Imagine sitting in class with a professor giving a lecture on the moral complexities of the video game Grand Theft Auto. For many college students, this would be a dream come true, and University of Wisconsin professor of curriculum and instruction James Gee hopes to make this dream a reality.
Gee, who teaches a graduate class on video games and education, researches college students and their video-gaming habits, an area he feels is an untapped resource for educators.
His son Sam’s interest in video games led Gee to come across what he considers to be an important tool for cognitive development.
“It dawned on me that good games were learning machines,” Gee said. “As someone who had worked for years in the areas of learning and literacy, I realized that these principles were supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning,” Gee said.
As part of his research, Gee has played an extensive number of video games as well as interviewed gamers from six to 20 years of age. In addition, he requires all of his students to complete at least 50 hours of gaming at an off-campus facility equipped with Playstation 2, Nintendo Game Cube and X-Box.
From such studies, Gee has theorized that video games encourage hands-on, rather than passive, learning, which he believes will produce a better learner.
“Games allow players to customize the game to their own styles of learning and play, as well as to be active producers, not just consumers, through the actions they take in the game and the modifications they can make to the game,” Gee explained.
With such thoughts in mind, Gee and his students feel that video games can have far-reaching effects, for they “represent forms of social cooperation where differences of race, class and gender can be backgrounded in favor of shared interests, purposes and goals, while still be used as active resources of different styles and approaches for the community.”
However, Gee believes the violence and negative stereotypes surrounding video games is something that may slow down this wish. He attributes these attitudes to an age-gap in learning styles.
“There is a real generational divide here,” Gee said. “Baby-boomers were taught by schools that being smart is getting to one’s goal as fast and efficiently as possible. That is not how good games work.”
Gee would eventually like to start a campus-wide program that would support research and courses on games, gaming and game design, which would promote the games as learning tools in schools, workplaces and households.
UW offers two undergraduate courses in computer graphics for Computer Science students and one graduate course. There are currently no video-game courses.
UW assistant computer science professor Stephen Chenney said sometimes students take his course in computer graphics because of their interest in the subject matter.
“It motivates some students to take these courses, but we don’t emphasize the video-game aspect of teaching; we emphasize the technology and underlying foundation of writing the games,” Chenney said. “Students will write games, but they don’t get to play them.”
Associate Chair and Professor in the Computer Science department John Strikwerda is positive about the future of computer-graphics courses at UW.
“Certainly we’re interested in building up our computer-graphics courses in general,” Strikwerda said. “I don’t know how our faculty would respond to video-game courses. We’re an academic institution, not a technical one.”
As of yet, UW has no plans to introduce a related major, Strikwerda said.
