Low Five Gaming’s

Low Five Education Project

The Articles

The following is a script for a forthcoming, accompanying video essay.

Introduction

Hey this is Luke, Co-host of Low Five Gaming.

The video game industry has exploded into one of the most dominant cultural and commercial forces on the planet. Video game publishers are selling for billions, Hollywood is making a huge push to make the next massive movie franchise based on your favorite video game ip, and everyone from your baby cousin to your grandmother very well may be playing games on their phone right now… That or watching videos on Youtube about Minecraft that confuse you and make you feel old.

Despite this cultural ubiquity there is one place where video games are not being used to their potential, the classroom. Many of us have extremely fond memories of playing some iteration of The Oregon Trail game series in classrooms going all the way back to its original publishing in 1974, but oddly the use of video games as a learning tool within the classroom has hardly grown.

It’s not as if gaming hasn’t gotten better since then. There seems to be an endless amount of games to play where you can be anything. I mean there are literally games where you can be a piece of bread, a murderous shark narrated by Chris Parnell, or just simulate mowing lawn after lawn.

Seriously though, technological growth has led to the creation of massively powerful simulation games that go far and above what The Oregon Trail did back in my day. These games give students the potential to build virtual cites, engage in policy creation, or explore ancient cities.

Despite this potential, the public often laments and worries about how kids are bored and disengaged within the classroom, why they don’t feel like their learning matters, and why we can’t get them excited about the world outside of their darn smartphones.

Video games provide exciting moments and opportunities to learn within schools. They won’t fix all of the issues within education, but they carry a ton of potential to make school more fun and engaging. I don’t remember much about elementary school these days, but I sure do remember playing the Oregon Trail and Math Blasters.

What’s even more interesting is how gaming at home in my early childhood led to academic success and passion in school. I’m not saying I owe my current profession as a social studies teacher to Age of Empires… but it's pretty hard to deny that it had a pretty big impact. We all know that game franchise is amazing.

My lifetime of social studies and video game passions bleeding into each other is a process that I think isn’t unique to just me. If we pay attention to the stories of students who gain passion and greater understanding through gaming, we are tapping into a tool or resource that can inspire kids to engage more in school, explore future careers, and even learn how to better care for the environment.

The Low Five gaming project is an advocacy project/platform/resource that seeks to empower teachers to use video games within the classroom and educate the public on the learning potential these games serve for students. As it turns out, many of the games we play for fun actually hold strong academic merit and would be great within a classroom setting.

My story is the emotional home for the project as it illustrates a student’s passion for learning that grows into an educator's desire to see exciting ideas developed into more and more classrooms. The story starts off the same way it does for most younger siblings who are gamers, annoying your older sibling as you watch them play games.

Shout outs to all My Luigis out there!

Passion and Reason for Project

Growing up with an older brother six years your senior has its ups and downs. Watching Alex play games over his shoulder and playing them when he wasn’t around came with the reasonable tax of fetching him ice waters and snacks at his beckon.

A game I first watched him play and quickly became obsessed with was Age of Empires. I can remember begging my Mom for permission to play the slightly more mature for my age game with the obviously sound reasoning and total truth that I was simply getting onto the game to read the historical information within the game and peacefully build a civilization that had no intention of conquest.

My Mom wasn’t a fool, but I wasn’t totally lying and she could see that. For those unindoctrinated into Age of Empires, it is a real time strategy game where you start with a few settlers from a handful of real civilizations in the Stone Age such as the Persians or Greeks, and grow your Empire as you advance up through the Iron Age. The game was very well researched and included an in game library about the different civilizations that I swear I actually read some of. 

As I grew older I continued playing games within the franchise, with the most time Going towards Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology, which was based on ancient mythologies of Norse, Greek, and Egyptian origin. Pretty soon I started checking out books from the local library about mythology as well as becoming increasingly interested and adept at social studies classes in school. 

Through these early games I had an increased interest in improving my reading because I wanted to know what was going on and to learn more, I had an above average handle on analyzing maps, and I even had a starting grasp on the basic needs for a successful society including farming, logging, and mining.

Moving on to high school I was in a bit of a personal crisis. My family had moved to cities and I went from a small catholic school to a very large public school where I didn’t know a single person. My grades my first year reflected someone who was struggling to figure out who they were. 

Eventually I found myself doing well again through social studies classes.

I wasn’t the most committed student by any measure, but in my AP history classes I didn’t need to be because I enjoyed being there and learning came naturally. I also became obsessed with the new and growing Assassin's Creed series.

What amazed me about the series was the level of research and detail that the developer Ubisoft put into recreating historical cities and environments from different time periods such as Ancient Jerusalem or Renaissance Italy.

Being a time traveling assassin is obviously pretty cool, but for me the biggest thrill of these games was the exploration. Climbing towers and running the rooftops of Venice gave my history education something to stick to and helped what I was learning in school come alive.

When it came time to start thinking about college and careers I could pursue after high school, I kept thinking about how strong of a student I was within social studies classes, but all I could see as options in front of me were being a historian, working at some sort of museum, or teaching social studies.

Fast forward roughly ten years and I’ve graduated College with a social studies teaching degree and have taught 8th grade global studies for six years.

The relationship between gaming and social studies became weaker, but continued playing of video games did give me something to bond with my students about and surprisingly proved to be very helpful when connecting geography skills and historical themes within the classroom.

When I signed up to enter graduate school I made what would be an impactful purchase that directed a ton of my learning and daydreaming. I needed a new laptop to complete online school so I figured that I might as well buy a gaming laptop so I could enjoy myself after a long day’s study.

What seemed like a bit of a mischievous mindset actually had a massive positive impact on my studies because the separate spheres of learning and playing became blended as each would bleed into the other once again.

Graduated Play and Studies

Getting the gaming laptop gave me access to PC games, and specifically greater access to more diverse simulation games. Simulation games are simulations of literally anything, like power washing or lawn mowing, but for me the big thrill is city builder and management games.

I’ve always liked this style of game, but going back to them as an experienced social studies teacher and graduate student was eye opening. Additionally I was going back to school for environmental education, so although video games might seem antithetical to environmental education, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

As I played city building games such as Cities Skylines I started to wonder why games like this weren’t being played in the classroom. I was having a ton of fun laying out city roads, managing industry, and carefully plotting out city infrastructure, all of which are prominent topics taught within social studies.

When I ran into trouble with my city as traffic came to a standstill or citizens trash was overflowing from their homes, I found myself on YouTube learning from Cities content creators about road hierarchy and at that point I realized that the game had turned a topic I literally couldn’t think of being more boring into something I was fascinated by. Imagine you're in a room talking to 9th graders about road hierarchy, traffic, and sanitation. Do you think they’re interested?

Now imagine giving those same students the chance to build a city, watching them struggle but have fun, and then teaching road hierarchy. I’m willing to bet students are at least slightly more interested in hearing what you have to say about how road hierarchy alleviates traffic and allows for greater use of crucial city services. Anyone who teaches teenagers would greatly appreciate a room of slightly interested teenagers. Please trust me.

The connections don’t stop there. As I was learning about environmentally sustainable practices in grad school, I was starting to see how those concepts played out in my gaming as well. If I didn’t manage my pollution, citizens would get sick. Public green spaces provided health and wealth to residential communities. Green energy might have cost more up front, but polluted significantly less and saved me in costs long term.

Kids could play games like these at home and they might adapt some of these connections on their own, but what if a knowledgeable teacher was guiding and discussing them as they build? 

At that point I also began developing a bit of a nagging feeling. Back when I was in high school and college I was an excellent social studies student, but didn’t really know of social studies related careers outside of teaching and museum work. Although I do happen to enjoy teaching, what if I had known about civil engineering and city planning?

As previously mentioned simulation games can be gamified versions of almost any job or task. Within the genre there are games that are based on real careers or at the least give a person reason to look into different topics or fields.

I can’t help but notice how much better a time class could be when instead of just talking and reading about concepts, we played and built as practice or taught the direct themes the games are centered around like saving the earth from environmental decay or designing a city. An awesome tool is sitting right in front of us, so what if we actually used it?     

So Why This Project? 

Classrooms admittedly aren’t the most fun place in the world right now, but what the public isn’t as aware of is what teachers are faced with and how they’re making the best of not the greatest situation.

Standardized testing and greater scrutiny on what is being taught in the classroom combined with general public distrust of textbooks means that many of your social studies teachers are burdened with creating the content they must deliver.

Teachers can and do implement engaging activities such as role plays, class projects based around choice, and the reading of graphic novels or young adult focused literature, but more materials that students genuinely enjoy are needed. Video games would not replace class materials or be the only thing covered in a class, but instead they could be tools of engagement and extension.

Many students play games in their personal life, are often very good at them, and learn very quickly within the worlds they provide. Carefully selected and planned games could serve as a way of exciting students about new material.

This could help engage students in social studies learning and provide reasons for students to do additional research or extended learning. Furthermore, the impact of these games within the room have the potential to spill out into their lives and careers in profound ways.

Introducing students to these different experiences that games provide also can lead to future career paths as well as real life community improvement. A student who had their passion for city planning sparked in their high school class could theoretically be given a greater lens of which to view the neighborhoods they lived in. What would they notice or what changed? 

Consider the conversions you could have in classrooms around equity. What do they now notice about their own neighborhoods?

Do they have the same access to public green spaces?

Are their homes close to major sources of pollution? 

How many key public facilities of safety and quality of life do they live near?

From there maybe they don’t want to be a city planner who combats these issues, but maybe they now start asking questions about what they can do to better their neighborhoods. What are the legal processes involved? Why are things in my neighborhood this way, but substantially nicer in the one next door?

As a teacher you’ve now modeled what types of careers impact these real world issues and you’ve empowered your students to turn learning into something that matters to them. From there, maybe when they get to 12th grade Government class they aren’t asking why they need to learn about the political system, but instead how they can use the legal system to better serve their community and its future.

Students have and always will ask why they need to be learning what is being assigned. Video games will not make every student happy and they will not make every student more invested within school. What they have the potential to do is make learning more engaging and potentially more impactful and personal.

Within this project I’m looking to advocate to fellow teachers the potential and possibility of video games within the classroom. My focus will often be on social studies given that’s my area of expertise, but that doesn’t mean what’s discussed doesn’t translate to other content areas.

This project isn’t exclusively for teachers. I firmly believe that by educating the public on the academic merit and skills gained from video game play that it will be significantly easier to get games into the classroom for class content or even more after school clubs.

At the very least it could alter the way people look at games in a positive way and encourage and expose more people to quality games that get players to see the world differently or learn new things. 

The project is about highlighting the educational benefits of games that are actually fun in a way that doesn’t feel too stuffy and overly academic. I’ve done plenty of research that is plenty interesting… but the content of this project will be more digestible and hopefully entertaining. 

The project will include articles on specific educational topics with examples from modern games, highlighted games reviewed through those educational lenses that would be perfect in a classroom setting, and a podcast where we go into depth about Cities Skylines and all of its educational but still way fun glory. 

Whether you’re a teacher yourself, parent, or just a curious gamer, feel free to connect with us and start a 

conversation throughout any point of the project. 

After all, the real mission behind this project is once again to advocate and hopefully assist in more video games being used within the classroom as an educational tool. Schools are run differently from within the same district and are dramatically different from state to state or country to country. 

No one solution will work for every school so let's work together to see what might inspire your school to change up the classroom and have some fun.