Want Them To Learn? Add A Keyboard And Special Effects

By LAURA FIORILLI TBO.com

Published: Mar 26, 2006

ORLANDO - Today's students take to keyboards more easily than to pencils and paper. Their brains seem to come with built-in Web search engines.

The challenge is directing their predisposition to learning instead of mere play.

If they play time-traveling scientists instead of monster-slaughtering dwarves and search for science facts instead of celebrity gossip, they'll learn, say researchers who are exploring how students' after-school media use affects their ways of learning in school.

An entire educational technology industry sprang up around the concept.

Harvard researcher Chris Dede and his team have studied computer role-playing games - such as World of Warcraft and The Sims - and discovered something any gamer knows.

Engaging, But Useless

"They're incredibly engaging," said Dede, a featured speaker at the Florida Educational Technology Conference, held Wednesday through Friday in Orlando and attended by an estimated 8,000 people.

But, Dede said of the computer games, "the content is garbage, generally, or even pathological."

"And so we have this wonderful engine for learning that's hooked to a bad set of knowledge."

Dede and his researchers figured a realistic, three-dimensional role-playing game about something worth learning would increase students' enthusiasm for school. So they created the River City Project, a game in which middle-schoolers explore a 19th century town suffering from a disease outbreak, using their science knowledge to solve the town's problem.

Published results on the River City Project Web site show students using the simulation improved their biology knowledge by 35 percent. They also showed enthusiasm for the game, giving it rave reviews and even skipping school less often.

At the conference, dozens of other game and toy-related gadgets were presented as tools for learning. More than 200 speakers and workshops offered lessons in using technology for education.

Among the exhibitors was a Tampa company whose Singing Coach software, designed to help people learn to sing on key, turned out to be surprisingly effective in helping children read. As singers crooned into a microphone at the Electronic Learning Products booth, the karaoke-like Singing Coach measured their pitch and timing.

A pilot test of Singing Coach at West Hernando Middle School last year showed 24 seventh- and eighth-graders who tested on a fourth-grade reading level improved by more than a grade level in just nine weeks.

Account executive Melissa Jay demonstrated Tune In To Reading, the company's new offering, which builds on the Singing Coach model by measuring students' pace and pronunciation as they read out loud - no singing required.

The company is taking orders now for the product, which Jay said will be in schools in August.

Economical Approach

Other technology put a new, less expensive spin on an old way to learn.

"The price of textbooks is way out of line," said Mark Bretl, marketing director of Kinetic Books, who was selling his company's electronic physics textbook, or e-book, for high schools and colleges.

Schools pay between $24.95 and $49.95 per user per year for the electronic text. A typical high school or college physics book costs $120 to $200, Bretl said.

Students access the textbook much as they would a Web page. It uses animations to show concepts such as acceleration and velocity - the things physics teachers demonstrate in class. But in the electronic version, students can repeat the "experiments" and alter the settings to get a different view of physics in action.

Like many digital teaching tools, the physics text also offers interactive homework problems and quizzes, with hints and feedback.

TBO.com Keyword: Education to see video of featured technology and links to some of the products.