Instructional Games

What: Instructional games are software developed to motivate students' learning through competition and student developed games.

Why: Games have been suggested as an effective approach for engaging students in the activities of scientists, particularly those activities associated with reasoning, choice, and communication. As stated in the recently released National Research Council's report, entitled Science through Computer Simulations and Games, "games have potential to advance multiple science learning goals, including motivation to learn science, conceptual understanding, science process skills, understanding of the nature of science, [and] scientific discourse and argumentation" (NRC, 2011, p. 2).

Research: Findings of various cognitive research studies show that games increase student interest in science while helping them to develop content understanding and process skills. Through playing instructional games students can "see the world around them in new ways and engage with realistic issues in a context with which the students are already connected" (Klopfer and Sheldon, 2002).

Best Practices: Games can be used in many situations such as to teach about complex systems or to increase students' problem solving skills. Consideration should be given in planning to understanding students learning styles and background knowledge. Competition and contexts of some games may not be motivating to all students. For example, some games require students to play as a team while others may emphasize individual effort.

Example:  In one of the learning games called Environmental Detective, students take a role of environmental engineer to find out a source of a toxin that had leaked into groundwater (Klopfer and Squire, 2008). Students work in teams and investigate the challenge in an actual geographic location. To solve the challenge students consider various factors such as topology, attitude of the location, visibility of potential remediation etc. While students find some of this information in their handhelds they need to walk around and make observations in the area to collect more data. The game includes real scientific data and students perform the investigations as scientists.