Games and education

"Motivation and Learning" by Henry Jenkins is an excellent paper on the role that games can play in education. It is all about involving the learner more closely with the subject, through (a) creating a flow that can result in better concentration in the activity and lead to a mastery of the skills, (b) bringing about curiousty, fantasy, and challenge which increase the level of interest, (c) making the fun hard and engaging, and (d) helping to create an identity to which the learner can commit to. Civilization III can help in history lessons, Carmen Sandiego can improve geography and awareness, and Revolution can help learn about how trade and business works. Games could be designed to teach children top-down the fundamentals of democracy as well, and encourage them to participate in the political process when they grow up. The author cites a number of reasons why learning through playing can be good:

1. Games lower a threat of failure, and encourage exploration and experimentation through scientific thinking.
2. Games foster a sense of engagement through immersion.
3. Games can schedule difficulty levels customized to each and every player differently, so as not to overwhelm anybody and gradually increase the challenge levels.
4. Games link learning to goals and roles.
5. Games create a social context that connects learners to others who share their interests.
6. Games can be represented in multiple ways like text, graphics, photographs, etc, thus increasing the reach and visilibity to a bigger audience.

Could the same ideas be used to make education more interesting in the rural context? Or, even in the suburban context for that matter? Back home, so many kids from the middle and lower-middle classes in the cities attend school regularly, but do not even know how to read the english alphabet correctly, or even understand the spoken language for that matter. The reason is that they never need to practice or use the language after they leave school. Engaging them in innovative games can certainly jumpstart the process. The tools are already available. Speech recognition and hand writing recognition technologies are getting better day by day. The 100$ laptop from Media Labs MIT, the Rs. 10,000 PC from Intel, under 40 $ cellphones from Motorola, all can be suitable platforms for implementing these games. And Internet kiosks can be excellent venues to hold multi-player games among the village children.

Matthew Kam, Divya Ramachandran, and John Canny from the TIER group at UC Berkeley are trying to do exactly this to promote education in the rural areas of the developing world.