Do games make effective instructional tools?

I love playing games. Rhythm and drama games, games of chance and luck, team and individual sports,  board games and card games, strategy games and logic problems, even jigsaw puzzles: I haven't met a game I didn't enjoy. One of my earliest memories -- and a favorite family story about my childhood -- is beating my father and brother in two consecutive games of Uno at the tender age of three while on a houseboat in Florida (both times I ended with two wilds in my hand).

Games are one of several powerful forms of play (along with imaginative play, rough-and-tumble play, object play, etc), and as Dr. Stuart Brown taught us, play is an essential life skill that has a direct impact on brain development, physiological and emotional health, social skills, professional success, and learning and memory. Which is why I enjoyed reading a recent CNN article about the Quest to Learn school in New York, which uses games as the primary instructional technique in the classroom.

At TBS, we also believe in the effectiveness of play as a basis for educative experience, and though it isn't the central pedagogical tool used in our classroom, it is deeply integrated into our practices. I wrote about the use of games in a K/1 Reading Workshop class this spring in Mission Moments #5, while the Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space math curriculum contains an extraordinarily rich variety of games including student favorites Roll and Record, Close to 100, Factor Bingo, and many more. Games are also a part of the Montessori approach, including the Stamp Game, which is used for teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and the Imaginary Island Project, which teaches a variety of concepts about physical and cultural geography.

Going beyond playing games for the educative experience of knowledge construction and skill building that can result, I also see great value in teaching children to think critically about how games work, as it teaches them to identify context, frames, and principles.  As a middle school teacher, I offered a course in game theory and design, in which we analyze the construction, rules, and guiding principles of games beginning with Tic Tac Toe and Rock Paper Scissors, moving on to Connect Four, checkers, and chess, and finishing with board games such as Monopoly and Risk. For a final project, students designed and built prototypes of their own games (which we then played in order to assess the design and underlying principles).

Connecting game-playing to the TBS mission to engage a changing world, check out Jane McGonigal's TED talk about games, and the possibility that games can actually be agents of social and societal change. She points to a real-life example of gamers finding a solution for how to fold certain proteins in certain ways that scientists had been unable solve as the potential for games to lead to a better world.

Problem solving is a type of game, so here's a problem that I'm also forwarding to our 4th-8th grade math teachers. It's the classic "Monty Hall" problem, and it's great for teaching concepts in probability, and for the ability to replicate and simulate variations to test answers within the classroom:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

You can check your solution here (warning, it's a link to Wikipedia).

9/7/12 Update: Here's another school using game-based pedagogy.