For years, pundits and many parents have pointed to video games with derision as one of the reasons that children today have problems in school. (i.e. too much time playing video games.) However, video games and their popularity might help us learn effective ways to teach children better. In Rose and Meyer’s book Teaching Every Student In The Digital Age; Universal Design For Learning they discuss how in video games challenges escalate as a player develops skill and thus the player is constantly being challenged, but not frustratingly so. This goes along with the educational idea of the Zone of Proximal Development where the ideal challenge level is just above reach but attain able with scaffolds. (p. 97-98) The idea of Universal Design For Learning (UDL) fits this paradigm in that the theory behind it is to tailor each child’s instruction so they are constantly being challenged but have the scaffolds and help to meet those challenges. There is another way that video games have show us the way in education when it comes to UDL that Rose and Meyer do not mention.
In a UDL style classroom, a student should be given multiple ways to demonstrate the achievement of the same goals. For example, if the goal is to learning the causes of World War 2, the traditional approach would be for a student to due research in text based media, and then write a paper about that topic. In a UDL classroom, that student could represent the knowledge they have in a number of different ways to be assessed. For example, a child might want to create a multimedia video about the causes of WW 2 instead of writing a paper on it and be assessed that way. In early video games, there was usually only one or two ways to achieve a goal. On the other hand, in today’s more advanced games it mirrors a UDL approach in that there are usually countless different ways to achieve it. If one wants to defeat a bad guy, the player can sneak up from the shadows and get them, or they can purchase a sniper gun and shoot them from a distance, or they can take a car and ram into him. Many people would read that last sentence and focus on the violence, but not think about how the game is allowing the player multi creative ways to accomplish the same goal. One of the reasons video games might be so popular is that they are always on the forefront of many of the principals of UDL. Thus, I would advise anyone with an interest in UDL to play and look into the latest video games for ideas and innovations that might work for UDL education.