Tired of covering never-ending education battles over standards, testing, and charter schools, veteran USA Today reporter Greg Toppo set out in search of a fresh story about how children actually learn.
The result is The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Children Smarter, a new book offering a wide-ranging take on the ways classroom teachers and game developers are reinventing school through (mostly) digital games.
Nearly three-fourths of K-8 teachers now use such tools for classroom instruction, according to a recent national survey from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a New York City-based nonprofit that studies digital-media use and children. Benefits include increased student engagement and, in some cases, early evidence of improved student learning.
Not everyone is on board, though. Worries about children鈥檚 screen time, the quality of the games (both commercial and educational) that often get played, and everything from violence to data privacy still raise the hackles of some.
Even so, Mr. Toppo, who is quick to acknowledge that 鈥渁 lot of what鈥檚 out there is trash,鈥� has become a believer.
In San Jose, Calif., he sat with a 4th grader matter-of-factly tackling complex math problems with the help of an animated penguin. In New York City, he watched a group of 8th graders during their final exam: playing Triple Turbo Ball, a game they had invented that blurred the lines between football, basketball, and soccer. In San Francisco, he played an early version of Throw Trucks With Your Mind!, a game being developed in the hope of presenting a non-pharmaceutical treatment for ADHD, that rewards players with super powers when they are able to sustain calm and focus (measured through an EEG headset).
The good stuff, Mr. Toppo said, can be transformative.
Following is a transcript of his conversation with 91制片厂视频 Week Staff Writer Benjamin Herold, edited for length and clarity.
What do you want people inside schools to take away from this book?
There鈥檚 this tool that鈥檚 developing really quickly, but it鈥檚 kind of under the radar. Until I really looked into it, I didn鈥檛 know how powerful it was.
You describe your encounters with teachers making innovative use of games as 鈥渁 welcome break from covering school reform.鈥� Why?
It actually really hit me when we all started having to write about the [common-core standards]. It really felt like, 鈥渓ather, rinse, repeat,鈥� like I had stepped out of a time machine. That was kind of demoralizing. I felt like we weren鈥檛 talking about learning in any big, substantial way. This was my attempt to start thinking about some of those things again.
One educator you profile is Eric Nelson, a teacher in the Minneapolis suburbs using the mechanics of fantasy football to engage students in world affairs.
What I liked about that game was the students鈥� willingness to play along with a clearly contrived system. Everybody going into it understands that it鈥檚 an odd thing to be doing: Choose your team of countries, and let鈥檚 somehow compete to see which ones are [in the news most frequently]. But it somehow did the trick.
Some people worry that 鈥済amification鈥� strategies rely heavily on extrinsic rewards and penalties, especially to encourage basic classroom behaviors, rather than promoting 鈥渄eeper learning.鈥�
A lot of people I mentioned this stuff to really didn鈥檛 want to hear about it. They felt like it was a misapplication of gaming principles. [Using those principles to get kids] to class on time or sit in their seat or raise their hands, a lot of people would say you鈥檙e going to pollute the waters. But in the end, I felt like that鈥檚 part of school, too. ... You can鈥檛 ignore that fact that teachers have to be in front of students every day, and they have to leverage productive behaviors.
You were very moved by the experience of doing math with Luis Zepeda, a 4th grader at S铆 Se Puede Academy, a charter school in San Jose, Calif. Why?
When I sat down with Luis, I was blown away by the work that was on his computer screen. The problems the software was asking him to solve were really hard. I couldn鈥檛 solve them. But that level of math had become a natural part of that kid鈥檚 day. And I thought, 鈥淭his is what we鈥檝e been after for years and years, raising the level of academic achievement of poor and minority kids.鈥�
S铆 Se Puede is part of the Rocketship Schools charter network, which has used software to push class sizes to 100 students or more, and senior Rocketship officials have acknowledged that their students sometimes struggle when given more independence. How does the context in which games are used matter?
I don鈥檛 say anywhere in the book that games need to absolutely overtake everything, [or] replace the curriculum or the teacher (although I do think they would do a pretty good job of replacing textbooks). I want to be careful to make sure that people understand this is a tool, this isn鈥檛 magic.
You also spent time at Quest to Learn Middle School in New York City, which has a heavy emphasis on game-inspired teaching methods. How optimistic are you that games can be used to reinvent school in these kinds of ways?
I鈥檓 guardedly optimistic, mostly because I still see the conversation around me as being about pretty deadly boring topics. We鈥檙e still talking about standardized tests being the measure of everything. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to get people talking and thinking about different things. Something like games can be a bottom-up solution.
But you wrote very positively about Amplify, a large ed-tech company that is taking a pretty top-down approach in trying to bring its games to classrooms.
I make no judgments about [Amplify鈥檚] actual curriculum or devices or customer service. What interested me was the fact they were placing a big bet on games as supplemental material. And what impressed me more was the way they did it, which I consider a very smart way. They hired people like [prominent game developer] Jesse Schell to do something I think is breathtaking, essentially farming out all the game design to these really remarkable studios. The people designing [Amplify鈥檚] games for the classroom are the same people we turn to when we鈥檙e on the couch with our iPad. That, I think, is amazing. [Editor鈥檚 note: Larry Berger, the CEO of Amplify Learning, a division of Amplify, is a board member of 91制片厂视频, the nonprofit that publishes 91制片厂视频 Week.]
You close the book with a chapter about 鈥淪urface: A World Above,鈥� an opera built and performed entirely within the virtual world of Minecraft by a group of teenage boys in an after-school music program at Virginia Tech University.
[What] was so moving to me was that marriage of something that these students were already so excited about with something they would never in a million years find themselves doing. So when that overture is playing, and you鈥檙e staring at this Minecraft world ... my emotions sort of got away from me. Who knows if those kids will go on to love opera for the rest of their lives? But they had this vivid experience, and they were in charge, and the teacher had to really trust those kids to let them run with it. I鈥檓 still thinking about that moment.
