As a boy, Kurt Squires admits, he spent “way too much time” playing the video game Pirates!
But when a high-school history teacher asked him about European colonization of the Caribbean, Squires found himself spouting off facts – about Spanish galleons, which countries controlled which islands and the fortifications at Havana and Port Royale.
Where did this information come from? Pirates!
That’s when it dawned on Squires that video games can be teaching tools.
Now 33, Squires is an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, and part of a group of educators at Wisconsin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California trying to develop video games to teach science, history, and mathematics in middle and high schools.