James Gee, Arizona State University

This is an interesting interview that explores the use of gaming in learning. I am really curious about the use of gaming in classes and one of the presentations that caught my eye at a the iCTLT conference in Singapore was by Mary Burns on Assessing 21st Learning, who discussed the use of games such as Civilisation, Making History, Peacemaker and Quest Atlantis.

A number of students have told me that they have become more interested in history because of games. After one of my senior students produced higher than usual marks in an exam on early 20th-century world history, he revealed it was because that he’d been playing “Age of Empires”. Now that will horrify some, but I thought it was fantastic. He had learned the information he needed in an engaging and fun way and was able to use that compose an analytical, logical and evidence-based argument.

Gee also talks about the failure of “drill and kill” pedagogy and how “the form of schooling that we engage in, that basically privileges people that know a lot of facts but can’t solve problems with them, is on its last legs”.

According to Gee, the future of schooling is one that stresses the ability to sovle problems collaboratively. He talks about how games essentially involve problem solving and how they are part of the solution of “helping kids in school to learn not just knowledge as facts but knowledge as something that you produce and, in a modern world, something you produce collaboratively.”