I recently played An Army of Two (Playstation 3) with my son. This game is in the war genre with other games such as Call of Duty. One big difference is that it is best played by two players who cooperate with each other; without another real-life person as your partner, it simply isn’t that fun. Each player views one-half of the split screen.

Similar to the movie cliché, “cover me, I’m going in,” the partners work together by one drawing all the enemy fire and attention, leaving the other player able to approach the enemy from the side or rear to get the “bad guy.” The “attention” (called aggro because of enhanced firepower) alternates from player to player (you are outlined in red when you are aggro), so both players get to experience both roles. You can even give kudos to your partner, letting him or her know, they did good work. The game has great graphics but unfortunately it is rated Mature.

The cooperation is what interests me. There are sports games where players can be on the same team but usually you can play as well or better by yourself. Online multiplayer games offer the ability to compete or to form teams and cooperate. Tom Snyder did a few science education, cooperative learning, software and booklet activities about a decade ago (including Rainforest Researcher and The Great Solar System Rescue).  But the educational emphasis today seems to be on one young person interacting with the computer. In programs where there is more than one player, it is usually a competitive situation.

So as the gaming world ventures forth into more cooperation, it is interesting to ponder how this will play out in the world of science education. Perhaps we can advance past the primitive world of two students at a keyboard, where one does the manipulating and the other does the watching, with very little conversation. Imagine students truly cooperating to build a Rube Goldberg device, such as in Adaptive Curriculum’s activity object The Transformation of Energy. Co-op play will certainly make the gaming experience better, and I look forward to seeing titles that young children can play. Let’s hope it goes aggro for the educational developers as well.