Today’s college students are increasingly scientifically illiterate.

Yes, I said it. This statement might upset you if you are a college student or professor, but you might likely agree with it if you are an engineering manager in charge of new hires.

If you do a bit of searching and speak to some technical book publishers, you’ll find that it is universally agreed that traditional teaching methods (including textbooks, lectures, and pages of homework problems) are becoming increasingly less attractive to today’s students and especially fail with underrepresented populations in science and engineering.

There has to be a way to address this problem. Last year I wrote a post On Teaching where I talked about my experiences with Socratic Method of teaching vs. the traditional lecture.

Because of my involvement with the Franklin Foundation, I had a chance to think a bit more about the issues that face the current state of our science education. I decided that just encouraging educators to use the Socratic Method, is not enough. Aside from the fact that less students are motivated to major in engineering and sciences, those that do, simply do not learn all that much.

A number of studies, such as Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence, by L.F. Gardiner, found that only about 20% of what is taught in a traditional university course is retained by the students. In rare cases that number can be as high as 50%. Meaning that in a traditional university course, 50-80% of instructor’s and students’ time is completely wasted! I do not believe it has to be this way. There is a way increase the amount of information that students retain, whether in class or while doing homework, and I think that can be accomplished with the help of video games.

Although this is not a novel idea, the research on benefits of video games for education purposes is barely getting underway. In 2003, BBC did a piece on how even the action-packed shooting games develop players’ strategic thinking (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2744449.stm). We know that problem-solving and strategic thinking are closely related and are necessary in learning scientific principles.

USA Today ran an article in 2005 on video games as potential treatment of ADD (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2005-09-26-video-game-therapy_x.htm). People with ADD tend to be more creative and have shorter attention spans and, generally, tend not to go into disciplines like engineering. Perhaps incorporating video games into engineering curriculum can change that.

There have been a number of attempts at creating a more “active” learning environment in the engineering education community. From what I’ve seen, most of these attempts resulted in very sad power-point presentations with some movies thrown in, and few complicated and bland computer “games” that much more resembled designing a machine part in CAD software, than playing a Play Station game.

Why do I think that science and engineering students will be able to learn better and retain more information by playing video games than by reading a book?

Since humans began to evolve as a species, they have been conducting experiments in order to learn about the world around them. As babies, we constantly taste things, touch things, and throw things so we can understand how they work. As teenagers, we push the limits of our parents’ sanity and try things we shouldn’t try because that is how we learn.

Somewhere in the establishment of our higher education system, the natural tendency of humans to learn by experimentation was stifled. Students are expected to passively sit through hundreds of lecture hours, read about experiments that have been done in the past, or at best, conduct very controlled and predictable experiments in one a few lab courses, stripped of any creativity. A carefully designed video game environment will bring into the classrooms that creative experimentation that allows us to learn so well as humans, without the massive costs associated with laboratory expenses.

Video games thus make it possible to “learn by doing” without making huge investments into elaborate laboratory space and equipment. (That is not to say that all physical experimentation is absolute. Only that a lot more learning should be done via experimentation and video games can allow doing so affordably).

If you think about it, learning via gaming would change the educational focus from passive learning (as in traditional teaching methods) to actively engaging students in the learning process by providing highly simulative, entertaining, and focused learning environment.

Rather than looking at Power Point slides or watching a movie about past experiments, students should be able to create their own experiments, while learning the underlying scientific principles.

I believe that incorporating video games into science and engineering educational curriculum will increase the quality of our scientists and engineers by greatly increasing the retention of technical information learned in school, attracting non-traditional engineering students, and by expanding the student’s minds by stimulating their creative and innovative thinking.

What you think? Do you agree or disagree? Where to you think we should go from here? Would love to hear your thoughts! Please comment below.

I just found out that my American Chemical Society courses have been officially added to the ACS spring schedule:

Computer Simulation of Reactive Flows: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB

Essentials of Chemical Kinetics: http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB

This inspired me to write on the subject of teaching – specifically, why most engineering courses are taught in such boring ways, and what can be done about it.

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