Doing it right!

I just read this article.  Evidently someone is setting up a new college called Minerva, which seems to follow some of the most important suggestions I have given on this blog.  The part of the article that really caught my attention was this, "Though 21st-century technology links professors and students, they use a seminar format that hearkens back to Socrates’ ancient learning model."  I have said this before, and I will say it again: One of the biggest problems with modern U.S. education is the strict classroom teaching style.  In ancient universities, a lecture/forum model was followed (the article refers to the forum part as "seminar").  This model was very flexible, allowing students to learn at their own pace.  It also did not grade students in a classroom style.  A student became a master in a subject not by getting good grades and going through a highly structured degree program.  A student became a master, by mastering the subject matter.  If this took two years or ten years, it made no difference.

So, some differences (which I have also suggested) from ancient schools is that Minerva does not plan to have formal lectures.  Instead, students must study materials on their own time.  In the article it says that Minerva suggests that its students use resources like Khan Academy for lecture style learning.  Professors will then teach in the form of online seminars, much like forums in ancient universities.  This allows Minerva to offer a high quality education at about half the cost.  In fact, their goal is to offer a Havard or better quality education, for half the cost of Harvard.

Something that bothered me in the article was a quote from MIT's Chris Peterson,

“They are looking to take some very unproven educational methods, still very much in the experimental stage and roll them out to a whole bunch of the most vulnerable people in the world,” Peterson said. “They frame this as founding the next university. They know that elite prestige sells better than anything else in the education world.”

The reason this bothers me is that it is a lie.  These "unproven" methods were used very successfully for many centuries before the modern classroom teaching method became common.  Right, the lectures were taught by paid professors instead of found free on the internet, and likewise the forums (seminars) were live instead of online.  I am sorry, but anyone who thinks this change in medium will make that big of a difference has not been paying attention to the last ten years (in fact, Khan Academy has shown that recorded lectures are far more effective than live ones, because students can rewind and view parts they did not understand as many times as it takes to understand).  Further, while Minerva may frame it as founding the "next university," it is little more than going back to the well proven methods of the past, which modern classroom methods have repeatedly failed to match.  Before calling something "unproven" please look at the evidence.  If you really want to look poorly educated, make a general statement about something you know nothing about, that is wrong.

Now, I am not saying that Minerva will be successful.  I am suggesting that if they fail it will not be due to their so-called "unproven educational methods."  One place they could fail is learning materials.  If they do not spend a good deal of effort making sure good supplemental materials are available online, students who are struggling may have a hard time finding help.  For any classes that rely entirely on online materials, it is essential that they verify the availability of such materials.  Another concern is availability of reliable internet services for students and professors.  If professors are doing live seminars online and one student has connection difficulties, it could interfere with that student getting answers to important questions.  Recording the seminars for later viewing could help, but if no one asked the question, it will still go unanswered.  There are plenty of things that could go wrong, but most of them are manageable, if the school puts sufficient effort into it.  If they fail, it will not be due to their unconventional learning model, it will be because they did not pay attention to something important.

Before concluding, I want to mention one other thing about Minerva that I think is awesome.  Each year, students will live in a different international city.  Now, I don't know how this will be handled if Minerva starts taking on students in areas where this is not a reasonable option, but for now, I think this is an excellent plan.  I live in the U.S., and I have found that most Americans are pretty deluded about the state of the rest of the world (BYU Idaho, the college I am currently attending requires at least one class on a "global hotspot," which is a place with a lot of oppression, violence, and/or disasters; I learned about Pakistan, including local cultures, government, terrorism, history, and natural disasters).  Americans do not understand that their culture is not the dominant world culture.  Americans (and many Europeans, as I found when reading about plastic printable guns) also seem to think that a majority of people in the world live under free, democratic, unoppressive governments.  While it is unlikely that Minerva will send students to countries with tyrannical governments, moving around will at least help them to understand different world cultures.  Also, I have found that the media in each country seems to report slightly different information about conditions in 3rd world countries.  Moving to a different country every year might help students to put together the pieces, so they eventually understand the real condition of the majority of world population.

I think Minerva has some extremely good ideas.  I expect the learning model to be highly successful once students learn to teach themselves instead of relying on professors to babysit their learning.  I sincerely hope that Minerva manages to avoid all of the potential pitfalls.  While their goal is not to overturn the modern educational model, I think they could do it.  While there are many other things they could be doing to improve their educational model, I still think this could be the start of a much more competitive education system in the U.S.