Future Learning: Part 2

Here’s our first selection of the kind of ‘future learning’ that we would like to see built into games used for fun and learning inside and outside the home. We’re going to highlight some of what we see as ‘key skills’ and present examples of existing games which offer such skills during play.

You’ll see one or two of our ‘Usual Suspects’ among the games as we go through the series. That’s because many commercial games focus on skills that don’t go beyond basic resource management, so-called ‘brain training’, simulated driving and pretending to shoot people in the head.

The timing of the appearance of this blog is, in part, because more games are finally starting to ‘move on’ to include more interesting skills which are central to gameplay:

Games often involve players in making frequent decisions and choices. Players have to weigh up evidence and quickly develop effective solutions. This allows players to learn flexible decision-making and planning skills.

Agricola is the type of strategy boardgame that makes it fairly easy to point to a range of critical thinking skills. Its learning curve is too steep for complete beginners but many teenagers could enjoy it after playing games like Talisman.

Agricola ZMG 7026

Games allow students to explore situations and learn different approaches to dealing with complex problems. Part of this exploration comes from a game’s context, which feeds into learning the social perspective taking skills that help us to adapt to new situations in the ‘real world’.

Free Realms is a virtual world that gets kids started on videogame roleplaying and introduces many of the standard approaches found in tabletop and videogame RPGs.

Free Realms

The use of technologies in games may help students to become used to working with future skills, in a technological future where switching between tasks, ‘pooling’ data from multiple sources and applying predictive or diagnostic decision making is going to be highly valued.

Batman Arkham Asylum is flavour of the month and rightly so. It’s too graphic for kids but there’s no denying the need to display plenty of thinking skills if you want to protect Gotham City. We’re using the link to the original comic here. You’ll maybe notice the name of a comic artist that we’ve mentioned before. (As always, you’re a star Dave). The first link is to the comic version. The second to the PC version. There’s a PS3 link off our recent post about Arkham Asylum.

Batman: Arkham Asylum(Graphic Novel)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC-DVD)