Govt in talks with game developers and it also plans to fund them

NURSES in Singapore could soon learn how to treat patients by practising their techniques on a video game. And they are not the only ones turning to games for their ‘lessons’.

The Government is banking on the premise that the local educational games industry will take off, allowing soldiers to use such games to hone their fighting skills, or helping students fine-tune their knowledge of chemical structures.

To give the nascent industry a push, it is in talks with game developers to produce such games, and will later help to fund them.

Mr Thomas Lim, senior director of special programmes at the Media Development Authority, which is spearheading the project, hopes Singapore will follow the lead of countries such as the United States, where video training is commonplace.

Fast-food chain McDonald’s, for example, uses ‘customer-service type of games’ to train its counter staff to deal with customers.

In the United States, students are also using games to learn chemistry by, for example, combining different elements to form certain substances.

The new initiative here, called Learning in Media, was announced by Rear-Admiral (NS) Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, at the Games Convention Asia opening ceremony on Thursday.

‘Moving away from entertainment, games are also a useful tool in engaging learners and helping them to develop new skills,’ he said at the convention dedicated to digital media, computer games, and entertainment software and hardware.

Held for the third consecutive year in Singapore, the convention is set to attract close to 120,000 visitors this year, including trade visitors. It is seeing a drop in exhibitors however, due to the economic downturn, with only 80 taking part, compared with last year’s 118.

Source The Straits Times