By Colin Cahill
Video games can be bad. With the increase in mass shootings in the past decade, some of which came from students or young adults with a past of playing violent video games like Call of Duty or Halo, it should come as no surprise that violent video games have been shown to increase aggression in kids, as well as adults. However, of the nonviolent ones to choose from, FIFA, a soccer video game, was always my favorite. I played soccer on school teams and club teams in middle school and high school, and loved playing FIFA with my best friend, who also played a lot of soccer growing up. We came to FIFA because of the fast-paced action of the gameplay, and the flashy tricks and skill moves that you could perform in-game. However, what we learned along the road spanned several subjects, from Geography to Economics.
Soccer, or Fútbol as the rest of the world knows it, spans nearly every country. EA, the maker of FIFA, analyzes and gives stats to the leagues and players they feature in the game so that they can be accurately represented. Through playing FIFA, my friends and I studied geography, learning city names in Europe, South America, Mexico, etc. I doubt many of my fellow 15 year-olds born and raised in Seattle new that Beşiktaş was a city in Turkey, or that Pachuca was the capital of a state in Mexico. We also learned how cities were divided by their soccer teams, how within a city like London supporters were divided in between teams such as Arsenal, Chelsea,Tottenham, and Fulham, and often these inner-city rivalries burned the fiercest.
In FIFA, there was a game mode called Ultimate Team, where players all over the world had virtual “cards” that were bought and sold on a market not unlike the stock exchange. We learned the basics of supply and demand, as the best cards were often released in the least quantity. The game gave you virtual coins for playing games with the teams you built, and those coins could be used to purchase players. We used our knowledge of the market and the desirability of players to buy low and sell high, to build up enough coins to make the best team we could build.
Players in Ultimate Team were sorted by what country they played for internationally, and what professional team they played for. When constructing a team, you had to organize your players in such a way that they were linked to one another via common country, league, or team, so that your team had good “chemistry”. In addition to this, there were different formations to play in where players had different connections. Building teams then became a creative process where you choose a formation and certain players to build the team around, and used a knowledge of players and connections as well as creative problem solving skills to create the best team possible.
I say all of this not to simply say, “Let your kids play video games!”, but to acknowledge that we can learn and make meaning in our learning in a variety of ways. Kids playing video games like FIFA never consider that they’re picking up valuable skills, because their focused on having fun playing the game. They see a problem, say a lack of coins to buy the player cards they want, and they apply their problem-solving skills to solve it in their own way, by learning how to make coins trading player cards. Kids get this opportunity less and less as they get older, as the concept of “play” becomes a childish notion that kids are meant to discard as they grow into adults. But we all need play, something to challenge our minds or our bodies, and something that we can do without the artificial structure of a school surrounding us (although there’s nothing wrong with schools in and of themselves). Play teaches us that we can be learners on our own, and there’s great value in that.
Playing FIFA, I learned skills in Economics, Geography, and Creative Thinking/problem solving. Interdisciplinary learning might be the way I learned in this game, but is also the way that the real world learns. Political scientists have to understand history, politics, and statistics to be effective. Journalists have to have an understanding of the topic they cover (which might shift from job to job), as well as skills in language arts. Sometimes when young learners explore on their own, outside the classroom, they build their skills this way, and in doing so prepare themselves for the real world ahead of them. This is why exploratory, project-based learning is so vital to STEEAM. It gets learners to think outside of any one subject, to learn as they play, and to attach their learning to experiences, as I did in FIFA. If STEEAM is going to innovate education, it has to be built up with engagement in mind; it has to be made like a video game.
Full STEEAM Ahead 