EDUCATION

In education, the first adopters were in the primary and secondary levels (K-12), where COTS games are still being used in many instances. The main subject areas covered have been; history, maths, science and language. In a recent study produced by NESTA Futurelab, they looked at how COTS games have been used to help children learn. “What was clear from the study was that a number of factors were significant in influencing the process by which games can be appropriated for use in schools. These included:
• the technical infrastructure of the school (including personnel and facilities)
• institutional and professional factors (including the organisation of time and space in the school, cultures of collaboration/knowledge sharing, traditions of ‘best practice’ in lesson planning, and classroom rituals)
• the extent to which games can be ‘disaggregated’ and appropriated to meet specific needs
• the individual teachers’ personal experience of games play, and their personal and professional identities as teachers
• the pervading cultural expectations of children’s attitudes to and expertise in playing computer games.

While games may have potential to support learning and while many teachers and pupils expressed enthusiasm in using games in lessons, it is clear that these factors need to be taken into account by teachers, and ideally by school leaders and games developers, before their potential can be fully realised.
The development of Serious Games in education is and will continue to be affected by similar factors as to those raised in Futurelab’s study, but the positive aspects of using custom games, as opposed to COTS is the pedological factors that can be built in along with the assessment tools.
The real question that still remains is when, not if, Serious Games will move into the mainstream.

According to Prensky, “The reason this will happen, and happen soon, is that learners will demand it, to the point that management, teachers and administrators can no longer resist. The workers of the games generations will no longer accept, attend, or do training that is boring. So we will have to, as businesses, schools and the military are already beginning to do in places, inject fun and games into training.”