To Engage Students, Bring Video Games into the Classroom

Teachers usually fight to keep their students off games. Could they instead harness them for learning? Image: The Midwood Argus / DALL-E 2

By NICHOLAS GITSIN

There I was, sitting in my Spanish class, opening a treasure chest on my phone. It turned out that there were 1,000 gold pieces inside, and I took the lead. But wait, was I playing on my phone in class? Where was the teacher threatening to take it away like they always do? Naughty me. I was actually playing an educational video game called Blooket with my entire class, and boy was I having fun!

The feeling of feverishly waiting for the teacher to start the game, the adrenaline rush that I got from being on the leaderboard, and the anticipation of seeing what was in my treasure chest all made that Spanish lesson extremely memorable to me. But if video games are capable of eliciting such excitement and passion from students, why isn’t our school doing more to implement them into classes?

“I don’t know that many teachers care about video games,” said Mr. Jordan Finn, an English teacher and the video game club's faculty advisor. “It is a shame that they don’t. I think they’re such an untapped resource.”

Sadly, having your phone out in class is a virtual taboo in Midwood. Teachers believe that video games are harmful distractions that prevent students from learning. “A teacher is never going to be able to compete with a video game in terms of engagement,” said Mr. Samuel Keener, a math teacher who sometimes uses video games in his AP Computer Science A class.

However, the distracting qualities of video games that skeptics are so worried about are actually what could make them beneficial during the learning process. Much of what we learn in school today is not attractive to students, which results in many losing interest. But video games could present the same information in a more appealing way, prompting students to open their minds to topics that otherwise wouldn’t have interested them. This is the same concept as putting peanut butter on a pill for a dog.

“Here’s the thing about humans: when we like something, we are more focused on it, and when we don’t like something, we aren’t so focused on it,” said video game club member Elijah Bouknight ‘23.

Indeed, playing video games indirectly results in better attention from students. When a person is doing fun activities, dopamine is released in their brain, resulting in a feeling of pleasure. However, dopamine also regulates attention, and high amounts of dopamine make people hyper-focused on a given activity. Therefore, while having fun playing a video game, students will be extremely attentive and will soak up the educational content as well.

Improved educational performance is only one of the benefits that video games could bring to our school. There is also strong scientific evidence that video games can benefit students’ mental health.

Video games can make children feel more accomplished, says WebMD, because they use medals, trophies, badges, and other forms of reward to make students feel that they achieved something with every little gain. This, in turn, will boost students' motivation. They’ll be encouraged to continue playing and learning all while building confidence in themselves and their abilities.

Another reason to use video games in school is that they help students deal with stress. Daily homework assignments, tests, and quizzes erode a student's mental health. Video games are a fun way for students to kick back and relax while still learning and completing their schoolwork.

Yes, they’re a distraction, but they’re a positive distraction. A video game can make you so focused that you forget about all your problems, Bouknight explained. This psychological mechanism is called “flow state,” the mental state of complete immersion in which a person’s mind locks on to one activity and represses most other thoughts and sensations. Thus, while a student is playing video games, positive thoughts will take the place of stressful ones in the student’s consciousness.

One video game that can be easily implemented into any Midwood class is Blooket, which is essentially Kahoot’s much cooler cousin. Just like in Kahoot, teachers can create multiple-choice and true or false questions on Blooket’s website. They can either create new questions or turn a pre-existing Quizlet into a Blooket game. The questions could be on any subject from history to grammar to algebra. Students could race each other to answer these questions.

Blooket’s best quality is the competitive environment that it creates. First, students play directly against one another, which gives them the added motivation of beating their classmates. Secondly, Blooket incorporates elements such as battling monsters and stealing gold from classmates that are bound to get the excitement flowing. As a result, it creates a fun environment where students focus on winning and subconsciously end up learning. 

So before you write off the idea of video games in the classroom, give Booklet a chance and see how gamification can bring learning into the 21st century.