Games to Help You Think

This might be an interesting idea for promoting environmental or public health education. Game-playing may have advantages over traditional teaching tools. Games such as role-playing games hold the potential for learning by letting players take on new personas, explore alternatives and solve problems. Games also might hold the promise of helping to engage people better in a topic – the theory being that playing “Rome Total War” could encourage you to start reading about the Roman Empire.

The U.S. Army thinks there is promise in this approach, using freeware such as “America’s Army” and “Full Spectrum Warrior” (the latter also being a training tool) as recruiting aids.

“Games to Teach” is a product of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Comparative Media Studies department. Examples of games that it sponsors include “Biohazard” a game involving an epidemiologist tracking down a disease outbreak and “Environmental Detectives”, which allows the players to assume the roles of various stakeholders investigating and correcting a hazardous materials spill to a river. The U.S. Department of Energy uses SimSite, an interactive training tool for learning the Data Quality Objectives (DQO) process for hazardous waste site investigation. Imagine how much more interesting a tool such as SimSite could be if it looked like this.

Let’s hope this trend can attract some funding and take off in environmental education.