Technology In Class

Video Games as Educational Technology 2

Do you find any direct or indirect benefit of video games and teaching or learning? Do video games enhance your teaching or learning performance?

Educators may be missing out on a great resource in the field of educational technology. You may feel a little sheepish writing off an Xbox for tax purposes but…

Yesterday we saw a teacher in Minnesota who uses video games as a vehicle to cultivate students’ technical writing skills, and the study that claims that surgeons who grew up playing video games had more alacrity in performing robotic surgeries. Today we’ll think about how video games can be used to teach and learn economics and management.

Libertarian economist David Friedman wrote about using World of Warcraftfor an economics course. After all, the game has markets, buyers and sellers, haggling. Add to that the online factor where you’re working with a team and you’ve got a complex economic world.

The Resident Evil games also have an economic system, albeit a more simplified one. The gamer has to efficiently allocate scarce resources which have alternative uses. There’s only so much medicine to be bought in the world of Resident Evil so one has to be wise in using it and buying it at the proper time. Depending on the situation one could buy medicine or a weapon. If the gamer has a weapon, she or he may not need medicine. These are basic economic decisions–the efficient allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses.

One can also learn management from video games. My wife, although a manager, has no formal management training. All the management she learned is from video games. She was an avid player of Heroes Of Might & Magic and Age of Empires. She learned resource allocation and management. In Age of Empiresthe gamer has to allocate resources properly. If the resources are allocated all in the military, then people in your city start dying. You also have to keep in mind logistics like terrain and the size of other cities and militaries.

A few questions:

• Would you ever use video games as a teaching or learning tool?
• If you are a gamer, do you notice any explicit correlation between your playing and your work or learning performance?
• What games do you play that you’d like to see incorporated in a course?

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