How can health be tied to learning and gaming? Ann Thai, assistant director at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, wrote a blog post on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation blog that outlines a recently released document entitled, Game Changer:Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health.
The post and the document raise a great question about the interconnectedness between fun, learning and health when it comes to kids. Something interesting that I pulled out of Ann’s post is:
How do we know what kids are learning from playing games?
Being that I’ve been on an analytics kick lately over here at Crumple it Up HQ, the question really resonated with me. I’ve spent a lifetime playing video games and there is no record whatsoever of my ability to learn. I know that I’ve learned how to type my initials into the high score column, but that doesn’t really tell me much. Until recently, there hasn’t ever been a platform to record meta-data into some sort of gamer profile. There’s never been a profile that follows me around from game to game.
Wouldn’t it be noteworthy if we could tie game play into learning and health?
Strategy games seem to be ripe to teach and measure a child’s cognitive ability to grasp a concept and implement learning into game play. I’ve played strategy games that integrate my choice of tactics into an overall score, but it’s all a free-for-all. I have to know what tactics to use for a given situation or just wing it and muscle my way through. What if the game provided some kind of instruction and measured my ability to follow those instructions? And what if it then analyzed my ability to learn across different situations and different games?
What about morality based games? I love the idea behind an open-ended world that allows me to choose my own adventure, such as KOTOR and Fable on my old Xbox. Measuring the moral decisions a child makes throughout a game seems like an awesome way to start to collect data on how kids cope in game play.
Once all this information is collected, it can be analyzed and trended. After talking with my friends Tom Stitt and Stew Apelzin, I think that’s where the real value lies.
What do you think? Can metrics attached to the back end of game play help us understand how kids learn by playing games? Can that information then be used to integrate better lessons into better games? Can it tie back to making kids healthier?
photo by: RodrigoFavera
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
