June 2004

Education Arcade

Continued from page 1

By Sally Atwood

Concept to Classroom

Games are an underexplored medium, according to Henry Jenkins, head of MIT's comparative media studies program and principal investigator of the Education Arcade, and they have yet to garner the support of many educators. Even Jenkins, who has been looking into educational computer games for years, didn't really focus on them until about three years ago, when he got involved with Games-to-Teach, a project funded by iCampus, MIT's $25 million research collaboration with Microsoft. Since most educational software is made for early childhood education, Jenkins wanted to see what could be done for high-school or early college students. He gathered an interdisciplinary team from the humanities, the sciences, and engineering that polled MIT faculty and high-school teachers to uncover concepts difficult to teach using traditional methods. Over the next two years, the researchers and their students outlined the designs of 15 games and detailed how each could be used to teach one of the identified concepts.

The researchers then developed and tested two games, Supercharged! and Environmental Detectives, at MIT and in local high-school classrooms. Supercharged! teaches the basics of electromagnetism by enlisting students to navigate a spaceship that acts like a charged particle through electric and magnetic fields. MIT physics students who played Supercharged! did 20 percent better on subsequent tests than students who did not play the game. Environmental Detectives is played on a Pocket PC; students use GPS to gather clues in order to solve a science problem. MIT students worked in teams to investigate a fictional chemical spill on campus, analyze the data they accumulated, and then determine how to address the situation. The researchers discovered that the students became deeply involved in the problem, collaborated, and came to understand the science underlying the solution.

A history project within Games-to-Teach had equal success in demonstrating the power of educational games. The project's head researcher, Kurt Squire, used the bestselling commercial game Civilization III as the core of a history minicourse for minority and low-income students in a Boston school. The game follows 6,000 years of world history and allows students to pursue "what if" scenarios. For example, a student could adopt the role of "Native Americans" and try to colonize Europe to see how different its culture and politics would have been. Squire found that students who initially were not interested in history became highly motivated to play the game. And they developed a broad understanding of how technology and geography influenced the development of civilizations.

About the time that funding ran out for Games-to-Teach, Squire was offered a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He stayed in contact with Jenkins and eventually became the link that connected the university with MIT. Jenkins was eager to take their idea to the next level, creating educational games that were as sophisticated as their commercially successful counterparts, and he wanted to build a support community for teachers as they integrated computer and video games into their classrooms. The result is the fledgling Education Arcade.