美国总统奥巴马最近访问了马萨诸塞州的TechBoston中学，并向该校学生发表了他对电子游戏的看法：“我呼吁增加对教育科技的投入，以创建像最出色的电子游戏一样富有吸引力的教育软件。我希望你们关注那些可以让自己学到点东西的电子游戏，而不只是在游戏中炸毁东西。”

《赫芬顿邮报》的一名撰稿人对此深有感触，他表示在90年代自己刚步入电子游戏行业时，在任总统根本不可能为电子游戏说好话。在那个时候，电子游戏这种媒介往往为政客所非议，并且饱受社会各界的责难，大家普遍认为玩游戏只是在浪费时间。

但今天人们对电子游戏的看法已发生了极大转变。几乎每周都有新调查称电子游戏有助于学习，无论是书刊、博客、TED演讲还是会议，常有人在各种场合宣扬电子游戏的潜在积极作用。不但有深入分析的学术报告声称某一款游戏的正面影响，还有一些泛泛而谈的言论也发话称游戏拯救了世界。

那么，游戏有助于学习的现象，究竟是一种炒作还是现实情况？目前来看，这两种都有可能。

该作者认为电脑和电子游戏当然具有促进学习（或者社交）的潜力，但同时也觉得游戏还没有真正发挥出这种作用，至少是还没有完全实现这种价值。

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至于游戏为何具有如此之多的潜在功能（以及游戏为何难以实现这种价值），首先要了解奥巴马在演讲中提到的几个棘手的美国教育问题：

·目前有25%的美国儿童辍学。学校对大多数青少年来说既无吸引力，也无归属感。

·美国学生在许多课程上的分数均低于其他发达国家，其中数字、科学课程的分数排在第25名；拥有大学文凭的年轻人比例排在第9名。美国学生还没有做好准备应对更具竞争性、变化迅速、高度电子化的世界。

·美国学校面临严重的财政吃紧，教育经费缩减的情况。学校教育需要更多创新改革，但这种创新必须具备资本效率，让优秀的教师以更少的代价发挥更多作用。

虽然基于游戏的学习方法并非解决上述问题的良策，但如果使用得当，游戏仍可成为医治教育顽症的有效偏方。游戏邦认为这种说法不无根据，因为电子游戏让人如此沉迷的核心元素，与最具魅力的老师在课堂上引人入胜的教学方法具有令人惊叹的共性。

这两者的共通之处主要体现在以下几个方面：

有目标的学习过程：游戏具有交互性、“指引人们向前进取”，以及参与性等特点。玩家在游戏中可以扮演多种不同角色（例如，科学家、探险家、发明家、政治领袖等），他们会遇到困难和挑战，自主做出选择，然后探索种种选择所产生的结果。游戏可以让学习更有吸引力，更加可亲可近，可以为学生提供静态的书本所无法展现的生动教材。

个性化的学习过程：游戏支持玩家自己安排游戏进程，让他们在安全有保障的环境中汲取失败教训，并从这一过程中不断总结经验，让自己掌握更精湛的技术。老师们也可以向游戏取经，通过学生能力评估、个性化而可调整的教学反馈，因材施教地管理一个学生能力不一、学习方法不同的大班级。

全天候的学习过程：游戏提供了一系列挑战、奖励、目标，它们可激发玩家积极完成任务，增加用户黏性，这种方法也同样适应于正式和非正式的学习环境。既然孩子们在电子游戏上花的时间比其他活动更多（除了睡觉之外），那么老师们也同样可以借用这段时间，有效加强学校教育。

同伴互助的学习过程：游戏可促进人们的社交互动。无论是参加公会，组队完成任务，社交网络中的异步协作，还是通过玩家社区获得游戏闯关攻略，游戏确实激发了同伴互助或者同伴指导的社交互动。

培养21世纪的职业技能：游戏其实很复杂很有难度，无论是5岁幼儿玩的《口袋妖怪》卡片，还是15岁少年体验的《模拟城市》，这些游戏都有助于培养他们解决问题的能力、判断思维、系统思考、数码媒介操作技能、创意和合作精神。21世纪还将涌现前所未有的大量职业，孩子们提前掌握这些“可移植”的技能就十分重要。

除此之外，游戏的另一大好处在于它具有资本效率，尤其是那些与游戏相关服务的部署、调整、更新和优化成本，仅是学生购买教科书费用的一小部分。

这听起来确实是个好消息，但坏消息在于设计、开发、发行、执行、规模化生产具备上述所有功能的游戏类教材，实在是个极具挑战性的难题——而要让这种方法适用于班级中的所有学生，更是难上加班。

由此可见，让游戏发挥促进学习的潜力与现实情况仍存在一个难以逾越的鸿沟。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Game-Based Learning: Hype Vs. Reality

In a recent speech to a group of students at TechBoston in Dorchestor, Massachusetts. President Obama had this to say about video games:

I’m calling for investments in educational technology that will help create … educational software that is as compelling as the best video game. I want you guys to be stuck on a video game that’s teaching you something other just blowing something up.

When I started my career in video games in the early 1990s, the idea of a sitting President saying anything positive about video games was pretty much unthinkable.

Back then, the medium was routinely vilified by politicians and generally dismissed as a frivolous waste of time by everyone else.

Perceptions of video games are definitely changing.

Today, hardly a week passes without a new study highlighting how video games can be good for learning. There is a steady stream of books, blogs, TED talks and conferences making a wide variety of claims about the positive potential of games. These claims range from rigorous academic studies highlighting the efficacy of a single game to broad claims about games saving the planet.

So, is game-based learning hype or reality? Right now it is both.

I believe that computer and video games absolutely have the potential to make significant learning (and social) impact. But I also believe that this potential is currently not being realized — at least not at a meaningful scale.

To understand why games have so much potential (as well as why realizing this potential is so difficult) let’s look at some of the thorniest education challenges the President outlined in his speech.

•Twenty-five percent of all kids in America are dropping out of school. Clearly school is neither engaging nor relevant to a large percentage of our youth.

•U.S. students are falling further behind other industrialized countries in everything from math and science scores (25th) to the proportion of young people with college degrees (9th). Clearly we are not effectively preparing enough of our students for a hyper competitive, inter-connected, rapidly changing, digitally charged global landscape.

•Schools are operating with severe fiscal constraints. Clearly innovation needs to happen, but this innovation must be capital efficient; enabling good teachers to do more with less.

While game-based-learning is certainly not a silver bullet for solving these complex challenges, games — when effectively harnessed — can be a powerful tool for addressing them. This is because there is a unique and, for many, surprising alignment between the core elements that make video games so deeply engaging and the best practices that many of the most effective teachers are employing in the classroom.

Here are just a few examples of this alignment:

Project-based learning: Games are interactive, “lean-forward,” and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.

Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just- in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.

24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).

Peer-to-peer learning: Games are increasingly social. Whether they involve guilds or teams jointly accomplishing missions, asynchronous collaboration over social networks or sourcing advice from interest-driven communities to help solve tricky challenges, games naturally drive peer-to-peer and peer-to-mentor social interactions.

21st Century skill development: Games are complex. Whether it is a 5-year-old parsing a Pokemon card or a 15-year-old optimizing a city in SimCity, games can foster critical skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, systems thinking, digital media literacy, creativity and collaboration. Given that many of the jobs that will emerge in 21st century have not yet been invented, these ‘portable’ skills are particularly important.

Games are also capital efficient. Games, especially game-based services, can be deployed, scaled, updated and optimized at a fraction of the per student cost of most textbooks.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that designing, developing, distributing, implementing and scaling effective game-based-learning products that leverage all of these capabilities is extremely difficult — especially if the goal is widespread adoption in the classroom.

As a result, there is a significant gap between the potential of game-based-learning and the current reality. The next series of posts will explore this gap further as well as methodologies for closing it.（source:huffingtonpost）