6/27/2005
Video Games Viewed Ss Aid To Education
6/27/05 Andy Hall Wisconsin State Journal
A Blackhawk is down.
Your mission: Search for the helicopter's crew in this bombed-out building somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Oh, wait.
A different scene appears on another screen.
You've got a new mission: Teach children to love science.
These are glimpses into the world of gaming - "serious gaming" as it's known by proponents - at vendors' booths this week at a conference held at Monona Terrace in Madison.
The event focused attention on the increasing respectability of video games. No longer exclusively the purview of obsessive teenagers and young adults, video games are receiving the blessings of some researchers, who hail them as a force that could transform classrooms, workplaces and even battlefields around the globe.
And Madison - thanks to researchers in a little-known academic lab - is right in the middle of the whole trend.
"They have more people here in the top tier than anywhere else in the nation," said Benjamin Stokes, manager of a program for NetAid, a nonprofit agency based in New York City that strives to inspire young people to fight global poverty.
Stokes, for his part, sees video games as a force for social change, so he's bringing together nonprofits and others across the country to develop games that create awareness and action on social problems ranging from hunger to AIDS.
About 325 computer experts and researchers from around the world, including people from colleges and schools, the military, gaming companies and nonprofit organizations, attended sessions and informal gatherings Thursday and Friday.
The goal was to explore the power of video games to foster learning and to understand video games' rapidly expanding role in society.
For decades, simulators have helped train people for such tasks as flying jets and firing military weapons. But they're expensive - often costing millions of dollars and requiring pricey upkeep. They usually aren't portable, either.
In contrast, educational video games can be delivered over the Internet to computers and other electronic devices, including cell phones, anywhere in the world.
"Get it on your cell phone," said Judy Brown, director of the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab, a joint University of Wisconsin System-Wisconsin Technical College project.
"Get it when and where you need it."
The lab, created in 2000, is funded by about $500,000 a year in grants and consulting contracts and brings together researchers from disparate disciplines to study and develop video games for educational purposes. About a fifth of the funds come from the U.S. Department of Defense. The lab's low profile locally belies its growing international reputation as a clearinghouse for some of the first academic research examining video games.
James Paul Gee, a UW- Madison researcher, told a standing-room-only crowd that video games hold promise for helping educators confront two crises:
Slumps among fourth- graders and older students who are failing to read well enough to master the complex vocabularies for such subjects as science and math.
Dimming prospects for college graduates who are finding that technical jobs are outsourced to nations such as India and China.
"We have a lot to learn from this despised industry about how to solve these crises," Gee said.
For example, Gee said, popular games such as "Yu-Gi-Oh" captivate children who pour hours into learning multi- layered rules and mastering skills because they engender a sense of purpose and fun.
Games such as history-based war game "Rise of Nations" offer players many pages of feedback in numbers and charts, providing players with clues for improving performance and offering a model that could be adopted by educators, he said.
"They never make you read a 500-page book before you can do anything, which is what we do in school," Gee said.
There was buzz about newly discovered abilities of video games to bring about change - not just for peaceful purposes, but also in war.
Frank Polster, director of Army Training Information Systems at the Army Training Support Center in Virginia, said the military is building video training programs into weapons systems, such as missile launchers or tanks. That way, soldiers will practice upon the same equipment they use, making the training more effective and keeping young soldiers engaged.
"This generation does not just sit there and take things passively," Polster said.
Michael Freeman, deputy director of the Department of Defense's Advanced Distributed Learning project in Virginia, said well-designed video games replicate what can be learned in simulators. They also engage players' interests by offering a story and teaching skills.
Freeman and Polster are working with manufacturers and software developers on uniform standards allowing old games to be merged with newcomers. A new game on running truck convoys in Iraq could be joined to an older game that included support strikes from F-16 jets.
A long-term goal, Freeman said, is to integrate games with players' prior performances, so they're drilled on areas that need improvement.
Freeman said he would understand if some people in Madison, with its history of opposition to wars including the U.S. military's presence in Iraq, are uneasy about the military forming an increasingly close alliance with the ADL lab in Madison.
However, he said, "even if someone is against the war, they wouldn't want someone not knowing how to react to (improvised) explosive devices, the IEDs. We're not really weaponizing anybody's mind. . . . We can disagree about whether we need to be someplace, but not whether someone needs these skills to survive."
The military already has found a potent link between video games and running a volunteer military force.
The world's most popular Internet video game, "America's Army," was developed for about $6 million beginning in 2000 and receives about $2 million a year in government funding, said Perry McDowell, who played a small role in its development. He now is executive director of Delta 3D, an "engine" the military is giving away to developers to foster the creation of a new generation of video games. McDowell works at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
"America's Army" was designed to give youths considering a military career some ideas about what soldiers do, from serving in the infantry to special forces and medic units. It's been played by 5.5 million people since its release on July 4, 2002.
On a typical day, it's played 1.6 million hours by a worldwide audience. The game is available free from an Army Web site, www.americas army.com.
Government research has credited the game with paying for itself by helping the Army recruit and retain soldiers. New soldiers who've played the game have gained familiarity with and a favorable impression of the military.
At his booth at Monona Terrace, McDowell demonstrated how Delta 3D, joined with scenery created by two interns, can simulate the site of a Blackhawk crash in an Iraqi or Afghan village. A full-scale game could be developed, he said, to train troops on searching for survivors in the hostile environment.
The military already uses such programs to train soldiers on how to hunt for improvised explosive devices and how to operate convoys in Iraq.
Another program, demonstrated by McDowell, will train Marines' forward observers on how to call in artillery strikes using night-vision goggles, laser sites, a compass and binoculars.
On the video screen, McDowell spied an Iraqi troop carrier, a mere speck on the desert landscape. He measured its coordinates and distance and punched in a series of firing codes, almost exactly as a Marine would do in combat.
The troop carrier was reduced to a smoking hulk.
"I hit it dead-on and I killed that target, which is pretty difficult to do in real life," McDowell said.
To make it more realistic, he said, programmers will introduce random algorithms, to simulate the vagaries of actual fire.
Contact Andy Hall at ahall@madison.com or 252-6136
A Blackhawk is down.
Your mission: Search for the helicopter's crew in this bombed-out building somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Oh, wait.
A different scene appears on another screen.
You've got a new mission: Teach children to love science.
These are glimpses into the world of gaming - "serious gaming" as it's known by proponents - at vendors' booths this week at a conference held at Monona Terrace in Madison.
The event focused attention on the increasing respectability of video games. No longer exclusively the purview of obsessive teenagers and young adults, video games are receiving the blessings of some researchers, who hail them as a force that could transform classrooms, workplaces and even battlefields around the globe.
And Madison - thanks to researchers in a little-known academic lab - is right in the middle of the whole trend.
"They have more people here in the top tier than anywhere else in the nation," said Benjamin Stokes, manager of a program for NetAid, a nonprofit agency based in New York City that strives to inspire young people to fight global poverty.
Stokes, for his part, sees video games as a force for social change, so he's bringing together nonprofits and others across the country to develop games that create awareness and action on social problems ranging from hunger to AIDS.
About 325 computer experts and researchers from around the world, including people from colleges and schools, the military, gaming companies and nonprofit organizations, attended sessions and informal gatherings Thursday and Friday.
The goal was to explore the power of video games to foster learning and to understand video games' rapidly expanding role in society.
For decades, simulators have helped train people for such tasks as flying jets and firing military weapons. But they're expensive - often costing millions of dollars and requiring pricey upkeep. They usually aren't portable, either.
In contrast, educational video games can be delivered over the Internet to computers and other electronic devices, including cell phones, anywhere in the world.
"Get it on your cell phone," said Judy Brown, director of the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab, a joint University of Wisconsin System-Wisconsin Technical College project.
"Get it when and where you need it."
The lab, created in 2000, is funded by about $500,000 a year in grants and consulting contracts and brings together researchers from disparate disciplines to study and develop video games for educational purposes. About a fifth of the funds come from the U.S. Department of Defense. The lab's low profile locally belies its growing international reputation as a clearinghouse for some of the first academic research examining video games.
James Paul Gee, a UW- Madison researcher, told a standing-room-only crowd that video games hold promise for helping educators confront two crises:
Slumps among fourth- graders and older students who are failing to read well enough to master the complex vocabularies for such subjects as science and math.
Dimming prospects for college graduates who are finding that technical jobs are outsourced to nations such as India and China.
"We have a lot to learn from this despised industry about how to solve these crises," Gee said.
For example, Gee said, popular games such as "Yu-Gi-Oh" captivate children who pour hours into learning multi- layered rules and mastering skills because they engender a sense of purpose and fun.
Games such as history-based war game "Rise of Nations" offer players many pages of feedback in numbers and charts, providing players with clues for improving performance and offering a model that could be adopted by educators, he said.
"They never make you read a 500-page book before you can do anything, which is what we do in school," Gee said.
There was buzz about newly discovered abilities of video games to bring about change - not just for peaceful purposes, but also in war.
Frank Polster, director of Army Training Information Systems at the Army Training Support Center in Virginia, said the military is building video training programs into weapons systems, such as missile launchers or tanks. That way, soldiers will practice upon the same equipment they use, making the training more effective and keeping young soldiers engaged.
"This generation does not just sit there and take things passively," Polster said.
Michael Freeman, deputy director of the Department of Defense's Advanced Distributed Learning project in Virginia, said well-designed video games replicate what can be learned in simulators. They also engage players' interests by offering a story and teaching skills.
Freeman and Polster are working with manufacturers and software developers on uniform standards allowing old games to be merged with newcomers. A new game on running truck convoys in Iraq could be joined to an older game that included support strikes from F-16 jets.
A long-term goal, Freeman said, is to integrate games with players' prior performances, so they're drilled on areas that need improvement.
Freeman said he would understand if some people in Madison, with its history of opposition to wars including the U.S. military's presence in Iraq, are uneasy about the military forming an increasingly close alliance with the ADL lab in Madison.
However, he said, "even if someone is against the war, they wouldn't want someone not knowing how to react to (improvised) explosive devices, the IEDs. We're not really weaponizing anybody's mind. . . . We can disagree about whether we need to be someplace, but not whether someone needs these skills to survive."
The military already has found a potent link between video games and running a volunteer military force.
The world's most popular Internet video game, "America's Army," was developed for about $6 million beginning in 2000 and receives about $2 million a year in government funding, said Perry McDowell, who played a small role in its development. He now is executive director of Delta 3D, an "engine" the military is giving away to developers to foster the creation of a new generation of video games. McDowell works at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
"America's Army" was designed to give youths considering a military career some ideas about what soldiers do, from serving in the infantry to special forces and medic units. It's been played by 5.5 million people since its release on July 4, 2002.
On a typical day, it's played 1.6 million hours by a worldwide audience. The game is available free from an Army Web site, www.americas army.com.
Government research has credited the game with paying for itself by helping the Army recruit and retain soldiers. New soldiers who've played the game have gained familiarity with and a favorable impression of the military.
At his booth at Monona Terrace, McDowell demonstrated how Delta 3D, joined with scenery created by two interns, can simulate the site of a Blackhawk crash in an Iraqi or Afghan village. A full-scale game could be developed, he said, to train troops on searching for survivors in the hostile environment.
The military already uses such programs to train soldiers on how to hunt for improvised explosive devices and how to operate convoys in Iraq.
Another program, demonstrated by McDowell, will train Marines' forward observers on how to call in artillery strikes using night-vision goggles, laser sites, a compass and binoculars.
On the video screen, McDowell spied an Iraqi troop carrier, a mere speck on the desert landscape. He measured its coordinates and distance and punched in a series of firing codes, almost exactly as a Marine would do in combat.
The troop carrier was reduced to a smoking hulk.
"I hit it dead-on and I killed that target, which is pretty difficult to do in real life," McDowell said.
To make it more realistic, he said, programmers will introduce random algorithms, to simulate the vagaries of actual fire.
Contact Andy Hall at ahall@madison.com or 252-6136
