Ntiedo Etuk

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tabula Digita

Having Fun at School? Absolutely.

An old truism of educational theory is that the teacher should meet the students where they are. These days, that would probably be in front of a video screen, with a controller in hand.

Software developer Ntiedo Etuk helps educators and parents feel comfortable with the idea of teaching from that place. He has been convincing school boards around the country that playing video games is a great way to learn.

And he insists that the method is not exactly new.

“We’ve always taught through games,” Etuk says. “It’s just that games have moved into a different medium. Adults tend to forget that.”

Etuk’s company, Tabula Digita, has already made significant inroads into major public school systems—including New York City’s—with educational gaming products that teach math, science and an expanding array of other subjects.

Video games have a great capacity to teach, he says, because they draw on many different levels of fun and engagement. Graphics, animation and sound offer far more visual stimuli than a textbook. Multiplayer games build communities; girls enjoy the social collaboration, boys go for the action. And the sheer competitiveness of the games keeps player interest high, even if playing entails learning an algebraic equation.

Meeting students where they are in this rapidly morphing multi-media world will mean saying goodbye to some old school teaching methods. And that’s probably a good thing, according to Etuk.

“The way in which we’re used to teaching kids is absolutely the wrong way to go about engaging a person,” he says. “There are very few tools that get down on their hands and knees at the student level and say, What is actually engaging you? What is getting you to pay attention?”

While the idea of “engagement” holds great currency in the digital realm, it is only now becoming a critical goal of the education system. And in this day and age of instant communication and instant feedback, capturing and holding the interest of a student has become an increasingly tricky task.

“Kids are different today,” he says. “They process, absorb and receive information completely differently from the way that we did when we were growing up. We need to teach them in a different way.”

Discussion on this topic has been prolific recently. Kids have shorter attention spans. They spend less time with their parents, more time with their friends, and more time on the Internet. Information comes at them from a million directions, and they like the freedom to choose the medium through which they receive it. They expect to be offered print, graphics and sound. They want interactivity.

And dare we say it? They want to have fun.

That’s fine, says Etuk. It’s an important aspect of learning that seems to get lost in the harried world of educational achievement goals.

Etuk points out that most educational publishers and developers create products that are geared for teachers, to help them do their jobs better. But if the teacher doesn’t get the attention of the student, those pedagogical tools are worthless.

Tabula Digita has developed a modular gaming approach that enables players to move around topics, rather than having to follow an elaborate storyline and linear learning path. Etuk says the modular approach reflects what actually happens in the classroom because teachers “jump all over the place” when they actually teach. He likens the Tabula Digita learning environment to an “arena” where anything can happen, where one can bump into any problem type (within limits of course), and where things remain fresh and interesting.

The biggest asset of educational gaming, he notes, is that it draws on emotion. Adaptive technology—if you get it right, the next question is harder—builds confidence through what he calls “small, incremental emotional gains.” Current educational practices, he says, often miss this point.

“You need to associate emotion if you want to change,” he says. “In the typical education setting, we’re continually trying to push students into a place where they don’t have any emotional response to doing a math problem. But in the educational gaming environment, every problem answered right is exciting and every problem wrong an incentive to do better on the next problem.”

The teacher stands by as a “support line,” Etuk explains, prepared with instruction that has immediate relevance to what the student is trying to accomplish in the game. Suddenly, the teacher becomes relevant as well.

Educational gaming will certainly challenge standard notions of what a classroom is supposed to be, perhaps shaking out some of the obsolete practices that can hamper vibrant learning. Mark Twain once said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

But in Etuk’s vision, schooling and education will be one thing.

Learning will be a more immersive, 3-D experience driven by the most important player—the student.