the blog

How can we better educate our children?  It’s a question that competes for a voice with Fast Food News headlines and breaking world events.  Meanwhile, educators compete with actual fast food and entertainment media for the attention of their students.  Ironically, if we focussed more on education around the world, there would be fewer doom-and-gloom headlines, and brainless pop news would garner less attention.  Well, perhaps not the latter, but I can dream can’t I?

We need a way to bridge the gap between learning and entertainment, and games are the perfect medium for this.  Games have a long and successful history of mixing education and fun.  Nearly all games are educational in the sense that they teach logic, strategy, puzzle-solving, and hand-eye coordination, but there is a specific set that focuses on academic subjects: educational games.  I have many fond memories of playing Oregon Trail, and later generations had games like Carmen Sandiego.  In these, you have some fun and you learn about history and geography along the way.  But how can these educational games compete with World of Warcraft or Halo?  While dying of dysentery sounds interesting, it doesn’t compete with slaying dragons, fragging enemy teams, or warping through solar systems to wage intergalactic battle. So how do educational games compete?

They start by keeping up with emerging trends.  Virtual worlds are big right now.  Only that’s an understatement.  Virtual worlds are huge.  When successful, they bring together millions of people from around the world to share an experience.  They encourage collaboration and teamwork, they build global friendships, and yes, they show us just how idiotic humans can be when given an audience with little in the way of repercussions or punishment.  But they also teach us how to deal with those cretins in non-violent ways.  Virtual worlds face many of the same challenges that real-world societies contend with, and they offer a relatively harmless way to experiment with solutions to these issues.

They also offer huge potential for educational gaming.  Why play a single-player game of math or history when you could join a world of other students?  Not only do you learn, you get to socialize, and you get to assist the newbies when they arrive.  Imagine learning about the science of space travel in a virtual world where you can travel through space?  NASA is working on it. They intend to make an educational virtual world that teaches science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as team-building, adaptation, and strategy.

How about learning about Shakespeare?  That one always ranked pretty high on the suck-meter when I was in school.  But what if you could delve into the life and times of Shakespeare, learning about the customs and surroundings that influenced the writer?  The folks at Indiana University are doing just that with their Synthetic Worlds Initiative.

As Virtual Worlds become more prevalent and easier to build, we will see the emergence of niche MMOs.  Fantasy and Sci-Fi will hold the big crowds, but imagine the endless possibilities for all those specialty worlds.  Architects and builders using them for city planning; photographers hosting virtual galleries; molecular biology professors taking students into a virtual micro-world of cells and DNA; historians taking us on virtual adventures to retrace the footsteps of Livingston, Shaka, or Genghis Khan.

There is a brilliant future ahead for virtual worlds, and education must be a part of this if it expects to compete with mainstream entertainment for our children’s interest.  It’s a topic for many lively discussions.  Of course there will be challenges—we have to ensure that children are safe, we have to encourage them to go outside and experience life first-hand, and we have to entice them into the wonders of reading books—but game developers and educators have to move on this. Virtual worlds are a mighty force, and we can either harness their power for educational purposes, or we can be swept aside and left to churn in their wake.