Handheld technologies are emerging as powerful educational tools for six reasons, said the third and fourth panelists, Jennifer S Groff, Program Manager, and Eric Rosenbaum, Research Manager, from The Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT). Game Boy game consoles, cell phones, play stations, Tamagachi toys, Palm Pilots, and pocket PC devices work for education because they are portable, ubiquitous, have connectivity, offer social interaction, are content-sensitive, and can be customized for the individual user.

Jennifer Groff, Education Arcade.  Click for larger image.

Groff and Rosenbaum work with the MIT Education Arcade, which develops educational games. A game called “Big Fish, Little Fish” teaches ecology: you can either take on the role of a big fish searching for food, or a school of small fish working together for protection. Another game, “Sugar and Spice,” teaches the concepts of microeconomics. And a third game uses pocket PCs linked to a server to teach ecology and evolution, based on the journals Charles Darwin kept on the behavior of finches. Users can breed the birds, feed on pollen, and otherwise interact with the virtual environment. The game goes constantly, so that students can manage their birds and flowers outside of class and analyze the data to present to their teachers.

Rosenbaum described “augmented reality games” that connect a pocket PC to a Global Positioning System (GPS) to put a virtual overlay on a physical space. “Environmental Detectives” presents gamers with a satellite map of the MIT Campus with dots highlighted. A toxic waste spill has put chemicals in the groundwater. Students walk around the campus with their Pocket PC devices and conduct virtual interviews with characters who are professors and construction managers to find clues. They can also drill a virtual well to get the components of the spill. Students share their data and make inferences to ultimately write a remediation plan. Another game, “Outbreak@MIT,” simulates a disease outbreak. Students are connected to a network, so if one of them should pick up the “vaccine” it will disappear from the other players’ screens. Students get “sick” and collaborate as they try to stop the outbreak.

Julie Evans pointed out that teachers won’t use games in the classroom unless they include ways to measure learning outcomes. The inquiry-based learning that takes place in computer games is harder to measure, but it is compelling to children. Groff said that children who are used to pursuing answers through games are apt to disengage from the old lecture-based learning models. “When I taught school, I dealt with a girl whose parents fought to get her into an inquiry-based learning model,” she said. “I think we’re going to see more of that.”