Quería recomendarles este excelente artículo publicado hace unos días por el New York Times, sobre una escuela experimental en Nueva York que está utilizando videojuegos en la educación primaria como un componente estructural de toda su currícula. La descripción de la experiencia es interesantísima, y aunque aún es muy pronto como para saber con claridad cuáles son los resultados (es, finalmente, aún un experimento), hay muchas expectativas positivas de lo que resultará con la escuela Quest to Learn.
Del artículo:
WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?
It is a radical proposition, sure. But during an era in which just about everything is downloadable and remixable, when children are frequently more digitally savvy than the adults around them, it’s perhaps not so crazy to think that schools — or at least one school, anyway — might try to remix our assumptions about how to reach and educate those children. What makes Quest to Learn unique is not so much that it has been loaded with laptops or even that it bills itself expressly as a home for “digital kids,” but rather that it is the brainchild of a professional game designer named Katie Salen. Salen, like many people interested in education, has spent a lot of time thinking about whether there is a way to make learning feel simultaneously more relevant to students and more connected to the world beyond school. And the answer, as she sees it, lies in games.
Creo que una de las cosas más importantes e interesantes de este enfoque es que la aplicación de los juegos y los videojuegos no es simplemente accidental, no es solamente un medio o un acompañamiento para la formación tradicional, sino que se vuelve el principio rector que articula todo el proceso formativo. Es el diseño de toda una experiencia, que abarca muchos años, estructurado bajo la forma de un juego:
A game, as Salen sees it, is really just a “designed experience,” in which a participant is motivated to achieve a goal while operating inside a prescribed system of boundaries and rules. In this way, school itself is one giant designed experience. It could be viewed, in fact, as the biggest and most important game any child will ever play. To this end, Quest to Learn has three full-time game designers supporting the work of the school’s 11 teachers — a ratio that reflects a trend more familiar to the business world, where designers and design-thinking have ascended to new and voguish heights.
Esto me parece importante porque no quiere decir, entonces, que se pierde el espacio para otras actividades como la lectura de libros simplemente porque ahora nos dedicamos a los videojuegos. Sino que componentes individuales, como los libros, o las tareas, son vinculados entre sí en una estructura de incentivos que, en su conjunto, es ella misma un juego en el cual los estudiantes van avanzando.
¿Qué opinan? ¿Hay un lugar importante en la educación para los videojuegos?
Se me ocurre que si se quiere hacer algo así, al menos aquí, se debe iniciar de modo experimental, tomando en cuenta esto de la accesibilidad de los participantes al medio, el grado de familiaridad, el diseño del videojuego y el supuesto contenido educativo. La propuesta es muy interesante…