Education isn’t a game. Well, actually…

…stating what is likely obvious to everyone that’s ever “beaten” a game even at its most basic levels, it is.  Or rather, gaming is education.

What’s surprising about some of the studies I’ve been introduced to during this course has been the relation of the gaming environments themselves to learning.  A particularly interesting approach to learning came from a brief demonstration on cell structure via the game Minecraft.  Though brief, the presentation was brilliantly executed.  The instructor seemed to use an array of classroom laptops and facilitated in the traditional way in a physical room, though the students piloted avatars in the virtual world while he explained the various organelles.

What this ends up being is a very real experience in a virtual environment that the student intrinsically learns from simply by being there.  Unfortunately I don’t have hard facts as to the performance of the students in relation to those taught in the “normal” way to compare, but I’d hazard an educated guess that the students using the Minecraft tour likely learned a lot more and more quickly than the norm.  More importantly, the exercise seemed to evoke both a fascination with the content along with a sense of familiarity (minecraft being a prolifically popular game helped there).

It’s completely upended how I was looking at approaching the classroom as a teacher, and introduces an interesting question… “How do we take this further?”

We’ve dreamed of a fully realized virtual reality since I was a kid watching Star Trek episodes regarding the holodeck (and with the relative power and danger of such a device it surprises me that there weren’t armed guards monitoring the thing at all times, but I digress).

With the recent trend in popularity of gaming devices such as Oculus Rift coming about, perhaps an even more visceral experience in learning can be created.  How much easier might a test be when an experience related to the question is unforgettable?

Exciting times lie ahead!  Also, that’s the second image I’ve posted in an assignment with “MFer” in featured in some way.  At some point I should break some sort of record…