Playing to Learn: The Benefits of Educational Games
Technology is a huge part of the world we live in today, and we interact with it everyday, whether on our phones, computers, tablets, etc. This type of technology has become a clear segue into education, allowing for children to learn in a fun and interactive way.
Tinsley Galyean of MIT, Elliot Hedman Founder of mPath and Cecilia Weckstrom Global Head of LEGO.com took the stage at SXSW 2015 to discuss the potential for games and learning. As well as how their studies have shown a high level of engagement from the students, and the personalized experience an educational game can bring. Whether you're interested in developing games for the education industry or not, there is a lot to be learned on how children experience games.
Tinsley Galyean of MIT began the discussion by talking about the global literacy project which started as a research project between MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University where tablets were put in the field in very remote Ethiopian villages with a collection of literacy apps to learn what the impact of this material could be. This was a village that was nowhere close to any school, and nobody knew English.
"What we found at the end of about a year is that they had self-organized, and they spent a lot of time with the tablets, and they had learned some basic literacy skills. Specifically around literacy, letter knowledge and sound symbol correspondence, and vocabulary. It was a condenser of what they would have learned if they had been in kindergarten for a year."
The information they gathered blew away the researchers so over the course of the next year they expanded the program and they are now in five different countries. The platform that the team created is very research driven, they are doing observations in the field in Uganda, and the tablets are constantly gathering usage data and they are doing pre and post assessments with the tablets.
Tinsley went to explain the three primary questions that you need to ask when it comes to creating educational apps.
- Is it usable?
- Is it engaging?
- Does learning actually happen?
- Establish Problem
- Establish criteria for solution
- Come up with many options
- Test against criteria and consumers
- Pick the best, develop further