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Can games improve literacy and education in general—and how can this happen?
November 13, 2006 | 6:13 am
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By David Rothman
Librarian Jenny Levine, a technology strategist with the American Library Association, sees possibilities here.
How do you feel? And what about games and e-books?
Just how might games be integrated within actual e-books—maybe even classics, not just regular textbooks? Could games in some cases replace conventional, boring study guides?
I’d love to hear from both the pro- and anti-games factions—especially from librarians and educators.
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Comments:
David,
Games are great to use with books. My son learnt more about history with the computer games Civilization and Colonization than he did in his classroom. And now you can play the virtual general of the British and attack the Americans in 1783. You can rebattle the Civil War, explore your way across America and run political campaigns. And you need a background of information as a player in order to be successful – derived from books. I used games in my history classes all the time. We had countries negotiating with each other with students playing ambassadors and kings and spies and traitors and all that good stuff necessary to run today’s political power houses. Sometimes I think our current leaders are the ones who are playing games with us. Maybe we need to have more reading contests…
Thanks, Don, and I hope this thread continues. If you have time, I’ll welcome the URLs of Web pages showing the efficacy of games for educational purposes. And just how do you think games could be integrated within books? What kinds of interfaces? Partial answers better than none. Thanks again! David
Note to readers: Don is an Apple Distinguished Educator with decades of library- and education-related experience.
I fondly remember a game on the Macintosh computer about 8 years ago where one had to build chemical molecules of ever increasing complexity. It was pretty educational and fun to play.
These days, a good starting point is the Serious Games Initiative website.
For the games themselves, there is a number of interesting ones including Virtual U(niversity) and Simulearn’s Virtual Leader programme.
And then there is a military language learning game.
BBC games might also be of interest. – David
Specifically: a flash-based adventure based off the recent BBC series on the Romans (and probably a by-product of their Rome co-production with HBO – hey they had all those props just lying around anyway…) I’ve played the first two parts of the game and there’s plenty of information about the Romans and early Christianity there.
Oh. It’s possible the link above may not allow you to try the game if you’re outside the UK. I’ve seen differing opinions on this so it’s worth a try.