Video Games’ Role in Special Needs Education
Michael Jude Plesniarski
Game Design Masters of Science, Full Sail University
GDM 513: User Research Data Analysis
Professor Christopher Lillie
October 27, 2024
Introduction
Video games, often perceived as mere sources of entertainment, possess an immense potential to revolutionize learning. This research will unveil the transformative power of video games, demonstrating their ability to teach children how to read, enhance their writing skills, accurately remember historical facts, acquire new and fine-tune existing motor skills, work on speech therapy, mathematics, science, and any other subject or criteria that the human mind can perceive.
This paper is a call to action, emphasizing the urgent need for a concrete framework in this area. While the questions asked have been answered, the pressing need for a structured approach cannot be overstated. Many tests have been conducted on this topic, and for this paper’s exploration, let’s examine how video games can be used as a tool for teaching and working with people with special needs and educational issues such as cultural or linguistic differences.
Background
Roughly 1.3 billion people worldwide, 16% of the population, suffer from disadvantages, making their lives more complicated than those of the 84% majority; these numbers are based on the World Health Organization statistics for disabilities (WHO, 2017). Many people do not have access to educational facilities or programs designed to enhance acquired skills further.
The disabilities that will be of concern throughout this paper are primarily psychological, such as Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Dyslexia, as well as other barriers, such as language, visual, and auditory disabilities. Developing more practical and widely applicable tools for education and teaching people with special needs is essential because everyone deserves equal ground to stand on.
Andy Veltjen, in his 2010 article Using Video Games to Support Students with Special Needs!, pointed out that these groups of individuals need additional support to avoid issues stemming from unemployment and disenfranchised opportunities later in life. His research focused on those with visual, auditory, and physical disabilities.
Current Research
Current research on using video games as a direct tool to teach and encourage motivation in children and adults has been documented for almost half a century. Video games have been used to teach and improve motor skills while aiding the test subject’s overall physical capabilities by assisting in weight reduction (Campos & Fernandez, 2016).
In their review of testing done using active video games, that is, those that require physical motor skill usage to play, test subjects showed remarkable gains in both their ability to do physical tasks and the frequency of time at which they could partake in those activities when compared to the scores of the control group, which was limited to only traditional exercise techniques, the experimental group excelled by a large majority (Campos & Fernandez, 2016). It is also worth noting that the attitudes towards physical activity changed for the better amongst the experimental group members when compared to both their initial assessment and that of the control group. This increase in motivation could be related to the increased scoring and desire to continue among the experimental group (Plesniarski, 2024).
Active video games have not only contributed to changes associated with exercise and physical activity but games of this genre have also been used to understand better how playing them can help children with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a neurological impairment that affects a person’s reading ability (Murray & Birch, 2023).
The research they were interested in concerned visual attention, which can be explained as a person’s ability to remain focused on currently active stimuli and maintain that focus without distraction. Their research exposed a similar hypothesis and experiment in which children with dyslexia were instructed to play active video games daily instead of traditional reading assignments. Without opening a physical book, these students increased their reading ability outside the video game environment (Franceschini et al., 2013, as cited by Murray & Birch, 2013). Upon further evaluation, adding active video games and traditional reading curricula also proved to show favorable results for video game applications as a educational tool (Plesniarski, 2024).
Focusing on a broader body of educational curriculums, Meghan Arias published an article in 2014 titled Using Video Games in Education. Her research appears to cover many classroom subjects and the games that were applied as educational tools. Overall, research showed that test subjects who played games increased their math, history, and science abilities and social and language skills.
The data processed by Arias (2014) highlighted several games used in different classrooms, which helped students better understand the subject material. As an outcome, motivation and attitudes toward learning were also documented. Students were more interested in learning and developing their theories than in playing for enjoyment.
In 2012, a university professor began using video games in his college-level courses (Wainwright, 2014). His work on “Teaching Historical Theory Through Video Games” exposes some of the practical ways he decided to incorporate the game Sid Meier’s Civilizations IV (Meier, 2005) into his curriculum.
During this time, gameplay was a requirement and operated in conjunction with traditional learning methods. Students would use the content they learned in class and compare it to how history is depicted through the lens of a video game. Understanding why changes were made in reflection of cultural acceptance while also discussing the theoretical aspects of what could have occurred throughout the history of a specific period in time. In this regard, the gameplay was used to express what is already known and as a tool to convey a sense of practicality to what would be exclusively theoretical (Wainwright, 2014).
Using video games and instructive tools is critical to applying video games to an educational program. This interested Leuchter and Kurtz when they wrote their paper Effects of Instructions, Assistance, Narrative, Competition, Challenge and Age on Performance in Digital Learning Games (Leuchter & Kurtz, 2022). Studies showed that students who had some assistance on tasks and operated in a multiplayer environment excelled compared to those who were isolated and playing alone (Plesniarski, 2024).
In the book Exploding the Castle: Rethinking How Video Games and Video Game Mechanics Can Shape the Future of Education (Bell & Gresalfi, 2017, as edited by Young & Slota, 2017), much focus is on concerns about how teachers would implement video games into the curriculum if they did not already do so and sheds some light on current issues with implementation.
What was exposed were different ways that video games could be used to teach subjects such as math and history and how this could be used to help improve memory functions. Much focus was spent on creating theoretical concepts that could later be built out and used to create programs with a deeper connection and understanding of how video games can be tools of education as well as what role educators should have; this also included how much information show be presented to ensure positive results (Bell & Gresalfi, 2017, as edited by Young & Slota, 2017).
All of what has already been discussed and sought after already exists. The systems required were already put in place, at least from a theoretical perspective, through the guise of a movie used to entertain in Ready Player One (Spielberg, 2018).
In this movie adaptation of the book Ready Player One (Cline, 2011), the world, though it exists outside of the digital realm, is rooted in its connection to a metaverse known as the Oasis. During this time, the user can experience real-time feedback on their actions while being connected to everything in the known universe. This includes social, economic, and, most importantly, education. An individual led instructions to thousands of people, and progress was observed in real-time. The experiences shared between the users and the system in this movie highlight many of the previously discussed sources have voiced concerns regarding, while not addressing others, such as financial or other external validity and construct validity issues (Plesniarski, 2024).
Using games as educational tools when working with special needs students has been discussed and thoroughly examined across many academic and professional disciplines for several decades, according to Games for Engaged Learning of Middle School Children with Special Learning Needs, written by Ke and Abras in 2013. Their research focused on using video games to provide a situated learning experience where the information students would be learning could also appreciate its value. The students they examined had cultural or language barriers preventing them from succeeding in school compared to the average children with no present barriers.
Their research and review utilized flow concepts to create an educational environment where typical instructional involvement appeared too intrusive and deemed an interruption. Their research suggests that for an educational game to remain interesting enough for the student, the knowledge must be presented naturally in an organic fashion to mimic reality (Ke & Abras, 2013).
Ke and Abras’s research and situational case study were party built upon the foundations outlined by Glenda A. Gunter, Robert F. Kenny, and Erik H. Vick’s 2007 article Taking Educational Games Seriously: Using the RETAIN Model to Design Endogenous Fantasy into Standalone Educational Games. The RETAIN model is an acronym for the Relevance, Embedding, Translation, Adaptation, Immersion, and Naturalization of information. In short, this model suggests that the information taught through this model should be essential and relevant to the task the student is doing. The educational concepts should be embedded into the natural framework of the game and not simply have educational content dumped into an existing game. Students should be able to transfer their knowledge from one task to another, continuously building on the knowledge they have gained in previous lessons—adapting or assimilating the previously learned information to formulate new ideas. The gameplay must be immersive, and the educational material should be consistent. Everything the student interacts with should be a chance to educate. The content of the game should be presented in a natural tone. This will allow the knowledge to be explored and learned almost automatically (Gunter et al., 2007)
Utilizing the framework inspired by Gunter, Kenny, and Vick, Ke and Abras’s situational study lasted three weeks and involved having their participants play mathematics-based games while also taking general math courses. Students played three different games, each presenting the student with varying levels of challenges and various amounts of feedback, which they could use as support, aiding them on their educational journey (Ke & Abras, 2013).
Their observations showed that if the games are designed to put education first, they are more likely to succeed in achieving the core objectives of educating students with special needs. Critical aspects when designing these types of games include having constant feedback in multiple forms, a minimalistic interface that is easily accessible, well-presented educational content embedded into the game’s framework, and the heavy use of rewards to the player for correctly completing activities. Additionally, multiple ways to solve a problem allow students to take what they have learned and explore new possibilities without fearing not progressing forward (Ke & Abras, 2013).
Research in creating educational material through video games has also been used to help deaf children. Vesna Radovanovic’s article from 2013, The Influence of Computer Games on Visual-Motor Integration in Profoundly Deaf Children, highlights how video games can help deaf children build better visual motor skills by allowing them to practice and maintain coordination using a mouse and keyboard. During the study, students would play video games online, such as Space Invaders or Pacman, to practice their hand-eye coordination over a five-month period of time; they also had a control group that did not experience playing the games during the five months. Visual motor skills were then used and compared to the IQs, which would later show the relationship between these two variables. (Radovanovic, 2013).
Radovanovic’s results indicated that the students in the experimental group who played the games had higher hand-eye coordination skills than those in the control group. These results also showed that deaf children develop more motor skills as they age.
In their 2015 article, Teaching Games to Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Special Interests and Video Modelling, Sunhwa Jung and Diane M. Sainato conducted several tests involving children with Autism, in which the children worked on assignments influenced by characters and themes they frequently enjoyed. They had noticed that children were the most social during moments of heightened play, and for their testing, they would pair up the children who had an autism spectrum disorder with a neurotypical child partner.
Throughout the testing process, a team of multidisciplinary professionals cross-examined the fidelity of the testing and iterated upon the process throughout the course of their testing. This enabled the researchers to keep the content enjoyable for the children by allowing both the educational material and the motivational resources to be more tailored to match the individual child (Jung & Sainato, 2015).
The results of their testing showed that children with autism spectrum disorder became more outgoing with their play partners and more receptive to the social and educational concepts outlined during the research. Verbal communication scores went up in the previously less verbal children, and the participants could take the skills they had learned from this intervention and apply them to additional new tasks (Jung & Sainato, 2015).
New Model
A significant amount of data has been collected and processed throughout the years. Many of the questions that have been asked now have their answers, and it is time to build further on the knowledge we have gained. Large-scale infrastructure to house the digital capabilities of both physical and cognitive skills would be required to create a universally applicable system (Plesniarski, 2024). This system would need constant updating as the stream of knowledge continues to grow. Unlike what is depicted in the movie Ready Player One (Spielberg, 2018), this knowledge would have to be rooted in reality and not fantasy.
It has already been established that students excel more in a multiplayer environment than in a single-player when working with educational material (Leuchter & Kurtz). One crucial element missing from the traditional education platform was the ability of enough teachers to provide appropriate feedback to students.
Developing a digital metaverse based on the premises of reality will enable those who experience it to socialize and learn with a greater depth of available resources. This would enable students worldwide to receive an education and allow educators to universalize educational curriculum. Developing such a platform will require decades of dedication to ensure that the educational material is available and presented in a way that it allows students to absorb and educators to build supporting educational platforms based on all of the real-world data that has been integrated into the system.
As real-world data is brought to the digital platform, developers and educators can collaborate on creating educational media that students will then access through the metaverse. As the flow of data continues and enough information becomes available, standardizing the educational approaches used to deliver the material and a universally accepted notion of what that content should include will enable students to have equal access to knowledge and universally understood knowledge.
Similar to the development life cycle of creating video games for entertainment, these games and educational applications must go through many stages of iterative design. During the iterative design process, it will become critical to have the games and applications tested through many series of playtesting as well as scientific research to ensure not only the product itself is of excellent quality but also the content provided to teach, which would be at its core academically sound and scientifically accurate. This also includes ensuring history remains historically accurate.
When designing the feedback system to alert the student to information, multiple types of feedback should be used to ensure that anyone with visual or auditory disabilities can still receive the equal content and information required to succeed. Additional feedback, aside from visual and audible, could involve using vibration to alert the student of any vital changes (Veltjen, 2010).
Limitations
One of the limitations of this research is construct validity. Due to the many different types of severity of mental health conditions, it could be a challenge to ensure that the correct test tools, the game, and the correct test subject, the student, align together. Another threat to the validity of this research is social validity. Video games already have a connotation with play, and that activity tends to give off the impression that all play is meaningless other than to provide joy. Socially speaking, we need to face the reality of whether people are, by large, willing to accept games as an educational tool because moving forward poses more of a challenge without further acceptance.
External validity also threatens this research. It is possible that additional research will be required to develop better tools for evaluating human conditions. The results of those findings could impact the validity of this research and result in the need for additional time to be spent in research and development before larger-scale testing and deployment of the platform can occur.
Conclusion
All of the research presented has been in support of games, especially video games being used as pedagogic tools for working with and educating special needs children and adults. These tools as mentioned by Veltjen will help reduce the number of adults who are left unemployable and as a result end up homeless (Veltjen, 2010)
Additional testing will need to be done to ensure that feedback and content within the educational program not only meets educational guidelines and disability guidelines but the content must also be presented in such a way as to hold and maintain the students attention. Feedback should be presented to the student in many different ways from audible, visual, and possibly other sensory systems such as vibration could be used.
Dr. Robert Kennedy and head archivist and cultural anthropologist Marie Stark-Farrow will be the mentors who will help work on this thesis and its findings. They both have experience working with students and understanding how and why people act and behave in certain behaviors.
This research connects to every capstone as concepts expressed through each differ and relate to creating a platform of this scale. This research relates to Triple-A because of finances and marketing. Serious games involve real-world applications and education. With UI/UX, the relationship is the student’s overall user experience and how well the intended audience can use the product. This also covers testing of the product as it is being developed through quality assurance.
The scope of what is hoped to be achieved by creating a platform of this scale would require the knowledge and manpower of every capstone track. Each track offers something unique and different to the platform, and their continued support is most welcome.
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