Sandbox Summit: Day 2

Children's education disguised as building code, interactive art, and online games.

Forty six percent of kids are playing games with their phones as well as sending on average 50 texts each day. With such a high rate of adoption and the ability to access online games virtually anywhere, it is no wonder that that video game producers and marketers seek to create games that give kids twitching fingers something to “obsess” over.

But the constant exposure and focused engagement (that some misname as addiction) that accompany online gaming has the potential to shape our understanding of how children learn.  On today’s “Inside Online Games” panel, Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at MIT’s Media Lab whose research team contributed to the award-winning LEGO Mindstorms, highlighted Scratch as an example of the benefits of gaming architecture in developing children’s creative skills. Scratch is a new programming language tool and website that allows for kids to create their own animated stories and games. It has inspired some users to not only create interactive art but to act as consultants, offering to draw unique characters at the online community’s request. Some users also use the open source space to teach others tutorials on how to create new characters, encouraging interactive and collaborative gaming with other kids. Constance Steinkuehler, Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, agreed that games like Scratch, where there were more possibilities for creative manipulation, encouraged kids to connect and immerse themselves in their interests. But Constance also played the role of the self-proclaimed skeptic on the panel, pointing out that the type of learning that children were achieving in their own play spaces far surpassed what teachers were trying to achieve in school. She argued that there was a “firewall” between play and school, where kids felt that their play was wildly unrelated to what they were doing in the classroom. Both Resnick and Steinkuehler agreed that the type of learning that was achieved through online gaming shouldn’t be disconnected from the teacher's curriculum. One would assume that the remedy for this type of separation would be to incorporate games into the classroom. But the panelists had a provocative counter point to this misleading idea. I spoke with the third speaker on the panel, Eric Klopfer, Director of MIT’s Education Arcade, on the role of gaming in schools, initiatives the Arcade has developed, and the future of mobile gaming in children’s education.