Let The Games Begin!

Mark Smithfield* spends his days roaming Taiga National Park looking for answers. The Moongabela River that runs through the area was once teeming with trout, but now most of the fish are dead, and Smithfield wants to know why.

Like a private investigator, he treks through lush green pathways, stopping to question park rangers, nearby indigenous people, fly fishermen, and employees of the local logging company. Later, he checks the river's temperature, oxidation, and pH levels and combs through online and print resources to find out what it all means. All the while, he carefully records everything in his notebook—information he'll need for an exhaustive research paper on his findings.

Smithfield isn't a world-renowned scientist working in a remote part of the world—he's a 10-year-old sitting in front of a computer. And the game he and other fourth graders at University Elementary School in Bloomington, IN, have been playing for the last few weeks is Quest Atlantis (www.questatlantis.org), a free multiuser 3-D virtual environment in which humans provide the inhabitants of the planet Atlantis with knowledge as they slowly rebuild their destroyed Arch of Wisdom.

Throw out your outdated notions of what's appropriate for the classroom—a growing number of researchers and educators are convinced that game-based learning is about to hit K–12 schools in a big way, and they want you to know that it works. The very idea that gaming may be integral to learning may alarm, or even offend, some teachers and media specialists. But Joel Foreman, an associate professor at George Mason University who studies Web-based learning technologies, says interactive software spawned by video gaming is successfully competing with print media for students' attention—and educators should not ignore this trend.

Just look at the amazing popularity of Grand Theft Auto, a video game in which players rise through the criminal ranks by stealing cars, running narcotics, performing hits, and kidnapping, or Madden NFL, an authentic simulation of football, complete with bone-crunching tackles, intercepted passes, and quarterback sacks. "Imagine students using such interactivity to dissect a human body, manage an air transportation system, or run an agribusiness," Foreman says. "These virtual settings anticipate advanced online learning worlds that can be dedicated to different subjects, populated by single users and teams, and pedagogically structured for deep and rapid experience-based learning."

By playing video games, students actively see and do, rather than read and listen, as they complete increasingly difficult levels of learning. This is important because while many kids struggle to retain the information they're taught, those involved in gaming are personally invested in what they're doing, and are, therefore, more motivated to retain what they've learned. "If we treat school activity in terms of learning, playing, and helping, then we can more thoroughly engage children in the learning process," says Sasha Barab, one of the creators of Quest Atlantis and an associate professor in learning sciences at Indiana University.

With the help of a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in 2001, Barab and his colleagues at IU have demonstrated that computer games are crucial to learning. "The idea [behind creating the game] was not just to have fun, but to engage kids intellectually in different ways," he says. The research team interviewed dozens of teachers and 150 nine- to 12-year-olds, and came up with Quest Atlantis, a software tool that uniquely blends education, entertainment, and social responsibilities—absent any guns or killings. The game's chat rooms and e-mail capabilities create a strong sense of community, and the accompanying posters, comic books, and trading cards make it all the more exciting for kids. But most importantly, all of the lessons, or quests, adhere to state academic standards and reinforce important information-literacy skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking. Since a council member, or teacher, oversees all of the students' work, she ultimately determines the level of inquiry that goes into each lesson by either pushing the student to conduct more research or accepting the assignment as it is.

After two years of studying thousands of Questers and their teachers, Barab and his team can conclusively say that the game is engaging, meaningful, and educational. For example, in a series of studies evaluating the impact of Quest Atlantis on learning, the Indiana team found that game- playing students offered more insights than those who didn't play Quest Atlantis when they were asked to elaborate on their readings. "Their written work reflected deeper levels of empathy with respect to the passage of text," says Barab. "[The Quest Atlantis] group empathized more deeply in some language-arts work and wrote richer explanations of a situation in a science unit." Elementary school students who participated in a Quest unit on animal cells demonstrated significant learning over time in their understanding of life processes. In addition, all of the 153 fourth- and fifth-grade boys and girls surveyed rated Quest Atlantis as more enjoyable than any learning activity in their lives. In short, the researchers say, students participating in Quest Atlantis showed significant increases over time in their learning retention levels. "The fact that we found statistically significant learning gains with respect to science, social studies, language arts, and metacognitive skills does indeed suggest that academic learning was occurring alongside of or in the process of the experience of playing." The bottom line is that "these games have a legitimate place in the classroom," Barab says.

Is there a role for librarians in this powerful new addition to learning? You bet. Since these online games are inquiry-based, researchers say media specialists are crucial to providing relevant print and online resources and making sure they apply to ongoing lessons in the classroom. And because librarians are typically the most tech-savvy people in the building, they should be in charge of introducing these virtual environments to their schools and showing their teaching colleagues how to use the games with students.

Diane Jass Ketelhut, director of the River City project (muve.gse.harvard.edu/muvees2003/index.htm), a free video game created by Harvard University researchers that's currently being piloted in low-income communities in 10 inner-city school districts in five states, takes it one step further. She envisions creating video games that let kids wander through library stacks and search among various resources, including online journals and databases. "You can create a multiuser virtual library site in which many people can talk to each other and collaborate on a research project," she says. "And a librarian can man the site from another state." The technology already exists—for as little as $200, companies such as Activeworlds (www.activeworlds.com) can help educators build their own 3-D virtual reality games.

Smithfield's teacher, Beth Piekarsky, knows firsthand that gaming has transformed the lives of her students. Before joining the ranks of more than 3,000 Questers in the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Denmark, and Sweden, Smithfield had no interest in school. "I couldn't reach him," Piekarsky recalls. But once Quest Atlantis was introduced to the curriculum at the beginning of the academic year, "He just lit up like you wouldn't believe." Now students turn to the once apathetic, quiet boy for answers to all questions about the game, and the quality of his schoolwork has greatly improved.

Piekarsky's students are not alone. Cathleen Galas, a sixth-grade science and math teacher at the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School in Los Angeles, recently introduced her class to the video game Whyville (www.whyville.net) to supplement her lessons on epidemiology and the spread of infectious diseases. With more than 550,000 registered users worldwide, an estimated 14,000 kids from age nine to 15 log on each day as citizens of this fictional town to explore, learn, create, and have fun—while soaking in knowledge of physics, biology, and world history. For one particular unit, avatars, or virtual creations of oneself, began contracting the highly contagious Whypox virus and were asked to investigate what it was, how it was spread, and if there was a cure. The site's designers even came up with the Whyville Centers for Disease Control to help kids uncover answers, and media specialist Judith Kantor supplied students with helpful Web sites, books, and other resources. Kantor also arranged for a recent school visit by Jim Murphy, author of the Newbery Honor Book An American Plague (Clarion, 2003), about the yellow-fever epidemic of 1793.

Galas's students enjoy the colorful 2-D, cartoonlike world so much that they visit the library during lunchtime and after school to engage in Whyville's other simulated activities—everything from flying hot-air balloons and doing triple axels on ice to driving electric cars. As they learn about air density, centripetal force, and the interaction between positive and negative charges, kids collect a form of currency called clams, which allow them to play more games. Whyvillians also have a say in all of the town's happenings and can write petitions and vote on issues that affect Whyville's future. The town has its own local paper, the Whyville Times, and its citizens report on local events, as well as write stories and poetry for the paper, and give advice on everything from games to fashion, says Yasmin Kafai, a Whyville creator and an associate professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

Indeed, researchers are taking this opportunity to examine how girls, who are typically less interested in computer games, are reacting to the trend. And the news so far is encouraging—more than 60 percent of Whyville users are girls, and nearly half of Questers and River City users are female. And researchers are awaiting the results of an ongoing three-year study by New York University computer science professor Ken Perlin called RAPUNSEL or Realtime Applied Programming for Underrepresented Students' Early Literacy (mrl.nyu.edu/rapunsel). The research project features a 2-D multiuser game that teaches middle school kids Java programming as they teach cool hip-hop dance moves, such as twirls and dips, to interactive animated characters. So far, Perlin and his team have learned that girls like games that are "part of a social fabric of getting to know other kids," and unlike boys, they generally dislike games that make them feel isolated, such as puzzle-solving or shooter activities. The study, which is funded by a $970,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and is now in its second year, will focus on a half dozen public middle schools mainly in low-income areas of New York City. By proving that RAPUNSEL's software environment is an effective learning tool, Perlin hopes the developers of educational games "will make industrial-strength versions" that will be widely used in schools nationwide, so that ultimately, "We would like to see a society in which there is no internalized gender bias around [computer] programming," Perlin says. "Our goal is to achieve gender equity. Currently, 93 percent of programmers entering the workforce in this country are men."

Researchers agree that convincing educators to use cutting-edge gaming technology in their daily curriculums will still take some time. "[Educators] are used to deciding what we should be using and doing in the classroom, and we're not used to having kids take this away from us," says Harvard's Ketelhut, referring to some teachers' fear of technology. But, she adds, educators need to accept that gaming technology does work in the classroom. "Sometimes, it just takes jumping in with both feet. And since these [games] are so new, this is a great time for someone to get in on the ground floor and grow with them."

*Name has been changed.