As new as the Smallab concept is, it is already showing promise when it comes to improving learning results: Birchfield and his colleagues say that in a small 2009 study, they found that at-risk ninth graders in earth sciences scored consistently and significantly higher on content-area tests when they had also done Smallab exercises. A second study compared the Smallab approach with traditional hands-on lab experimentation, with the group that used mixed-reality again showing greater retention and mastery. As it is more generally with games, the cognitive elements at work are not entirely understood, but they are of great interest to a growing number of learning scientists. Did the students learn more using digital mixed-reality because the process was more physical than hearing a classroom lecture or performing a lab experiment? Because it was more collaborative or more visual? Or was it simply because it seemed novel and more fun?

HERE ARE SOME DIFFERENCES between Kai and me: Kai hates Justin Bieber whereas I only dislike him. Kai sends and receives about 50 text messages a day. My average is about 4. My idea of leisure involves wandering aimlessly and anonymously through the local bookstore whereas Kai — “not a fan of books” — can be found hanging around the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, where he is on a first-name basis with employees. When I am sick with a cold, I sit at home flipping through magazines and not really wanting to be seen by anyone. When Kai is sick with a cold, he sits at home and makes YouTube videos. (“If I sneeze during this video,” he tells the camera, “don’t yell at me.”) We also feel very differently, it turns out, about the game Halo. Kai sees it as having amazing graphics and a great story line and violence, “but only against aliens,” he says. I see it mostly as violent.

One night at Kai’s apartment, we turned on the Xbox and played Halo 3 as teammates. He played the role of Master Chief, the ultimate superwarrior, and I was a friendly alien who liked to fight. It started like this: I sat on the couch, and Kai sat on the floor in front of the TV. He said, “You get the machine gun, and I’ll drive the car.” I’m not really sure what happened after that. I would call it a nine-minute-long, jackhammering bloodbath, in which we (me poorly, Kai deftly) killed a lot of bad aliens until my lack of experience almost cost our team the game, and — a little sweaty and yes, totally excited — I handed my controller off to Kai’s 14-year-old brother, Sam.

It was, for me, a reminder of how confusing it can be to think about video games and schools in the same frame. Not only has excessive gaming — much like excessive TV watching — been associated with obesity and depression, but playing violent games has been linked in some studies to an increase in aggressive behavior. Advocates of game-based learning concede that these games can be spectacularly gory, amoral and loud, even when they are artful and complicated. They like to point out that the majority of games sold commercially are not particularly violent and are rated “E” — for “everyone.”

And then this: Brain researchers have found that playing first-person shooter games like Call of Duty does seem to have some neurological benefits, including improving peripheral vision and the ability to focus attention. The playing of shooter games has also been shown to enhance something called visual-spatial thinking — for example, the ability to rotate objects in one’s mind — which, it turns out, is a cognitive building block for understanding concepts in science and engineering. Women, who tend to score lower when tested for visual-spatial skills, apparently gain more from virtual machine-gun outings than men: a 2007 study done at the University of Toronto showed that women who played just 10 hours of an action-oriented video game (Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) not only improved their spatial attention and mental-­rotation abilities more significantly than their male counterparts, but the game-play also appeared to substantially reduce any sex-related gaps in visual-spatial thinking abilities. Five months later, the effects still held. (Bad news for pacifists: a control group that played a stimulating but nonviolent 3-D video puzzle game showed no measurable improvement.)

Unsurprisingly, no one I spoke with who works in the field of games and learning says that first-person shooter games are the key to building future scientists and engineers. One topic under discussion is the broader question of “transfer,” whether a skill developed by playing a game actually translates to improved abilities in other areas. They also note that we are only just beginning to tease apart the mechanisms that make game play so powerful. And inside those mechanisms, there is at least potential to advance our country’s educational aims — if only we can sort out how we feel about games. Even the first family has sent mixed messages: President Obama has criticized video games for displacing family time and physical activity — urging parents, for example, to “turn off the TV, put away the video games and read to your child” — but he has also encouraged the development of new games to bolster the all-important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills in young Americans. In March, Michelle Obama helped introduce a government-sponsored design contest to reward those who create mobile-phone games and apps to combat obesity, lamenting at a national Parent Teacher Association conference that “we know our kids spend way too much time with these games,” but that at least the time could be spent more productively. The cognitive dissonance is likely familiar to any parent: she has also admitted, cheerfully, to owning a Wii.

WHEN IT COMES TO CAPTURING and keeping the attention of children, game designers appear to be getting something right that schools, in many cases, are getting wrong. James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its “internal design grammar” and that this is a form of critical thinking. “A game is nothing but a set of problems to solve,” Gee says. Its design often pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that our definition of “literacy” needs to be widened to better suit the times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.