How Virtual Games Can Help Struggling Students Learn
11/26/2013
More educators are using online games to supplement teaching, and are seeing positive results. It seems like kids do everything online these days - and school is no exception. More and more, educators are taking advantage of digital advances to supplement their teaching in the classroom, and are seeing encouraging results. This is especially the case for certain subgroups of students that typically struggle academically, such as English language learners and special education students.
"The classroom you went to school in is almost the exact same classroom you'd walk into today, but the level of engagement our kids get outside of the classroom has changed dramatically," says Jessica Lindl, general manager of the digital gaming company GlassLab and a spokesperson for the game SimCityEDU. "Teachers are almost the entertainers trying to find whatever tool they can to try to engage their kids."
Lindl says the SimCityEDU game helps engage kids by helping them improve basic cognitive functions and critical thinking. In the game, students serve as the mayor of a city and are immediately faced with challenges - they must address environmental impacts on the city while maintaining employment needs and other relationships.
Although Lindl says it's important to use games as a supplement to classroom-based learning, such digital outlets have added benefits.
"There is continuous positive feedback," Lindl says. "Learners are way more likely to feel comfortable with a video game than taking a standardized test and that's really powerful."
Additionally, video games in the classroom provide teachers, administrators and parents with a plethora of data to give assessments on students' performances that Lindl says is invaluable, not just because of the granularity of the data, but also because it shows student achievements in real time. Other times, parents and students may have to wait weeks or months, depending on the test, to see their results.
"When you think of learning games, engagement and game mechanics is exciting, but there's a critical value proposition around game-based assessments that we're seeing," Lindl says. "Teachers, students and parents can have in the moment understanding of what the child is learning, how they arrived at that learning and accelerate what the learning is, as opposed to waiting weeks down the road."
Another valuable aspect of using games in the classroom is the competition (and hence reward) mechanisms built into some games.
At Mario Umana Academy in Boston, students from kindergarten through eighth grade have been using a program called First in Math since 2010. think certainly competition could be viewed as positive and negative, but right now it seems to be in this building a rallying cry for the school and an issue of school pride, where they can say that as a school we are working very hard to be number one in the state," says Principal Alexandra Montes McNeil.
And the students have achieved that goal for the past three years. Montes McNeil says the students see the competition as a motivating factor to help them achieve their math goals.
Ellen Latham, an eighth grade math teacher who pushed to bring the program to the schools, believes First in Math helps students build on basic math skills that many often struggle with, such as addition, multiplication, fractions, and other standard math curriculum. But in the math games, students are rewarded for solving problems with speed and accuracy, which helps them break through those barriers, Latham says.
"I have always felt in public education that kids' basic skills are slowing them down to understand more complex content," she says. "They're spending too much time trying to remember what nine times six is, but their time should be spent on the more complex math."
That's why often times, students at Mario Umana Academy are assigned First in Math games as a homework assignment. That way, as they build on basic skills at home, they're able to move on to more advanced math in the classroom - and the results show.
According to Montes McNeil, the school's math scores on state tests have gone up substantially, by about 20 to 22 composite performance index (CPI) points. And each year, the scores have gone up on state metrics by five to seven points.
"If this was a one-time deal that we get the kids going on First in Math and we get everybody to the same point, then it would level off," Montes McNeil says. "But we've consistently shown over the last four years a growth … and it's my hope and my expectation that we'll continue to show that growth."
Montes McNeil and Latham say the interest and performance of students in the school's special education program was a beneficial surprise. Often times, students from the special education program are part of the school's monthly top 10 students, Montes McNeil says.
"It's something they can access at their particular entry point and can build on their skills," Montes McNeil says. "Some of our students do have such academic needs that they're not performing, and will not perform, at grade level, but yet they feel a lot of success because they can be part of this school-wide initiative."
Another subgroup of students that appeared to benefit from the program is the school's English language learners. For more than half the students in the school, Montes McNeil says, English is not their first language.
One of the games, for example, helps students tell time in different ways by displaying an analog clock, a digital clock, or words, and asks students to then identify another representation of the same time.
"When students see the numbers '9:30' and see the words 'half past nine,' they can connect that language with the numbers," Latham says. "The program definitely facilitates the learning of the English language maybe a little bit more easily than other programs do, I think. It's not too heavy in language, and yet the language that it does provide is enough for them to learn."
While such games often prove particularly useful in topics such as science and math, Montes McNeil says the school is still searching for other games to provide the same level of engagement and outcomes for subjects such as English.
"It is a piece of the puzzle … that we continue to try to work out as the needs of the students change, as the expectations of the state and the country change," Montes McNeil says.
By Allie Bidwell