Video Games for STEM Education: Potential and Pitfalls

From the US to Canada to many countries in Europe and across the world, it is widely recognized that STEM education is in crisis. Despite numerous reform efforts, not only is average student performance in math, physics, etc., in high school as well as among students in undergraduate courses relatively poor, students don’t also seem to have a real conceptual grasp of key ideas from these domains. As a result, many of these students decide not to pursue STEM degrees in college and those who do pursue them end up not being well-prepared for STEM careers. One approach that has been proposed to address the problem is the use of video games to help students develop both competence and conceptual understanding of key topics in algebra, calculus, discrete math, physics, etc. The underlying rationale is that well-designed video games whose stories and/or mechanics involve important STEM concepts and techniques, will immerse the player in the game and the resulting engagement will ensure that the player, even without realizing it, develops competence and conceptual understanding of key STEM topics. Several such games have, indeed, been developed and we discuss some of them in the paper. Unfortunately, as we will see, the results have been relatively poor, and the games are not widely used. In this paper, we will explore some fundamental reasons, these being the pitfalls referred to in the title, why the games have not been successful. We focus attention on possible games for middle school and high school Algebra courses for two reasons. First, it is in these courses that students’ difficulties with STEM concepts and techniques seem to first manifest. Second, algebra serves as the basis not only for more advanced math courses such as calculus, statistics, etc., but also for physics, astronomy, discrete math and computer science, etc. Therefore, students’ difficulties with algebra will naturally affect their ability to do well in these courses. We then consider how more effective games that take explicit account of insights from research on math education may be designed.