Leveling Up Learning: The Future of Gaming and Learning

The gaming industry has grown from a $10 billion industry to a $200 billion industry in just two decades, making it bigger than film, music, and streaming combined. But a small subset of video games haven’t taken off in the same way: educational video games, which haven’t developed much since classics like Oregon Trail. What led to this lack of progress? How are modern learning games evolving to catch up, and what does the future hold, especially with the emergence of AI?

These were key questions at “Leveling Up Learning: The Future of Gaming and Learning,” a panel at this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual gathering hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) and Global Silicon Valley (GSV) that connects leading minds focused on transforming society and business around learning and work. Endless CEO and Founder Matt Dalio joined Adam Seldow (Roblox), Steven Isaacs (Epic Games), Liam Don (ClassDojo), and Jessica Lindl (Unity) to discuss.

Here are some key reflections from the panel.

Where did learning games go wrong?

When gamification met education, learning games enjoyed a brief time in the sun. But many lacked the quality they needed to make an impact on learning. One common pitfall, says Isaacs, is that the rewards don’t always match the overall learning goals: “We navigate through letters to spell a word and then get an opportunity to shoot something that has nothing to do with what we were just doing. The learning has to come from the engagement in the gameplay and the gameplay has to match the learning objectives.”

On the other hand, adhering too strictly to the learning content can be limiting, too. Don explains, “If we think about what we teach—say, history—then a series of events is one way of thinking about that … but that's not really what history is. It's really how one event led to another, what the motivations of the people were… And I think games can allow you to explore those systems and really build an intuition which leads to mastery.” For example, focusing on an educational outcome, like a math equation, makes for a very different gaming experience than something like SimCity, which has outcomes that are much harder to define but is “teaching a lot of understanding of complex systems, of cause and effect,” explains Don. “I think we started to push for games to be obvious to the people funding them that they were teaching this node or that node, rather than just building your intuition for how systems work.”

Additionally, games continue to face a stigma in the classroom, explains Seldow. “Games by and large are still viewed as distractions … They don't belong in the classroom, they don't teach our kids anything.” He hopes more successful examples will help shift the tide: “Games, electronic or not … have so many innate values that teach kids so much about cooperation, failure … perseverance, grit. All of these wonderful things that are very hard to measure—and frankly, very hard to teach—are part of games.”

And—of course—money has always been a challenge: with the explosion of the industry, games became more expensive to make and a lot of game designers went to the higher-paying jobs on the entertainment side.

Where do we go from here?

All of that said, there’s a lot of potential in learning games and all of the panelists represent some incredible gaming solutions seeking to better support students in today’s landscape.

Centering Creators

Endless Studios, explains Dalio, is all about empowering kids to build their own games—“We're all creative as humans and giving kids the most powerful tools—games and game engines of today are the most powerful tools in the world, basically—[allows them] to imagine anything. What we're trying to do is say … How do you get kids into real software so that they can … be ready to be out in the working world?”

Building on this idea of a “player to creator pathway,” Issacs explains how the Unreal Engine is making tools and resources more accessible to teachers that can help the onboarding process. Sometimes “educators are intimidated about the idea of bringing a tool like Unreal Engine into the classroom. So we've created a lot of great resources that allow them to essentially support the students as much more of a support or a guide than someone who has to stand in front of the room and teach everything about our engine.” They also have a variety of career-oriented content that includes videos from real professionals followed by related lessons on the same topic, all of which are no charge.

Roblox’s platform already features a plethora of user-created games, and their team is interested in how they can continue to push the quality of these creations. Seldow says, “In the education part of Roblox, what we're doing is investing in creators by working with some of the best content providers out there to bring standards-aligned, academically rigorous content onto the platform through exemplary models.” One example? A game called “Pathogen Patrol” developed by partner “Project Lead the Way” where you play as a white blood cell trying to kill pathogens as part of their biomedical curriculum. “It's a lot of fun, but when you go in it, you're actually learning the science. You are doing the anatomically correct things to kill pathogens.”

What’s next?

The future of educational games

So, what does the future hold? Isaacs addresses two big topics in edtech right now, saying “I love the idea of AI supporting a learner to be more efficient … I think we're also moving to a place where … we're creating these metaverse experiences. So kids are … seeing what that is and they're … go[ing to] see a Travis Scott in concert in Fortnite. That's why I love what we're doing. I want the kids who know this space to be the ones creating it.”

Building on that, Seldow thinks the future holds more ways for kids to express themselves: “The portfolio type of assignments that we do now, where we draw a poster or we build something, I think that building can include games moving forward. And I think we're going to see, hopefully, more ways for students to express themselves in these various metaverse situations and be who they want to be at that moment and change it often.”

The future of education also needs to match the future of jobs, which will require skills like project management, marketing, and digital art: everything that goes into making things. “The future of work will be things like AI and using those tools. And I think that the future of education or the present of education needs to . . . give youth an opportunity [to learn those tools], starting from a young age, all the way through their employment. We're not going to be replaced by AI. We're going to be replaced by people who know how to use AI,” Dalio concludes.

With better technology comes more opportunity for learning games that engage kids in key processes and teach relevant content. What that will look like 5 and 10 years down the line is hard to predict, but it’s clear that games need to continue to center kids as creators and support educators in teaching key processes.