Translator: Emilie Hughes Reviewer: Didar Omar
I’m going to present a situation.
Well, more than a situation,
my own situation.
When I was seven or eight years old,
I was full of energy, running all over the place.
It was really fun.
Well, until it was time to learn math.
It was always really complicated for me,
and seeing papers with so many equations...
...bored me.
I had a hard time understanding them.
Because of this,
a teacher started to teach us using a game.
A videogame.
Which game? This one.
I know that it seems very simple,
but for a 7 or 8 year old kid,
it was totally ground-breaking.
This game has meteorites with numbers
falling on penguins.
Something surreal, but for a kid it was super fun.
I really loved it.
The teacher explained to us that when the meteorites fall,
the only way to help the penguins was to solve equations.
The answer to the equation...
...was the meteorite’s number.
I’d like to ask you something.
Think like a 7 or 8 year old kid.
How would you want to learn?
Like this?
Or like this?
Clearly, the first option right?
Many people think this.
Because it is.
For a kid, especially one who is always active,
sitting in a classroom working on equations
on a paper is really boring.
Because of this, I became interested in gamification.
What is gamification?
According to Eduteca and the ISESA University,
gamification is the use of elements of video games
in other settings such as studying, education and others.
I will talk a little bit about how gamification can be applied.
First I would like to show you
how reasoning happens in video games.
Here we have a character.
Some of you will know him.
It’s from a video game where this character
can move forward, backward, and jump.
How does reasoning happen?
Trial and error.
Often times we fail at first.
We try everything from the start.
We can start to move ahead or backwards.
We can jump.
We have all these options when we encounter
our first enemy.
Here is where we put on our thinking hats.
You could be a bit more aggressive, try to jump on him.
And you discover that you can defeat it that way.
Or you could be calmer and just avoid it.
This kind of reasoning not only helps us find a solution,
but it shows us that there are many ways to find a solution.
It’s a process that anyone can do in their own way,
but everyone comes to the same result.
It’s a different situation having video games in the classroom.
How can gamification be used for education?
Fun.
Yes, it’s fun.
For a 7 or 8 year old kid, like I said,
who had these games...
For me it was not only fun, but it was a competition with my friends
to see who would get the farthest, who would save the penguins.
It was really fun for me.
It made learning fun.
Fun in a different way, out of the ordinary.
This can be used in high schools today
if people are not excited for
chemistry exercises in the lab.
In my opinion,
doing the chemistry equation and then doing the experiment
are different things.
It’s a different way of learning,
how the information gets into your head.
It’s different.
What about studying?
How can we combine studying and video games?
Let’s start with frustration.
Often, when we have an opportunity to learn
we get frustrated when we can’t find the solution.
For example, we have a quiz, we fail the quiz.
We can’t usually try again.
I say this from personal experience.
As a student, failing tests frustrates me a lot.
I can’t try again.
I can’t get feedback.
However, in video games,
when you lose,
you simply push a button.
The retry button.
With this simply button, we can try
as many times as we want until we find the answer.
Until we learn what we need to pass the lever.
Like I told you, the video game my teacher used
was a game you could play for hours and hours
until you learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide perfectly.
Imagine that you are a 7 or 8 year old kid
who knows how to multiply 3-digit numbers.
All thanks to a video game.
I know that sounds impressive, surreal,
but it’s a reality that we can achieve,
that we can bring together.
What else can be associated with video games
besides normal studies,
like math or Spanish?
I’m going to show you the social area.
These games that you see here are multiplayer games.
We can use these games to play with people all over the world,
even with relatives who live in other countries
to pass time or talk with them.
These video games give us the opportunity
to communicate with different groups.
For example, many times when we are studying...
Excuse me.
When we are playing
we can meet someone from another country.
We can meet British, Brazilian, or Spanish people.
And many of them have different dialects.
They speak and express themselves differently.
We learn how to speak with them anyway
to achieve the same goal.
To win the game.
I also learned better English pronunciation
playing these games with British people.
They taught me things, and I taught them too.
It was really fun.
I learned to socialize effectively
through video games.
Look at this picture.
What do you see?
Many say: “It’s a man flying an airplane.”
But it’s not.
This is a flight simulator.
Believe it or not this is considered a video game.
A video game is an electronic game that is on a screen.
That’s what this is.
Everything you see, all the buildings,
all the lights, all that is a screen.
Why am I talking about this?
Most of the time, learning requires practice.
These exercises increase understanding, help you understand.
In this case, practicing in a plane
can have catastrophic accidents.
And we don’t want that.
Because of this, many schools
use what we call simulators
to teach students how to fly planes
or even cruise ships.
This is a more effective way of learning.
They can learn with all the buttons,
they can learn almost every little thing,
and not just read the manual.
It takes them through everything they need to know.
Including one that brings you a glass of water.
Absolutely everything.
They have a complete understanding of everything they do.
Now look at this picture.
It shows a study about learning through this video game.
This is a popular game throughout time.
They had a test.
The 40% of students that used this game
had higher grades than the 60% that didn’t.
Why?
Although this game is not very realistic
and a little pixelated,
it’s historically accurate.
Everything that is shown here is from that time.
The game shows the time period exactly.
Simulators bring us to this idea:
gamification lets us learn through games.
We even learn more quickly that way.
And we can retry as many times as we want.
Here’s another example.
They also sometimes give out criticisms.
This picture is inspired by a game.
Well, the game is inspired by the picture.
The painting is The Pietà, it’s in the Vatican.
This picture shows the Virgin
holding Jesus after his death
in her arms.
But the game represents this differently.
Video games help us think differently.
Many times games criticize something, often religion or politics.
Not only this, but video games
teach us personality characteristics and features.
This actually helps us learn more quickly in many cases.
Who can deny that when you work with a friend
you understand better what they are saying?
Because they’re your friend.
There is a connection, and you understand better.
Video games do the same thing.
They give us a character
and depending on the choices you make or how it’s programmed,
it has certain features.
It can be more intelligent, or funnier,
they can be more humorous or more serious.
In the end, we get attached to the character.
When something happens to them, we get angry or we have fun.
This happened to me with the penguins.
The penguins were like my kids.
I had to protect them from the falling meteorites.
I got attached to the game.
I’d like to show you one last character.
At the beginning, this character gives us an option.
To kill it or not.
After, you can choose to go back in time,
but if you do, it gives you a phrase that makes us think.
That is:
“No matter what decision you take, you’ll have to live with what you did.”
You can go back as many times as you want, but what you did can’t be changed.
You must live with it.
Video games don’t only teach math and language.
They don’t only teach us to communicate.
They give us morals and generate emotions.
We can apply all this more to education,
we can level up,
we can encourage our students
to want to learn more.
Here are two phrases, one from a video game journalist,
the other from a writer.
The journalist tells us that we aren’t accustomed
to the fact that video games teach us emotions,
that we can see such real emotions in pixels.
We can say it like that.
Here the man tells us that today we live in a monotony.
We are trapped in this repetition over and over.
Often, this is the case in education.
Repeat equations a thousand times. Repeat texts a thousand times.
Because it doesn’t give us, as he says, more creativity every day.
so that when we die we don’t regret it.
We’re sure we lived a full life.
A life full of diversity and differences.
So we get to a point where we’re proud
of all that we’ve done and learned.
To conclude, I want to give you this last message.
I want to invite you to...
Often our children, our friends,
fail a subject or don’t understand something.
We torture them, draw them away,
or prevent them from having these video games.
Instead, I want to invite you
to give them the opportunity to learn through games.
And that they themselves make the video games that teach them.
This not only sparks interest,
it makes it possible for others to learn.
We can communicate, we can evolve.
We can break this cycle that we have in education.
We can create change in young people,
and in adults.
All this can apply in universities, colleges, and high schools.
So I give you this last phrase.
It’s not from an expert. It’s my own.
My phrase is that we live in a cycle.
Let’s live every day like it’s the last. Let’s learn differently.
And let’s learn as much as we can. Thank you.
(Applause)