How to Help Kids Learn From Video Game Play

Teens spend an estimated nine hours a day using video games, apps, social media, and other technologies.

While some screen time is devoted to school or research, approximately four or more hours per day are spent in recreational screen use. Part of this amount is passive time spent watching mindless YouTube videos or bingeing on Netflix, while much of the rest of this "recreational screen time" is spent playing video games.

This does not just include shoot-em-up gameplay; most gaming is cognitively challenging and uses skills such as planning, organization, flexibility, and self-control. However, as much as teens and tweens love their video games, questions remain as to whether they are learning anything from them and if they are learning so as to help them get ready for the demands of the 21st century.

So, how can we help kids learn from their video gameplay? And can we do it without taking away the fun?

Game publishers and tech companies have tried to create brain training and learning games that are supposedly “fun” and lead to the development of real-world skills needed to cope with 21st-century demands. However, these games have been roundly criticized for improving only the narrow skills practiced in gameplay.

Improving most thinking and problem-solving skills requires sustained and deliberate hard work and long-term practice. And just because something is called a game does not necessarily make it engaging. The vast majority of the brain training apps and the previous generation of “edutainment” games were not fun enough to continue playing.

Fortunately, the best games to challenge thinking skills are often the same ones kids want to keep playing. They are complex, cognitively challenging, and not easy. They tax the brain and require problem-solving, critical thinking, and executive-functioning skills.

But games that challenge and stretch cognitive skills in gameplay are often not enough to make substantial changes in real-world skills. If game publishers and developers sincerely want to make their games fun and good for kids, they need to build in-game mechanics that lead to generalization and transfer of game-based learning (GBL) into real-world skills (RWS).

Starting with an engaging video game has the built-in advantage of the first and most essential component for learning, attention. Putting it simply, if you don’t pay attention, you won’t learn. However, focused attention is often not enough to apply game skills to other activities.

New research from leading educators and psychologists describes evidence-based strategies that can transform playing games into powerful opportunities for game-based learning that transfers to the real world. Well-made video games naturally build in many of these learning principles.

However, a deliberate strategy to build in tools to promote generalization game-based skills is often not considered by game publishers. To some degree, this is due to a choice not to do anything that might take away from the fun and engagement of gameplay. For other publishers, learning is not a stated goal. However, as the need for our children to develop 21st-century executive and social-emotional learning skills grows and an increasingly large percentage of “experts” questioning the impact of excessive gaming, it may begin to appear on the radar of game publishers.

Examining how games that generate sustained attention, motivation, and persistence can be leveraged for learning is the first step. The next post in this series will explore how cognitive strategies can transform game-based thinking into real-world skills. The final post details strategies that game publishers can use to generalize and transfer skills, knowledge, and insights from gameplay into daily activities.

One of the chief complaints parents have about their children playing video games is that they won’t stop. Their kids are focused, fully engaged, and persistent in gameplay, all key ingredients for learning.

This level of focus is easily translatable to paying attention to the cognitive and problem skills used to master the game if game publishers make it their business to point these out. Once players can learn to detect or identify the skills that are most useful for their gameplay, they have a new way to use these skills outside of the game.

Motivation can also play a role. If players can get better at the game by sharpening their planning or time-management skills, there is a new reason to do so. Flexibility, learning from mistakes, and opportunities for self-efficacy can be strengthened by the motivation to perform well, which can also lead to more practice.

When practice leads to ingrained learning or automaticity, players have more resources available to do other things in the game and to recognize the most relevant problems facing them. This is one of the reasons researchers believe that the improved attention control seen in players of action games allows them to apply other skills such as visual short-term memory, spatial cognition, and reaction time better.

Children learn only modestly from playing video games, particularly when they are played without limits, outside mediators, discussion, or context. At the same time, there is substantial evidence that an hour a day of video-game play is a healthy cognitive challenge. Regular, modest gameplay might be even more powerful if a variety of games are played and may be a powerful tool for learning if children are able to think outside the game. If game publishers choose to add a bit of “digital nutrition” to games, they could become an even more potent learning tool.