Your child’s screen may not be the problem — Hapini Awang

OCTOBER 6 — Whenever adults hear the words “digital games”, the conversation almost immediately turns to screen time. How many hours are children spending online? Should phones be banned? Are games distracting them from learning? 

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of focusing only on how long young people spend in front of screens, we should also ask “What are they doing with those screens?”

There is a significant difference between consuming technology and creating with it. A recent Universiti Utara Malaysia initiative involving 88 lower-secondary students and teacher mentors from three schools demonstrated what can happen when students are challenged not merely to play digital games, but to design them.

Creating a game requires students to make decisions about rules, scoring, characters, logic, user experience and technical problems. Mathematics emerges through calculations and game systems. Technology becomes a tool for creation. Engineering thinking appears when students test an idea, encounter failure, make adjustments and try again.

The author argues that digital games can become powerful STEM learning tools when children move beyond consuming technology to designing, experimenting and creating with it. — File pic

STEM, therefore, stops being something students simply read about. It becomes something they build. Students were also introduced to artificial intelligence when developing 3D characters. This offers another important lesson. AI literacy should never mean pressing a button and accepting whatever the machine produces. Young people need to learn how to use AI while retaining human judgement, creativity, originality, ethics and responsibility.

Their digital games were eventually showcased through a metaverse exhibition, giving students an authentic audience for their creations. Learning changes when students know that what they produce will be seen, tested and discussed by others. Of course, digital games are no cure-all for declining STEM interest, and not every lesson needs gamification. If Malaysia wants a generation that is digitally fluent, telling children simply to “put down the screen” is no longer enough.

We should be teaching them to do something more powerful with it. Perhaps the future of STEM begins when a child stops asking, “What game can I play?” and starts asking, “What can I build?”

* Hapini Awang is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced and Smart Digital Opportunities (IASDO) of the School of Computing at Universiti Utara Malaysia.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.