Student Post: Matthew Young

 I am wholly in support of using games as learning tools and as assessments. My main reasoning behind this is that it abstracts the learning and the assessment process for the student in a way that relies upon intrinsic reward rather than extrinsic rewards. With any standard assessment, the student is working for a good grade. However, with a game, students will compete to do better than a peer, to see if they can accomplish a task, or even something as basic as the endorphins released from instant positive feedback.

Motivation, in general, is stronger when it is internally based rather than external, it can be a way to keep a student on task or to push them harder. When playing a game, a student might forget that they "don't know how to do it" or "can't possibly answer that question". A strictly gaming example is recently taking my partner into a very difficult level in Destiny because they had been complaining about how bad they were at the game, but then showing them upon completion that they were better than they think. To bring that to learning, a student may look at a complicated algebra problem which in reality is just more steps than they are used to rather than too complex a concept, and if the process has been gamified they would dive into it instead of balking at the prospect.

The other benefit to using games is that games of all types involve rules. This is useful in math and science because many of these processes also rely on rules which can be abstracted to games. This allows them to memorize rules through gameplay, test rules through experimentation with instant feedback (an action - consequence relationship instead of hypothesis - procedure) and allows them to explain those rules by trying to create games of their own. The first idea that comes to mind and this is cheating because I know it's already been done as a commercial project, is asking students to make a board game that involves traversing the periodic table or creating molecules using component atoms. One could also imagine giving students a board or card game involving factoring, fractions, or solving equations, or a game akin to Memory but with relationships between two terms or concepts instead of just pictures.

While tangential to the previous point, I would also add that in general games are fun while classically, "tests are hard and stressful", and performance with a mental task for most people is improved when there isn't stress involved.