Just a game?

I met with some very impressive young people yesterday during my visit to a local secondary school. I was visiting Saltash.Net Community School with one of my Austrian research colleagues to see how the school is using e-learning approaches and harnessing Web 2.0 tools. In my opinion, Saltash is one of the most innovative schools in the country, which is underlined by the amount of national awards it has been given recently. Around the table at lunch, in the Headteacher's office, we sat eating pizza and drinking fruit juice with five year 10 students. The talk inevitably turned to internet games (I actually initiated this part of the conversation) and suddenly the students because very animated. They enthused over Farmville, the Sims and other long games and talked about how much they enjoyed playing them.

I asked them what they actually learned from playing games such as Farmville. They didn't miss a beat. One bright young lad said that he learned how to organise his time and make better schedules to plough ground, sow seeds and reap crops. 'If you don't time it perfectly, your crops die' he said. Another student said that to organise her time and calculate how much she was earning and spending on Farmville, she used a spreadsheet alongside the game. This taught her how to plan for expenditure and calculate how much she could expand her farm next time. I think she is also learning how to integrate tools together to amplify her learning. Time management, organisation, planning - these are clearly very important skills that can be applied to formal learning activities.

The teachers in the room were clearly interested in these views and I could see them trying to work out how to capitalise on the affordances of these popular games in the classroom. In other words, they were interested in taking the power and attraction of informal learning tools and harnessing or leveraging them within formal learning contexts. It's the Holy Grail of education - and it's not easy.

I read a very interesting blog post entitled 10 things I learned from Farmville about real life farming which included such gems as 'looking after your neighbours' - that is, collaborative working. I'm sure there are a huge number of transferrable life skills children can acquire tacitly from games like Farmville and The Sims, including planning, time management, problem solving and coping with disappointment. Such games are often maligned by some teachers and parents as a 'waste of time' and children do, if allowed, play for long periods of time on such games. But doesn't that tell us something about the power of these tools to engage, enthrall and educate? How can we harness this power in the classroom - that is the question...

The Professor, the Pizza and Farmville (Dan Roberts)

Saltash School (Bernhard Standl)

Image source