Amanda Baron
Final Research Paper

Practical Uses of Online Gaming in the K-12 Curriculum

History and Overview of Topic

Online gaming in a classroom setting was unheard of twenty years ago. But now over the past few years, games have gone from social outsider to the sweethearts of the media, technology, and now educational industries. In 1973 John Daleske and Silas Warner created a simple space-craft war, your ship controlled by typed commands. This is thought to be the first ever networked multiplayer game (running on the PLATO network), before the internt as we now know it (Mark 2011). E-learning educators in particular stand to learn a lot about building next-generation learning environments from games. While online courses are usually little more than "online course notes," games offer entire worlds to explore (Gee 2005). While educators wonder if it is possible to create good online learning communities, game designers create virtual societies with their own cultures, languages, political systems, and economies. While completion rates for online courses barely reach 50%, gamers spend hundreds of hours mastering games, writing lengthy texts, and even setting up their own virtual "universities" to teach others to play games (Gee 2005). In short, games have developed a reputation for being fun, engaging, and immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. These facts make functional and interactive games a necessity it the modern everyday classroom in schools or online.

Implications, Uses, and Capabilities

Some educators may still be suspicious of online learning games because of the amount of negative publicity video games have acquired from the educational realm, as well as off-putting criticism in the media. What teachers should know is that there is a huge difference between online learning games and recreational games. To highlight the differences between current education games and video games, Halverson draws on the distinction between exogenous and endogenous games. Exogenous games provide simple networks of generic, interactive strategies useful for organizing access to a wide variety of content (Halverson 2005). Teachers and curriculum designers have long used exogenous games, such as Jeopardy-style or Wheel of Fortune-style quizzes, in order to provide a review of or a break from ordinary learning activities. The learning environment of an exogenous game bears no necessary relation to the content—Wheel of Fortune activities, for example, can be quickly constructed for a wide variety of topics. Simple designs and adaptable content make exogenous games popular in schools, relatively easy to create, and usually peripheral to central learning activities. Endogenous video games connect game design and domain content by integrating relevant practices of the learning environment into the structure of the game. Mastering the learning environment is itself the learning outcome; it is not merely a means to an ulterior goal (Halverson 2005). Learning to navigate the game design provides an introduction to how knowledge is organized in the modeled domain. Supporters of learning through roll playing and planning games such as Rise of Nations and Civilization III describe how interactive environments allow players to explore counterfactual historical claims and manipulate complex historical models
(Gee 2005). While exogenous games provide valuable tools in the teaching repertoire, formal schooling has shied away from the adoption of endogenous games. This preference for exogenous over endogenous games follows from the widespread acceptance of educational content standards in K-12 education. Standards specify what to teach; school leaders and teachers construct efficient pedagogies and learning environments to teach it. Exogenous games have long played a supplemental role in helping schools reinforce lessons and provide remedial activities for students. Endogenous games, on the other hand, provide inefficient and unpredictable environments for learning school-based material and have learning outcomes that are difficult to map onto curriculum standards (Halverson 2005).

Educational Applications

Teachers across the country are developing lessons and learning environments to help students learn from endogenous gaming. The loosely coupled structure of the American school system has long granted individual teachers space for instructional innovation while at the same time preventing these innovations from reshaping teaching practices across schools. Thus, although the inspiration for instructional innovation often comes from teachers, the responsibility for realizing the power of game-based learning environments across schools lies mainly with school leaders. Formal school leaders such as principals, technology and curriculum coordinators, superintendents and department chairs, and informal leaders such as lead teachers and curriculum designers share responsibility for shaping the conditions of teaching and learning in schools. To realize the potential of such a radically new learning technology, leaders must coordinate their efforts with teachers in order for gaming to get a foothold in schools (Gee 2005). Although 6-12 grade online games get a lot of attention, Pre-K though 5 grade games are even more prevalent. Television stations like PBS and Disney now provide free online interactive games for children as young as 3 years old (PBS 2011). These games teach math, science, reading along with role playing and modeling like the games for older students (Disney 2011). Online games teach students of all ages a wide variety of skills that surpass basic reading and writing. Being a part of a game or gaming community can foster character traits that some students do not develop until after adolescence.

Problems and Controversies

Online learning games can help solve a never ending problem: providing compelling activities for motivating otherwise indifferent learners. Educational video games can potentially help teachers improve the design of learning environments. However, there are considerable rhetorical and practical barriers between the schooling and gaming communities grounded in fundamentally different approaches to learning. Whereas schools are moving toward increasingly standardized learning experiences, games offer the prospect of user-defined worlds in which players try out (and get feedback on) their own assumptions, strategies, and identities (Gee 2005). It is difficult, at first glance, to see how gaming can help teachers meet the demands of an increasingly standards-driven public schooling system. The adversarial relation between the two cultures heightens the contrast between the underlying theories of gaming and schooling. Many school leaders and teachers react negatively to video games and gaming culture, bashing video games as diversionary threats to the integrity of schooling or as destructive activities that corrupt moral capacity and create a sedentary, motivation-destroying lifestyle. Apart from embracing a few games such as Oregon Trail or SimCity, schools have typically acted to eliminate or marginalize gaming. The strong content and the addictive play of games such as Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Everquest have led non-players to overlook the learning principles incorporated into the game design (Gee 2005). Thus games have come to typify the essentially subversive side of computing in schools.

Demonstrations and Examples

Gee believes that “good video games” for middle and high school learners, like Full Spectrum Warrior, distribute authentic professional expertise between the virtual character and the real-world player. He represents this notion by the formula: “Virtual Characters &; Authentic Professional Knowledge &; Player.” The game Thief: Deadly Shadows, for example, requires the player to identify with a professional thief. In the game, thieving expertise is distributed between the virtual character and the real-world player. Likewise, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay features the professional identity of a "tough guy prison escapee," and Tony Hawk's Underground features the professional identity of a skateboarder.
Gee and Halverson both agree that as one masters Full Spectrum Warrior through activity supported by distributed knowledge (i.e., the knowledge built into the virtual soldiers), many aspects of military professionalism come to life. All sorts of arcane words and information that would be hard to retain through rote drill become part of one's arsenal tools through which activity is accomplished and experience understood. For example, a student would learn what "bounding" means in military practice, how it is connected to military values, and what role it plays tactically in achieving military goals (Gee 2005). A mere dictionary definition could not begin to compete with the complete understanding that the game lead to. Games like Full Spectrum Warrior, Thief, Riddick, and Tony Hawk share knowledge and skills between virtual characters, objects, and environments and the real-world player. By the end of the game, the player has experienced a "career" and has a story to tell about how his or her professional expertise grew and was put to tactical and strategic uses (Gee 2005). Although Gee speaks mainly to upper level learners the same is true for every age group when it comes to online games. If a game is well constructed, has educational vitality and entices a student to learn, then it is a useful teaching tool for any teacher who is willing to use it.

Reference List

Halverson, R. (2005) What can K-12 school leaders learn from video games and gaming?. Innovate 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php70
Gee, J. (2005) What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?. Innovate 1 (7). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php80
Squire, K. (2005) Changing the game: What happens when video games enter the classroom?. Innovate 1 (4). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php82
Mark, A. (2011) History of online gaming InfoGragh. Retrieved from:http://www.news.silveroak.com
PBS. (2011) PBS Games. Retrieved from: pbskids.org/games/
Disney. (2011) Disney online games for kids of all ages. Retrieved from: disney.go.com/games/