Dr. Gee

Dr. James Gee was a guest speaker this week for my Digital Game Based Learning class. The entire hour he spent with us was great and he provided some great in site into games and their potential educational use in the classroom. One statement that stood out for me was when he mentioned that he was not advocating that games are used for teaching what he was most interested in was “that they recruit very good learning, they organize learning in a very good way.“
This was great for me to hear because I was struggling with the fact that most games that are created for education are not that good, and when you try to use commercially developed games and then try to find educational value in them, at time you find yourself grasping at straws.

Here are a number of points that Dr. Gee had that I thought were very good, there are more but I didn’t want to transcribe the entire hour.

• video games are just a way to solve problems
• people are gamers in quite different ways, people learn in different ways there is not one type of learner, in the same way there is not one type of gamer
• I am not advocating that we use games for everybody, in fact I am not even advocating that we even have to use games, what interests me about games is that they recruit very good learning, they organize learning in a very good way.
• They are about problem solving, they are not about facts and retention or memorizing stuff, they are about whether you can solve a problem. All a game is a set of problems and then a reward usually winning or getting out of a level or finishing those problems.
• They (games) lower the cost of failure, and the reason you want to lower the cost of failure is because if failure is too consequential people won’t explore it, they won’t take risks, they won’t try new things, they won’t try new styles. In school sometimes the risk of failure is I get a bad grade it means I am a bad person, in a game it means I start again from the last save.
• There is nothing more important to learning when you are learning something difficult, which is the only things worth learning, than persisting past failure.
• There is a word that people use for an essential, core necessity for learning, they call it grit, grit is persistence plus passion.