What Happens When Video Games Enter the Classroom

Squire, K. 2005. Changing the game: What happens when video games enter the classroom?. Innovate 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=82 .


Games, known as fun, engaging, and immersive, have been studied and found to be requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving skills.
This paper suggests that games really help learning so the educators should study building better school environment with games. In the paper video game, Civilization III is used as an example for history class.
According to Malone (1981), Cordova and Lepper (1996) games create intrinsic motivation through fantasy, control, challenge, curiosity and competition.
According to Gee (2005), Shaffer (2004), (2005), games in classroom would leverage players' desires to develop new skills and better understand world from a new perspective.
From constructivist approach, Piaget(1962) and Vygotsky(1978) agree that play is a crucial method through which we test ideas, develop new skills and participate in new social roles.

Difficulty of a game makes the game more engaging. Civilization III was good for being flexible and replayable, which means it lets the player to replay the history according to player's decisions. Even though, students thought Civilization III was more difficult than anything they study at school, they were interested in it because they were able to access the complex professional practices and manage them.

Failure was a precondition for learning in the experiment, it forced students to cycles of recursive play         .

A curriculum based on Civilization III removed the traditional hierarchies which are having some being successful in a traditional schooling while other always fail. The successful students weren't happy with the fact that they weren't as successful as they are in traditional curriculum. However, others became more successful in the new curriculum, developing complex understanding instead of being unrecognized in traditional approaches.

The way the learning happens with playing Civilization, problem identification, hypothesis testing, interpretative analysis, and strategic thinking, more close to real life than learning through a traditional curriculum.

Conclusion: not only bringing games to schools but also need to change the school environment:
- new curriculum by considering personal relevance to students
- opportunities for students with different interests
- days and curricula should be organized by students, parents, teachers' goals
- no limit in the learning experience
- assessment = opportunities to support learning