At one point in my life – relatively recently, in fact – I considered training to become a teacher. After realising that the main jobs I qualified for with my Computer Science degree just depressed or demotivated me, I recalled the old mantra: those who can’t do (or are too lazy to), teach. I used to tutor younger students at secondary school, and, while relatively shy in one-on-one social situations, I’ve always been able to stand up in front of crowds of people and present almost anything with fairly-little preparation. Of course, then I got ill and decided to chase after this indie-games thing, but that’s another story.
Educational video games, then. Depending on who you ask, they’re either fun distractions for a growing mind or a pandering waste of time. In America, at least, they’re fondly remembered for the likes of The Oregon Trail, famous for allowing un-prepared players to die from dysentery and in other humorous ways. This was followed up by a number of Trail sequels, but it eventually led to the birth of the ridiculously popular Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego series, which continued to sell well into the late nineties. Heck, at one point in gaming history, the production of the next Carmen game was prioritised over Prince of Persia, a concept that must seem laughable to anyone who plays games.
America continued to receive a stream of surprisingly well-designed educational titles for the next decade, like physics-puzzler The Incredible Machine, which has arguably influenced everything from Portal to every iOS game ever. Even Ron Gilbert, adventure-game veteran behind the Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion series, made a successful stab at the kid-friendly market with his Freddi-Fish and Putt-Putt adventure games.
As some of our older British readers will recall, things were a little different on this side of the pond. While those of you who, I dunno, could afford a car probably used something as luxurious as an Apple Macintosh, complete with a copy of Arthur’s Teacher Trouble, we at Dundonald Primary School had a BBC Micro. In 1995. It was here that I was introduced to “problem-solving educational adventure”, Granny’s Garden.
Now, a certain percentage of our readership will have closed this tab out of sheer terror, because Granny’s Garden may as well have been a survival-horror/torture simulator as far as my fragile young mind was concerned. Imagine: you’ve been tasked by local royalty to retrieve a number of magical items for the usual MacGuffiny reason. Fair enough, except that to get to these items, you’ll have to navigate through the labyrinth of terror that is the witch’s home. Good luck figuring out which rooms are safe to enter. Do you want to pick up the [RED BROOM]? Are you sure? Worse still, the witch – who we can only assume is the titular “granny” – can pop up at any time to scare the hell out of you and prompt an instant game-over. Your only chance at escape? Trial and no error. Or death.
Snap out of it, Scott! She can’t hurt you anymore. Right, yes. Outside of the usual shovelware, what’s happening with interactive edutainment nowadays? I’m always happy to point towards traditional games as a great starting point for kids. It probably sounds like a tired argument by now, but I’m more convinced than ever of the benefits that “hardcore” games bestow, in measured sessions: improved reading-skills, dexterity and problem-solving, to name a few. The potential for creative-output is also massive; just let your son or daughter play LittleBigPlanet for an hour and see what madness they come up with. More recently, however, sandboxes like Minecraft have sparked a new kind of education: the Minecraft Teacher.
The project, brain-child of IT teacher Joel Levin, aims to re-purpose what is normally a reasonably-serious game experience to keep kids learning. Using a carefully constructed tutorial-world and customised server commands (described as his “teacher magic”), Joel initially guides students along a certain path to instil new skills and confidence with technology… and then lets them loose to do what they want, albeit once he has taught them what they need to know. It’s pretty ingenious; we know that the children are actually learning, but as far as they’re concerned, they’re adventuring through an unknown gaming wonderland. It is, in many ways, the best example of “playing to learn” that I’ve seen.
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