WASHINGTON — When Alejandra Ceja was growing up in Huntington Park, a Latino community in Los Angeles, she didn’t have exposure to the type of leader that she would one day become – a woman helping kids like her explore a world of possibilities.
“I didn’t have role models in my community who had achieved a four-year [college] degree. I had a family friend, who had gotten her two-year degree, and to me, that was a role model – and that’s what I aspired to,” Ceja said in an interview. “It wasn’t until college that I had access to programs on leadership, access to women that were breaking barriers. It helped me understand that there was more to explore in this world.”
Helping young people is exactly what Ceja now does in her role as executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, a program run by the Department of Education. One of the major initiatives of her program, now in its 25th year, is to expand STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) education by bringing video games, robotics and coding to the classroom.
“We know that STEM is really going to drive our changing workforce,” she said. “STEM education is important because we want to level the playing field so that all students can have access to STEM courses.”
The Education Department is partnering with business leaders to work with students who are interested in technology and STEM careers. The agency is also creating after- school programs to give students more access to educational video games and robotics and video games.
“If it sparks the passion and the innovation in the student to want to pursue their education, I think it benefits students in the classroom,” Ceja said. “We all learn differently, so I think if gaming and coding helps students with their math and their skill set then I definitely think we should do more to encourage that.”
Greg Toppo, an education reporter for USA Today and author of The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make our Kids Smarter, agrees that video games can offer opportunities to students that traditional learning cannot.
“Games present something called ‘hard fun’ for kids,” Toppo said. “It joins these two really important things that school needs to be: it needs to be hard, it needs to be rigorous, it needs to give our kids the tools to compete. But it also needs to be something that engages them because if a kid doesn’t want to be in school, then they’re not going to do much of anything.”
In April Ceja met with a group of students who had worked on a robotics program at school. Many of the kids told her that being involved in the program inspired them to become the first in their families to graduate from high school.
“Robotics and video games sparked the interest of the students in math and science. It made them want to go to school,” Ceja said.
Educational video games can help students engage with the material in new and exciting ways.
“A game is like a piano,” Toppo said. “If you want someone to experience music, you can put on a record. But if you sit them down at a piano, then they can make music themselves. It gives them access to the material in a way that they couldn’t otherwise.”
“A really good game gives a kid access to material in a way that they often can’t get,” he continued. “A good game allows a kid to take their time with the material, to explore it, to try it out, to come right back again if they fail or if it’s too hard. And [they can] just keep trying and trying.”
Toppo’s research also found other benefits of educational video games. A lab in Washington is developing video games as therapy for children with ADHD. The games can help children with the disorder learn to focus and see a task through to completion. Other research is being done on how video games can be a form of socialization, especially when young children and their parents play together, he said.
The social benefit of video games is the topic of research done by Lindsay Grace, the director of the Game Lab and Studio at American University. The lab in Washington is designing and developing new video games.
One of Grace’s recent prototype explored problem solving through gaming. Players worked together to develop a new treatment for AIDS.
“We are seeing that games can have both practical and pro-social benefits,” Grace said. “People can play a game to work together to solve a real twenty-first century problem.”
Grace hopes that educational video games will continue to become more widely used as an educational and problem solving tool.
“Games aren’t just about improving STEM skills. They are a form of the liberal arts,” he said. “They also require you to use logic and language arts and creative writing. They are a great way to make all of these areas fun for learners.”
Ceja hopes that providing more learning opportunities through video games will ignite a passion for learning for all students beginning in early grades.
“We can start unleashing the potential of kids early on if we are more creative in how our kids are learning,” Ceja said.