by Alan Nelson
The other day, Victoria sent me a link to a press release from Microsoft about a new initiative they have launched to teach people about some of the more advanced features of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It’s called Ribbon Hero and involves people competing with others by completing a range of games or challenges based on advanced features in the packages.
I am dubious about educational games. Don’t get me wrong: I have two young children and their cupboards are packed with worthy developmental games, just as our family PC is. But I always find myself asking. “Will this be fun, or will it be educational” Because I can’t believe it will be both. Even my six year old can only be persuaded to stick at BBC Bitesize KS1 (educational games for kids) for a short time before he demands to go to the ‘proper’ games on the CBBC site.
But it got me thinking about how people learn new stuff and whether an ‘edugame’ is really the right way to do it. Will the lure of competition be enough to tempt people to play/learn?
The next day I mentioned it to Victoria. It was, after all, her that introduced me to this. “I’d hate to learn that way,” she said. “If I need to learn something I want to just look it up and then practice it. Just give me some simple instructions and a couple of examples.”
Next I asked Tony how he finds out how a new piece of software works. “I just poke around. I can normally work it out and if I can’t, I find the answer on one of the IT forums. If it’s really difficult to track down, I have a subscription to a service that will answer a certain number of questions a month.”
Finally I turned to Angela. “It depends what it is I want to find out” she said. “If it’s Powerpoint I might ask you, for Word I go to Nicola and I’d ask Matthew [her husband] about Excel. One of you will normally show me the answer”
Now you don’t have to be Kolb to notice that we have a Doer (Victoria), an Experimenter (Tony) and an Observer (Angela). However, we don’t appear to have a gamer. The jury is out on Ribbon Hero at present. I’ll be interested to see the take up over the next months.
