welcome to part two of our series on how
games can be used in education last week
we talked about how games can free us
from a fear of failure and make homework
a learning opportunity rather than just
an assessment by giving students the
instantaneous feedback they need to
freely discover and explore this week
we're gonna talk about what that
instantaneous feedback does for teachers
and how games can help us give each
student the lessons they need one of the
biggest problems with schooling is that
classrooms are simply too big to give
each student that sort of personalized
attention they need and this is true of
almost all modern classrooms not just
the overcrowded 60-person classes we
sometimes think of when people talk
about our educational crisis now many of
you who are watching this are probably
much better more experienced teachers
than James but when he talks about it he
feels pretty strongly that it's very
hard to give 100% to more than 10 maybe
12 students at a time any more than that
and it gets difficult to understand
where each student is struggling and to
craft lessons for each of them on a
personalized basis and yet this is what
games let us do you see one of the great
struggles in trying to educate a nation
whose population numbers in the hundreds
of millions is that we have to create a
standard curriculum for everyone and
this is in many ways fantastic it helps
ensure that all schools are teaching up
to a baseline level it allows teachers
to share ideas about curriculum
nationwide it creates a standard set of
knowledge that colleges and universities
can then build from but it's not right
for everyone in fact you can pretty much
guarantee that it's not perfectly right
for anyone and this is especially
important in education as often when you
hear someone say something like I'm not
good at math it's not that they aren't
good at math but rather that at some
point in their education some part of
the curriculum didn't make sense to them
and they got left behind that small gap
in their understanding just compounding
over time as the class had to move ahead
this problem could of course be
corrected if teachers had both the
information they needed to identify
where each student was struggling and
the ability to tailor their assignments
to each individual students needs
clearly that's a ludicrous in the
context of modern schooling no teacher
will ever have time in the classroom to
make specialized assignments for each
student and often they don't even have
the data they need to pinpoint what tiny
sub concept a student is struggling with
not so with games think about games as
they stand today think about how many
metrics games already take we know
wherever you click we know how long you
stood waiting to make a jump or how many
people died on that one ledge we can
take in vast amounts of data and if we
dynamically alter the experience based
on that data at the simplest level we've
all played games whether or not we
realized it at the time where they
adjusted the difficulty on the fly based
on our performance on a slightly more
sophisticated level we have things like
the director and left for dead
now think about using that for education
imagine a child going home each night
and the game being able to feedback
massive amounts of data to their teacher
automatically calling out anywhere the
child is struggling or highlighting
places where they excel imagine it doing
more than that imagine the game they
play actually choosing challenges for
the child based on this data
imagine one child being assigned
something that helps shore up their
understanding of cross canceling
fractions while another gets a little
more time focusing on order of
operations imagine the game actually
being able to send the child through
micro tutorials on those subjects if
changing the play by itself wasn't
enough and finally imagine the game
being able to put a special flag on the
assignment so it immediately got noticed
by the teacher if the systems within the
game weren't enough to help the student
through whatever they might be
struggling with games could
automatically tailor assignments for us
based on our needs without overburdening
teachers who are already stretched to
the limit and it could give teachers so
many more tools to understand where
their charges may have misunderstood a
lesson or missed a fundamental concept
this may sound wild like it would take
an incredibly extensive game system and
it would but nothing beyond what we're
already capable of in fact when you
consider that every student in America
would be playing the thing immediately
making it the most played game of all
time producing a game like this suddenly
sounds incredibly economically efficient
when we stop thinking on the scale of
entertainment and start considering the
size of the public school system and
endeavor like this while by no means
trivial becomes completely reasonable it
would take a great deal of time and
effort it would require an incredible
amount of work with teachers and subject
matter experts and even then would
probably need some trial and error
before we got it right but it's by no
means outside what we're already capable
of so when someone asks you why we
should have games in schools beyond
making them more engaging you can tell
your interlocutor that games allow us to
provide teachers with incredible amounts
of data to work with to better
understand the learning needs of the
children in their care and that games if
we were willing to push for doing it
could allow us to automatically adjust
assignments on-the-fly they could allow
us to serve the needs of each and every
school child individually rather than
having to hope that our universal
standard works for them
catch you next week
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