As the father of four children, two of whom are gamers, University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham recently found himself wondering about the educational value of video games.
To wit: Which games can actually teach children something?
Willingham did a search in Apple’s App Store and was shocked by how hard it was to ascertain. From reading manufacturers’ descriptions, it was almost impossible to know which games had genuine educational value and which ones didn’t. The only way to know for sure was to play the game.
Willingham was struck by the fact there is a rating system to help parents keep their kids away from content that isn’t age-appropriate, but nothing to lead them toward games that could actually teach something.
“It’s not as if kids have to be learning something with every activity,” Willingham said. “I just think transparency is useful for parents.”
It was with that in mind that Willingham wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he advocated for the implantation of an educational rating system for video games.
Willingham says it’s almost impossible to tell from just reading the description of a video game if it has any educational value. (Photo by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications)
UVA Today caught up with Willingham – whose work is centered on cognition as it applies to K-12 children – to take a deeper dive into the subject.
Q. As video games are presented now, what makes them so difficult to determine whether a game has any educational value or not?
A. It’s a mess. There’s not an authority. Right now, there’s nobody who’s knowledgeable and providing that sort of information. You see games in the “educational” part of the App Store, like a first-person shooter, and say, “What in the world am I going to learn from that?”
But more often I think you really need to play the game in order to know. You can’t really tell from a description. That’s part of what I was trying to convey in the op-ed. Learning is pretty subtle. And I think it can go both ways. I think there are times where you may actually learn some things from a video game that you wouldn’t expect to learn anything from. And then equally often, you probably won’t learn much from ones it where it looks like you will.
Q. Are there any good examples of that?
A. I think people seriously think you’re going to learn physics from RollerCoaster Tycoon (a game that allows players to construct their own roller coasters). One of the things we know is that learning principles of physics is really hard, even in a physics class.
There are several studies showing that when you teach Newtonian physics, in the beginning of the semester everybody is an Aristotelian. They have this intuitive understanding of how motion works; for example they think that when you throw something, the thrown object has this sort of quality … like impetus … and that’s the reason it keeps on moving. Then you teach them the Newtonian version and they pass all the tests, and then at the end of the semester they’re really still Aristotelians. It’s like, “Yeah, I know that’s what it said but it never really made a whole lot of sense to me.”
