AUSTIN - If someone proposed putting Halo 3 besides civics and gym class in elementary school, it would produce epic meltdowns at school boards across the country.

"Biddeford School Board Fights Off Torch-Bearing Mob of Parents," the headline would read.

But is that because of the way our culture (or some in our culture) view games, or because video games aren't quite ready for school?

At "What Can We Learn from Games", game developers and university professors made the case that not only can video games teach, but they can exist in schools...but both have to change first.
"When you put anything playful in the classroom kids look at you cynically," said Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at MIT.

The fact is that learning games already exist. Anyone from my generation can tell stories of "Oregon Trail," the game that taught you about survival on the frontier through hunting cattle, forging steams and dying of cholera.

But now a new field of gaming has sprung up called serious games.

Portland is home to Digitalmill, a video game design and consulting firm that has worked on "serious games" such as Virtual U, which simulates operating a university.

Other serious games offer you the ability to fight cancer, learn binary math and experience the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.

But Jenkins and others on the panel argued that current video games and schools aren't a good fit. Educators don't see a role for games, and the segmented classroom schedule doesn't fit with games, he said.

James Gee, a professor of literary studies at Arizona State University, said many games don't encourage creative problem solving or present challenges that aren't easily solved.

Gee said textbooks and video games can have one thing in common, that they rely on a combination of what he called "skill and drill" to advance and succeed.

But Gee said games are teaching kids skills that help prepare them for real life that don't fit in the classroom.

"I wish we taught scince by saying don't try to learn this stuff, think about how to model it" in real life, Gee said.

Warren Spector, creative director for Junction Point Studios and Disney Interactive Studios, said games have the ability to transport players into new worlds, create communities to work together and show the consequence of actions.
"Games are the only medium that make you feel guilt," he said. "If you do something bad you have a stake in it. You can't distance yourself from it."

Spector, Gee and Jenkins pointed to newer games such as Spore, which allows players to create and foster a creature in a pattern that models evolution. Those games, which have no set path or strategy for winning, encourage the type of learning that would be beneficial in the classroom.

The divide between game developers and educators may be narrowing, as charter schools are being developed that would use games as part of the curriculum.

Gee said those two worlds, games and education, need to recognize that students ability to learn and play are not as far apart as they think.

"Games are teaching a generation that failure is not bad and collaboration is not cheating," said Gee.

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