A call to fill the edu-game gap

Video games, proponents insist, are good at training kids to think strategically and spatially. But are they doing much to help children learn to read, excel in math, or pique their interest in the vast questions of science or social studies?

No, says a new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. “Although casual gaming has emerged as a significant trend, there are very few educational video games” for children 3 to 11 years old. The report considered the features of scores of products – including web sites, virtual worlds, computer software and video games – and concluded with a call to “fill a gap in the market” by making more education-based games.

The answer, the report suggests, isn’t to simply insert phonics drills or multiple-choice quizzes into videogames. The report’s author, Carly Shuler, a Cooney fellow and recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a background in new media, suggests harnessing the energy behind the development of “Web/toy hybrids,” like WebKinz, to create new educational spaces.

I think about my brother-in-law, now 11, who can spend hours inside World of Warcraft, paging through complicated maps of fantasy worlds and plotting new missions. What if those maps were of, say, the Middle East? What if the mission was to pull together two warring factions with as little bloodshed as possible?

But I may be asking a lot, given that some online worlds are being considered, at the moment, as potential avenues for commercialism, not cognitive heroics. Shuler’s report warns of the “unprecedented opportunity for commercial marketing” in such virtual worlds and hints that immersive advertising to kids is just around the corner.