Immersive video gaming could be growth area for education industry

Nick | 02 Jan 2009, 09:47

Research by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and published in Science suggests that virtual gaming can help students develop develop critical-thinking skills and enhance their understanding of science and maths and can be particularly beneficial for students that respond poorly to traditional teaching environments.  Professor Chris Dede explains:

“Many academically low-performing students do as well as their high-performing peers in River City [one of the games assessed in the study]. By stepping out of their real-world identity of poor performer academically, which shifts their frame of self reference to successful scientist in the virtual context.“

The research implies that closer collaboration between educational publishers, software and video games developers could be an important growth area for the creative economy in future. Educational software and gaming is still relatively small compared to the publishing industry. According to Thad McIlroy on The Future of Publishing:

“The combined print publishing business for the education industry is worth in the range of $20 billion per year in North America. Depending of which figures you accept, this could represent some 50% of total book sales.“

The US educational software market, by comparison, is worth only $2 billion and a recent study for the US Department of Education cast doubt on the effectiveness of many new tools compared with traditional teaching methods.