Why and how video games will bring revolution to education
Why revolution?
In the first place, we need to understand exactly why and what we need to revolutionise. Today’s education system creates many problems globally: disengagement, dropping out, poor mental health, low self-esteem, and limited employability possibilities.
These are not side effects. These are the structural features of our school. Industrial school is powered by standardisation and wrong assumptions about how children learn. By an expert in education Sir Ken Robinson, who talks about the need for a full reform of schools, the change needs to be at the core. Not around it. That core was moulded during the first industrial revolution and hasn’t changed still.
Quite a lot of educational technologies — EdTechs and government policies do not focus on changing that core because it is just too hard. Those who try, face many problems. The system is just too big and inert. Sometimes they even enforce this broken model and help to lock it in. Nevertheless, I know a few EdTechs who are trying and succeeding, but it’s still too slow and hard to scale.
So how do we make that revolution?
To understand how to transform schools, we need to look back at how people learn. Modern brain research revealed that children are natural-born learners. You do not need to force them to learn. They are from the beginning curious, motivated and self-driven. Our schools kill the drive to learn for children.
It turns out that play is a natural way for children to learn. Every mammal plays to ensure getting the right skills to grow into an adult. Lion parents are even seen roleplaying with their cubs. Homo sapiens can do it on a whole new level. Play is our collective imagination creating non-existing rules where we can safely learn by trial and error. Play is the best process of training an organic algorithm. Peter Otis Gray is a professor at Boston College who does great research about the importance of self-driven play from an evolutionary perspective.
A game we play is a system, which has an artificial conflict, which is bound by rules and has a measurable outcome — that’s how game designers put it. But it has many faces and forms. One way how the play looks in schools is project-based learning while collaborating which imitates real life. But the most important feature of the play is that it’s not passive consumption of information. It is an active one. Freedom to act and react. Children are still finding their talents and personality, so play should be an exploration born from curiosity. Play must be self-directed.
It changes the role of the teacher as well. Not to broadcast information, but to empower learning. From anthropology research, we learned that free play without adults has great value. Most of the time in schools should become student-driven play/learning while teachers facilitate the process. So the main focus shifts from the teachers to the content that students play with. Play needs an environment where children can explore with freedom and play with rules — content.
That is the easy part. Most of those things are known for decades. The core shift here is that now play is manual work and hard to integrate into today’s education structures. We need to automate it. That is the hard part. How to make it at scale and efficiently.
Somehow we need to make the play: easy to scale, adaptable to each group/student, easy for teachers to use, low cost so everyone can access it, and easy to create or change.
Good thing we have examples in other industries who did exactly that! For the past 50 years, many industries have grown multiple times in efficiency. How?
Digitalisation! Computers and the internet.
We need to digitalize the play. Digital play.
Wait.
Sounds familiar.
Video games!
For the past two decades, the video game industry developed the right tools to organise play and especially sandbox and simulation games grew in numbers and quality drastically. And in the last 10 years, most of the gaming industry shifted to collaboration, creativity and self-expression.
But playing computer games doesn’t mean you are learning. Right? Yes and no. Video games and education are pretty close, and there is a very narrow line dividing them. That line is called facilitator and it can be a game design element or a person-teacher.
Playing video games most of the time now is like feeding your talent. But learning is growing your talent. Video games can easily both provide feeding and learning.
Using video games in education is called game-based learning and through research, it was proven that it has great value! It can teach both hard skills and competencies and it is adaptable to many situations.
To name a few video games that are great examples:
- Minecraft (and especially user-made the modifications),
- Eco,
- Kerbal Space Program,
- Cities: Skylines,
- Stardew Valley,
- Farming Simulator.
They let players engage in an open world with many interesting rules and create something by themselves. Children love to use these games to collaborate, communicate and solve problems together and you don’t even need to force them. These video games are meant for entertainment but have almost everything a formal curriculum needs! Tweaking them just a little and adding more educational functions can provide massive value to schools.
They could be used during classes or for homework. Individual learning or in groups. Short lessons in an hour or year-long projects. Getting knowledge and a better understanding of the topic or purely creative tasks to generate new ideas and put your knowledge into action. With teacher-lead or student-driven.
However, they are hard to use in schools.
Now, most game creators do not think of implementing/expanding games to be suitable for education. Nor adaptations to be used in schools. It would cost a lot and the market is unexplored and inert. And most educational games, especially mobile games, are enforcing broken education models. They are targeting parent pockets, not the transformation of education.
Basically, right now the video game industry is completely focused on entertainment.
What needs to change?
What we need is a lot of people creating a lot of various games with strong educational elements that are easily accessible. There is no ecosystem for that. Tiny supply and tiny demand. And even a lot of times cultural resistance.
We need seeds for the ecosystem and somehow culturally and economically bridge the education and gaming industries. For that to start, I believe, two things need to happen:
someone leading it and better tools.
Why do we need someone to break the ice?
Because schools now most of the time see video games as an enemy of the education system. That it distracts students from learning. If we want to enforce a broken education model furthermore, they are right. It’s not the video games’ problem, it’s the schools’ problem. Video games provide far more interesting challenges than schools. We need more good examples of success cases and especially for less progressive schools. Slowly incorporating game-based learning into the formal curriculum and gradually changing the status quo.
That will prepare the ground for more solutions to come and transform schools. Start simple, and advance gradually. Schools will adopt this method slowly and safely changing lessons that are easy to change. Probably first targeting for better grades. With time schools will become more open to more diverse solutions. You reach better grades not because you focus on grades, but in general on the well-being of children in schools.
And most importantly, from the educational side, leading the transformation of schools with video games is a very hard challenge. There are still very few examples and a lack of research and methods. It is easy to do it in the wrong way. Creators and businesses need guidance on how to do it properly.
And they also need better tools to create those solutions.
How do we create digital play?
A few decades ago, every game development studio created its game engine from scratch. That is making a game from nothing. It took a lot of people and time to produce even the simplest game.
It’s like building a house and you need to make every material yourself.
Now, most of the games are produced in either Unreal or Unity game engines. It takes far fewer people and time to create amazing games. Now even solo developers can produce best-selling games.
It is like building a house, but you get a wide range of prepared materials available to use.
There is another step for enabling faster creation of games. Modifying existing games. For decades there was a popular thing for various games to create modifications, so-called mods, on existing game mechanics. That is how a good portion of very popular games was born. That way you had a base game and only needed to create additional ideas on top.
It’s like someone else built a house and you just decorate a room inside.
In the last decade fusing sandbox genre elements and modding capabilities we get two most popular games in the world right now: Minecraft and Roblox. They enable everyone to create something inside. These are Integrated Virtual World Platforms (IVWP) and they are the fastest way of creating a game experience now.
Minecraft is the first good tool and the first that started game-based learning on a bigger scale.
As Minecraft pushed the video games industry to creativity and the sandbox genre 14 years ago, it also started bringing education and video games together. With Minecraft: Education Edition developers, teachers and children can use video games to foster education in many new forms. Teaching a wide range of subjects, including maths, science, history, language arts, and coding. The game can be used in a variety of ways, such as creating virtual worlds to explore and study different historical periods or natural phenomena, or building and programming robots and other automated systems. Minecraft is a pioneer here.
So is Minecraft suitable for the education revolution?
It is the best we have, but far from what we need.
It will stay only a pioneer here. As Minecraft: Education Edition has many licences sold worldwide, I saw that teachers rarely use it. It lacks content, better inside tools and better policies. The platform is very close to the community for further development. Both, education and commercial, editions of Minecraft are moving to be closed platforms for development and bundled products. It is very hard to monetize educational content there.
It is not an attractive platform for creative people to come and create educational content in it. And personally working with this platform for 10 years I don’t see it becoming one.
Another candidate video game is Roblox. It is also an integrated virtual world platform like Minecraft. It has way more tools to create content yet lacks a sandbox element. It takes a lot of work to create content there and it takes a 75% cut of the revenue. It is a lot. It has many smaller problems and all of them sum up that it is also not a very attractive platform to foster the creation of educational content.
There are many other IVWPs, but they have similar problems: no content ownership, lack of monetisation, Lack of tooling and you can’t even make your tools as there is no access to the underlying code, ridiculous entry cost, fake digital scarcity, poor data policies, or technologically not suitable for education products. That leaves us with a gap. We need a good dedicated platform for this problem.
The next-generation platform
We need a virtual worlds creation platform that:
- Enables easy creation of content with adaptable complexity,
- Embraces the sandbox element of play,
- Fosters an open and digital economy to attract creators,
- Focuses on students’ data decentralisation,
- Has educational mentoring and moderation.
This platform would lay a new bridge between gaming and education. It would allow bright people to create many different educational solutions. And it doesn’t even need to be completely for education. As I mentioned before, fun and learning are not that far apart.
And to push it even further
This platform together with upcoming technologies with VR and AR will enable digital play to be an active physical activity. Web3 and blockchain could help to decentralise the students’ data and make a more open and frictionless digital economy. Integrating generative AI these virtual worlds could be created way faster, more immersive, more adaptable and procedurally generated.
For example, instead of learning about astronomy through books and information broadcasting, students could use video games to experience the subject in a fully immersive way. In a virtual sandbox, students could use their hands to manipulate virtual objects, such as building a rocket, adjusting its parameters, and performing calculations. They could even launch the rocket and explore different planets, building outposts and learning through trial and error. And very shortly, the outposts in games will have NPCs (non-player characters) which will behave like real people, so students will be able to learn social science in these simulations. Video games in education allow students to actively engage with the material, rather than passively receive information.
The new digital era
Putting it all together, almost all of the required components I have been talking about fall under one name — metaverse. 3D internet. And a immensly interactive one. The revolution in education will come together with a new era of the internet. The building blocks for it are already emerging and video games are leading it. Metaverse with interconnected sandbox virtual worlds will create a new layer for education — a web of digital environments for self-driven play with a lot of content and every school will connect to it.
And that is exactly what our startup Three Cubes is doing. Bringing revolution of education through the metaverse.
We are leading it. For the past 6 years, we have piloted many different forms of game-based learning in schools through Minecraft: Education Edition. Now we have many products for schools to easily equip this learning method and in the last year schools started to join fast.
We are on the road to building the next-gen tool. We want not only to easily create these games ourselves but to enable others also and push the technologies further. Fostering the ecosystem. So we decided to create a new WEB3 technologies-based Integrated Virtual Worlds Platform that focuses on education.
The timing is perfect
The education system is one of the slowest changing industries, but soon it will have plasticity for change again. Crises are opportunities. But the pandemic was not a strong crisis for education. It was a kick for sure. But not at the core. What we did during the pandemic was just bring a not working model of education to screens and make it even worse. A different crisis is approaching. Disruptive technologies like AI will change the job market and in general, the world so much that schools and real life will be astronomical scale apart.
And it’s true today. Today in schools children are behaving like time travellers. Seeing if they would survive in the previous century. Learning all the skills that were valuable a few decades ago.
So let’s change education together! Like our future depends on it. Because it does!
If you want to be a part of our journey, follow us and join our new community of innovators!
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Also, Sir Ken Robinsons and Peter Otis Gray both have great TED talks. “Do schools kill Creativity?” and “The decline of play”