Usefulness of Gaming in Education Response

I agree with you that gaming has such potential in education particularly for teaching problem solving skills.  In the text, Learning Theory and Instruction (pp 125-129), the discussion on "Activation of Knowledge and its "Instructional Applications" provide support for this opinion.  The main topic, transfer, is described as occurring "when knowledge and productions are linked in LTM with different content."  We can encourage this by having students practice new knowledge put to use in a variety of settings and modes.  In the gaming environment these factors are easily manipulated.  Skill levels can more easily by provided than by static text by requiring transfer via the high road, the low road, forward reaching or backward reaching. For example, our text states, " students who have difficulty learning new material employ backward-reaching  transfer when they think back to other times when they experienced difficulty and ask themselves what they did in those situations (p. 127). 

The additional plus a gaming environment offers is immediate feedback, which keeps the behaviorists happy. Page 128 provides this support, in a study of adults working on verbal analogy problems some were given corrective feedback while others were given strategic advice, it was concluded, “corrective feedback was superior to advice in promoting transfer of problem solving skills.’

The last point I would like to address is that of motivation covered by this quote from p.129, “Students do not transfer strategies automatically…. Practice addresses some of the concerns but not others…. More complex skills, such as comprehension and problem solving skills will probably benefit from this situational cognition approach( Griffin, 1994). Teachers may need to provide students with explicit motivational feedback that links strategy use with improved performance and provides information about how strategies will prove useful in that settings.” Your example of military training exemplifies this concept.