Low Five Education
Using Video Games to Spark Student Careers
A small but meaningful piece of advice I would give to any new teacher going fresh faced into education, especially middle school, is that they should have some playful and serious responses ready for the inevitable question of “when are we ever going to actually use this?” It's basically the coolest most counterculture anti establishment thing that a 13-14 year old is going to come up with that perfectly encapsulates their growing teenage angst. They have every right to question you given it is their education and future, but in my experience it’s often more about the act of rebellion than actually seeking answers, which is why I suggested playfulness in the potential response. Despite not being perfect, educators work tirelessly year after year to equip students with the tools they’ll need for a future we can’t read. Therefore the best we can do is make students well rounded, provide them with experiences, and hopefully help them figure out who they want to be.
The frustrating thing about preparing kids for the future is that we obviously don’t know what it’ll be and the world changes constantly. What counts as a meaningful experience or inspiration towards a student’s future will and has continued to change. Thirty years ago I doubt many people would have believed that video games could lead to future careers or inspire kids to want to be something. This is in part due to the fact that games were simpler and less advanced technologically, but also because it was a newer medium that could be looked at as a fad or frivolous. The video game industry has grown to become massive, and interestingly incredibly diverse in terms of game play or experience offerings. From this growth have come games that put players in the shoes of professionals ranging from city planners to airline pilots. These games aren’t exactly niche either as games like Cities Skylines and Flight Simulator sell incredibly well and/or have thriving communities dedicated to them online.
In education you’ll hear buzzwords like technology integration or 21st century skills being used all the time, but some of the best technology that is kid friendly out there is being completely ignored. Perhaps it's the commercial relationship we have with video games. It could be the fact that the connotation of the word game makes them taken less seriously and their potential is therefore more hidden. My personal opinion is that in addition to the previously mentioned mental roadblocks, the biggest obstacle to using games within the classroom are unfamiliarity, both with what they could potentially provide and how to properly use them. Today’s games provide so much potential for experiences that inspire and really work different areas of your mind that have you seeing normal things in a new light. As previously discussed, games inspired me as far back as elementary school to care about social studies, and as an adult I found myself questioning if I should have become a city planner with how much fun I had playing city building and management games. If brought into the schools and skillfully taught, video games could provide similar experiences for students from all sorts of backgrounds. They could be used to give kids ideas on what they want to do in the future, provide new ways for them to think about themselves, and most interestingly give students meaningful practice in certain professional fields.
Seeing Students in Different Careers
What do you want to be when you grow up? Another cliche, this time from the teachers, that always carries great weight. It’s not exactly fair to ask, but teachers hope to inspire and get students thinking about their future, or at least enough to partake in the present. Other than when I hilariously told my 1st grade teacher that I wanted to be the Pope, I always struggled with answering the whole what am I gonna be when I grow up conundrum. I loved social studies, but being a historian didn’t seem particularly practical, and working at a museum also did appeal to me, so I got into teaching. Although I have enjoyed teaching, I look back at my own education and become frustrated by the lack of exposure to different careers within social studies. This feeling is strongest when I play city building games where I design my own cities and figure out different ways to run and improve them. At that point my teacher brain takes over and I start to wonder about the potential these games could have in a classroom, and how that could possibly lead a student like me down interesting paths.
Thinking like a historian is a mindset we try to use in social studies teaching, which would be similar to thinking like a scientist. Although useful for good teaching it is admittedly narrow. As students progress through education it could be useful and rewarding for them to advance beyond those initial mindsets and start thinking like a city planner, lawyer, or engineer. Video games are immersive experiences that allow us to role play different identities and with that comes different mindsets or perspectives on issues. It could be really powerful for a student to enjoy playing and become particularly good or successful at a game that highlights a particular career or field. Maybe when they’re looking into their post secondary future they’ll remember that feeling and identification with the job and get into a career path within that field. It’s funny to me that the press and parents wring their hands about video game violence or how combat games would turn their kids into soldiers, but that same logic was never transferred to games outside of the first person shooting genre. What about a kid who plays sports video games and that sparks a career in sports journalism or working within operations for a professional team? Maybe the kids playing the extremely popular lifestyle simulation The Sims would grow up to become architects or interior designers. Players can stumble into these inspirations on their own at home, but a teacher highlighting and connecting these experiences to content or the students’ future could be a powerful experience.
We seem to forget most of the facts from our education, which is exemplified by game shows like Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, but experiences and inspiration stick with us far longer. If you look back on your own education, I’m willing to bet some of your more fun experiences seem to stick out more prominently than others, especially when you actually got to do things. Video games shouldn’t be something done all the time in class. Doing so might actually wear off much of the appeal. If used with a solid plan in place, games could be an engaging change of pace that excites students on potential learning in the coming lessons or solidify concepts previously learned. The biggest takeaway could be the fact that they enjoyed doing something and maybe got inspired to continue down that path. It could be the previously used examples of wanting to become a real city planner or architect, but it could also give them an outlet as an artist, programmer, writer or researcher. Making video games is a process that can be done by humongous teams or solo developers. Games need artists, writers, programmers, researchers amongst many other jobs. Much of this inspiration comes naturally as video game players become inspired at home, but not everybody has the money for game systems or games, and not everybody gets exposed to the more positive end of gaming.
Using games within school could widen who gets to experience and become inspired by different professions, which would in turn diversify the fields of study or professions themselves. School is ideally supposed to be the great equalizer and creator of opportunity for all of the nation’s youth. In some studies video games have been shown to increase interest and success from marginalized populations, so the idea that games could inspire a more diverse workforce isn’t actually some pipedream. Experiences from carefully selected games could help students see themselves in a new professional scope while having fun. From there schools could offer more specific training within identified fields with more education, or training focused games through epistemic gaming.
Epistemic Gaming and Actual Job Training
An epistemic game is when a game is designed with educational or training purposes from the ground up. Commercial games are designed to be fun and therefore trade realness for playability. For example city building games are often called “god games” because the player creates and deletes as they please. You may have monetary constraints, but you do not have checks and balances of power or angry constituents who won’t approve of your measures. There are still strong learning concepts and educational purposes from casual games as we’ve been discussing throughout this project, but they do not 100% represent realities. Epistemic games are created to actually put you into the shoes of a professional and see jobs as they do. This offers the players realistic experience that educates them in a meaningful way and could actually test if the field of work is something they want to really pursue.
The idea of a game designed in collaboration with professionals from a specific field to reflect, teach, and give realistic experience within the job sounds ideal for the classroom, so why wouldn’t I have started the article with them as the star focus? The reality is that these games are more rare for capitalistic reasons and more niche for playability or fun based reasons. The can still be found as enjoyable, but the focus is once again a realistic portrayal of the job. Games are expensive to make and without obvious and strong demand, you won’t find supply. But what if videogames were more popularly used in schools and students became introduced to more professional fields? Students could have had fun and great experiences in middle or high school with more casual games and might want to take things a step further. From there a greater demand for more in depth and realistic games for schooling would naturally incentivise companies to make quality epistemic games for a growing market.
To stay within present realities there are some compelling epistemic games currently available that I would love to highlight and promote coming from the University of Wisconsin’s Epistemic Analytics Lab through the Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Professor David Williamson Shaffer is the director of the project and has published a number of influential academic works in regard to epistemic gaming and the potential of gaming within the classroom. The project includes a handful of compelling offerings, but for the strongest connection to this project I’d like to focus on their iPlan project.
In iPlan the player uses real land-use data to address environmental and social challenges within any location within the United States. Once you choose your location on Google Maps you choose the issue you want to explore and begin making land use changes. Where things really get interesting is that you have to make sure various community stakeholders are happy and supportive of your choices. Just like in life not everybody is aligned so you’ll have to do your best to keep a balance. Essentially iPlan is the working life of an actual civil engineer and could therefore give real experience and motivation to a new wave of future engineers. The fact that a teacher could have the students focus on their very own neighborhood gives validity to the project outside of just career modeling. Students can take a more critical glance at their community and discover new things about it. You might just find that you’ve inspired your students to make a change or at least more carefully observe their surroundings.
With greater use and familiarity, video games (both made for entertainment and epistemic games) could become enriching experiences that both inspire students and give them meaningful career based experiences. By using them as a tool we’ll be doing more than just getting better at teaching through them, as we’ll also create greater development demand for games within education. From there even more games specifically made to teach or reflect a multitude of careers may become available expanding what’s possible within schools. To get to that future we need to better utilize the tools we have currently available to us instead of leaving all of their potential untapped.