Educational Study Game Ideas

I work in a middle school where all of the students are checked out Chromebooks. They do homework on them and sometimes we allow them to play games. Supposed to be approved educational study games. These games are from the books we have and they are very boring matching games. I am curious if anyone has any ideas on a study game that would not be too complicated to make so I could try and get it out to the students to see if improves test scores.

My random ideas:
-a dungeon puzzle game where to access certain parts or to pick up an object have to answer a question
-basic flashcard game, but you acquire points for some type of reward
-Racing game where getting question right allows you to go faster

Also I am in classes for Ancient History so any ideas with that theme would be awesome!

 

However you dress it up, make sure you are building in a spaced repetition system (SRS).

SRS is hands-down the best way to learn any kind of facts that have to be memorized. It presents each fact just before you would have forgotten it, reinforcing the memory, without wasting time reviewing things you already know. I've been using it for years now to learn Japanese kanji and vocabulary (among other things), and it's ridiculously effective. (See here for the tale of how I learned 1500 kanji in six months.)

 

Small world, I totally read that blog last year. No wonder your name was familiar. Also, the New Game! anime was awesome.

As far as making educational games... the game itself has to be educational. Students, even adult students, will absolutely rebel against anything that smells of a game with a test stapled to its face. They want their games to be games and their tests to be tests.

So what you do is construct a system where the answer to the question is actually useful in the game. For example, let's say you want your students to learn the city-states of ancient Greece. You could throw flash cards in their face all day, and they would learn nothing.

But if you give them a basic war game where your alerts come up as "Elis is being attacked!" or "There is a drought in Sparta!" and there is no visual indicator of where these are, your students will literally have no choice but to learn what and where these city-states are. Otherwise, they will suck at the game. And they don't want to suck at the game, so they now want to know what you want them to know.

That's the real key. They have to want to know it - instead of just wanting the arbitrary carrot you've stapled it to. It's a subtle distinction. But the test performance just naturally falls out of what the students want to do anyway, so it doesn't feel like learning or studying.

At the core, it's about a reason why. Why do I need to know where Corinth is to make my car go faster? It makes no sense. But if I need to know where Corinth is because the gold deposit I want to mine is in Corinth, that makes sense. I understand how these things are connected. If I don't see the connection, I see right through your trickery and rebel against your futile effort to control me.

 

I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that even the simplest possible game is hard. Assuming you do not have much experience building games (i.e. not a programmer, not an artist), you can start with the premise that it will take you many months to bring even the crudest idea to life. Nevermind making something engaging that also educates.

The good news is that games work. The even better news is that you don't need a computer game - you can create a physical game (cards, board game, class room game-activity) in a matter of days. I taught the National Science Foundation's Edugaming Workshop for 4 years. We brought in highschool teachers, taught them the basics of game design, and then mentored them through building a physical classroom game that they then brought back to their classes. Low budget, no tech, and apply-able to every subject imaginable!

Some resources:

• Why Games Work - the science of learning (published paper)
• What Makes Great Games Great (conf presentation)

Rock on!
Gigi

 

You can take a look here, and organize the list by Genre. You will see a variety of games that Nintendo made for educational purposes. Maybe some good ideas there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

 

Take a look at some classics that did it well. One thing they all have in common is they focused on the game play, while the learning was something of a backdrop you went through in order to better play the game. They are rarely outright question/answer format. You learned in order to better play the game rather than interrupted play with arbitrary learning moments that take you out of the game.

Oregon Trail - Learning history, historical locations, and resource management, while playing a game where you're trying to get your family from the developed east to Oregon set in the mid 1800's.

Agent USA - Learning geography, major city names and locations, spelling and time zones, all while trying to combat what is basically a zombie virus spreading across the country.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? - Learning geography and encyclopedia facts while trying to track down Carmen Sandiego and her henchmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_USA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego

 

Last year I worked on one good project as a developer - Predynastic Egypt http://store.steampowered.com/app/461620
I love context-based learning in this game actually. Game designer put real historical events to the game as challenges. So player actually pass real part of history of ancient egypt. This company also have two similar games, but i didn't play it. Only know that they have similar structure and gameplay.