All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So goes a time-honoured British proverb. The question of play has resurfaced with stronger emphasis than before. Play has been widely used in education systems especially with the very young. But the strategy dies out as we progress through school and come face to face with Henry Ford’s dictum that: When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two.

Scroll forward to the present time and to the mission statement of Southwest Airlines, a low-cost successful company. It states that: People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it. And what’s new about that you may ask. Nothing except that the educational uses of play have been sidelined in line with Ford’s dictum and are only now being rediscovered due to the present technology.

Let us move sideways and go on to health. Laparoscopic surgeons operate on colons, gall bladders and almost anything that can be accessed by a small incision. But they never put their hands inside the patient. Instead, they use robotic controls – essentially a joystick – to move instruments inserted into the patient through a tiny incision (it’s sometimes referred to as keyhole surgery). They watch what they’re doing on a video screen. The ability to make an instantaneous connection between hand motion and remote movement viewed on a screen is crucial, because laparoscopic surgeons don’t look at their hands. Their hands are moving joystick controls, not scalpels.

An interesting three-month study was conducted in Israel. The results were published in the February 2007 issue of the journal Archives of Surgery and reported some interesting results. Thirty-three surgeons participated in a two-part process. First, they played three non-medical video games. Next, they completed a wide variety of virtual laparoscopic surgery techniques. The researchers measured their accuracy and their completion time in both parts.

The results took into account not only the surgeons’ performances during the three-month study, but also factored in their level of training, number of years in practice and how many surgeries they’d performed, as well as their video-gaming habits in real life. When all of the factors were considered, the analysis was dramatic:

• The surgeons who had a history of playing video games for more than three hours a week made 37 per cent fewer mistakes and completed tasks 27 per cent faster than the surgeons who had no history of playing video games.

• The surgeons who were still playing video games (for any amount of time per week) at the time of the study made 32 per cent fewer mistakes and completed tasks 24 per cent faster than their never-playing colleagues.

• The surgeons who scored in the top third of the video-game portion of the study made 47 per cent fewer errors and completed tasks 39 per cent faster than those who scored in the bottom third.

This study only included 33 surgeons and obviously more needs to be done before we give our medical students time off to play video-games. Nevertheless the future of surgical training is clear, and actually has been for some time. The US military has been using a field-medic simulator called STATCARE for years. STATCARE stands for Simulation Technology Applied to Trauma Care. It’s basically a video game that enacts real-world battlefield situations in which a fallen soldier needs medical attention, and the doctors and medics must act quickly. The virtual patient responds to pain and drugs, exhibiting vital signs like a heart beat and blood pressure in response to treatment. The Army had discovered that having medics insert their first Intra venous line in a fellow trainee out in field conditions wasn’t the best idea. It’s now investing in medical simulators, including a bio-feedback mannequin that actually gets sicker if the doctor messes up.

Last month, the BBC ran an educational piece on video-games asking whether they constituted learning or just playing. The investigation into the habits of 700 children aged seven to 16 found for a start that, far from being a solitary activity, children preferred to play games in pairs or small groups.

Researchers also found that the games had significant educational value and computer games could become part of the school curriculum. The UK study concluded that simulation and adventure games – such as Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon, where players create societies or build theme parks – developed children’s strategic thinking and planning skills. Parents and teachers also thought their children’s mathematics, reading and spelling improved. The research from the group Teachers Evaluating Educational Multimedia (Teem) is being studied by the Department for Education in the UK.

The director of Teem, Professor Angela McFarlane, said there was much to learn from the games industry in terms of developing scenarios that really challenged and engaged children, rather than reproducing text books on the screen.

Adventure, quest and simulation type games have a lot of benefit. They’re quite complex and create a context in which children can develop important skills Professor McFarlane pointed out. Of course teachers often found it difficult to justify the use of simulation or adventure computer games during school time because their content did not map the national curriculum. But Prof. McFarlane believes that if educational material could be built in, such games could be used in the classroom legitimately.

Why am I writing about this? My Eden experience has left me with some interest in educational processes because what was achieved there with children and adults with intellectual disability was stunning. The results were not obtained by following established procedures. I am therefore convinced that while updating schools is fine and necessary, unless the actual educational approach meets the global needs of the century we are in, we will simply not get there.

To begin with, we do not seem to have made a strong enough differentiation in Malta between education and schooling. To most people they mean one and the same thing. But they are not. Many students are willing to learn but they hate the way it is done, they hate schooling. So we get drop-outs! There are enough studies that show some students learn by outside stimuli and that games benefit those students. For example, some pupils might find a typing game a better way to learn the computer keyboard than having a teacher talk to them about it.

A short time ago, in a Washington report, The Federation of American Scientists, after a year of study, called for federal research into how the addictive nature of video games can be converted into serious learning tools for schools. The theory is that games teach skills that employers want: Analytical thinking, team building, multitasking and problem solving under duress.

President Obama visited South Korea last week and remained stunned with the educational attainments of the country’s students. Ironically, in an interview, the President of South Korea expressed his surprise at Obama’s reaction, for the country was actually trying to change an educational regime that leans enormously on memory and involves cram schools and private lessons that make South Korean students sleep one hour less each night than their American counterparts, into one that is more creative and open-minded.

South Koreans it seems are obsessed with education. When they can afford it, parents send their children to foreign schools where the basis of learning is creativity rather than memory. But what stands out is the lust for learning evidenced by South Korean families. When President Obama asked what the main problem with Korean education was, the prompt answer was that parents were too demanding.

We must start thinking of rooting in all our families the same lust for learning. In the near future there will be no jobs for the unskilled and the unqualified. What is urgently required is thinking outside the box.