Lots of games, from dedicated educational titles to adult brain-teasers, make claims about how they can improve someone's mental performance in various ways. But there's often little evidence available to back up these claims and, in many cases, the evidence itself is ambiguous. Can playing games actually help in the classroom?

The answer appears to be yes, based on a talk by Stanford's Dan Schwartz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. But effectively leveraging gaming probably requires taking a lot of factors into consideration. At early stages, the games themselves have to be designed to focus on developing skills, rather than encouraging memorization, while more advanced students can benefit from games that build an intuitive sense of a specific subject matter. In all cases, the games had to be coupled with a good classroom explanation that put things into a broader context.

Designing a good game for kids

Schwartz said that games serve two purposes in early education. The first is to provide a concentrated learning experience that reinforces what teachers present in the classroom, where teachers also have the ability to handle social and emotional development (like getting kids to sit down and pay attention). The second is that they draw children into lessons while letting them have fun. "People design games to motivate kids to do things that are otherwise dull," Schwartz said, before listing a set of what he called "proven motivators," like narrative, graphics, and manageable challenges.

But it's really easy to do this badly, as Schwartz demonstrated with examples. In one case, simply changing the graphics could turn a task from a math problem to a reading task. These cases where the content can be swapped while leaving the structure of the game intact help with memorization but little else; Schwartz argued that nobody's going to learn anything much from them.

In another example, he showed a mermaid-themed game with sets of five and two fish in one corner. While most of us might be inclined to add them, Schwartz pointed out that kids might easily get stumped on what's being asked of them: "Do they mate and produce thousands? Do the five eat the two?"

So Schwartz' group decided to see if they could do better, building an app called Critter Corral (available for free on iTunes). In the demo he showed, math came into play through real world situations—how many meals do you need to cook to feed all the patrons in the saloon? And, if your answer is incorrect, the game does more than simply tell you you're wrong; feedback comes in the form of patrons that look deeply saddened that they're not getting a meal. (Schwartz called this "engaging in quantity.")

So far, it appears that the game works. In testing with a kindergarten-level program, test scores went up by over 20 percent; when the control group was then given access to the game, they quickly caught up with their peers.

Preparing to think

In the example above, the children were using the game to develop basic math skills. Is there a place for games at higher levels of education? Schwartz would definitely argue yes, but he suggested that the role of the games would be different. Rather than developing basic skills, the games help give people an intuitive grasp of a subject, after which explanations for their intuitions can be supplied in the classroom.

This was done explicitly in one case, with the researchers building a Space Invaders-style game where each successive wave had a different pattern of invaders. The frequency of different patterns, rather than being random, was governed by statistical distributions. On its own, the game didn't help players do any better on testing, since the tests were couched in terms like "normal distributions" and the like. To have an impact, the game had to be coupled with a written description of the statistical patterns. "A short written description helps everyone," Schwartz said, "but gamers get much more out of it."

The big surprise is that this effect spills over to commercial games that aren't designed for educational purposes at all. Schwartz's team had junior college students play about 15 hours of two different games: Civilization IV and Call of Duty 2. Afterwards, they were given short descriptions of real events from World War II that either focused on international relations or on tactical situations. The students were asked to formulate a series of questions they'd ask to better understand the circumstances.

When it came to international relations, the Civ-playing students were able to formulate more sophisticated and probing questions. But, when handed a tactical situation to analyze, Schwartz suggested they were completely lost, and often failed to come up with any questions at all. For the Call of Duty players, the converse was true.

(The effect seems all the more amazing due to the fact that I probably had no idea what was going on yet at 15 hours into Civ IV.)

In the discussion that ensued, games like Portal and Kerbal Space Program both came up as examples of games that did the same thing for physics.

In this sense, Schwartz seemed to be arguing, games can help people develop an intuitive feel for everything from math to diplomacy. Classroom instruction can then build on these intuitions, providing explanations for specific behaviors and familiarizing students with the terminology involved in the field. In turn, the gaming experiences can make the classroom material seem less dry and more likely to have applications outside of class—and maybe outside of the virtual worlds of the games.