28th September 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
It was interesting reading an article this week about some families in the US requesting tutors for the online game Fortnite. Traditionally it’s a bizarre thing to do; private tuition is expensive, and spending money on a tutor to help a student to be better at something which is normally seen as a waste of time seems to have so may things wrong with it. However, maybe there is more to the idea than there appears to be at first.
Actually, parents’ reasons for getting a computer game tutor aren’t really convincing. They tended to say that it’s a good way to control the time spent playing the game, and the conversations their children have with other game players. This overlooks the fact that there can be a lot of value for a student’s learning ability by playing a game.
A common question for graduates, particularly those from Oxbridge where degrees are so academic, is whether they use their degree in their jobs. The superficial answer is “no”, but actually the value of an Oxford University or Cambridge University education is the way students are trained to learn and the different ways of thinking which are developed. For example, many arts subjects ask students to read around an essay topic over the course of a week and then write an essay; a skill which is used all the time in one’s working life when writing a persuasive report for others to read. Also, so much of science subjects revolve around creating an order or a structure to help solve a problem, or creating a new way to approach that problem. In many technical jobs this is the lion share of what people to on a day to day basis.
Computer games have changed over the last 20 years. Now they are far less linear and require problem solving and investigative techniques to succeed. More adults than ever play computer games in their free time for exactly this reason. They are genuinely stimulating. In playing these games young people are learning to problem solve, they’re learning to overcome what seem like impossible problems at first. This is so far away from what we think of as classic arcade games where success is based on reactions and luck.
Getting a tutor for a computer is extreme, yes. Even a tutoring agency will admit that, but the skills developed playing modern games can actually help students with problem solving in their academic life. We wouldn’t argue that a student is better off playing a game than studying, but when so many of them are choosing to spend a lot of free time in front of a screen, it can only be a good thing if the games are becoming more like an academic problem to be solved.