A growing number of education experts, school districts and companies are applying what young people love about games and gaming to new tools for teaching core subjects. But do they work? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has the Short Answer.

At a private school in Houston, eighth-graders slingshot angry red birds across a video screen for a lesson on Newton’s law of motion. High-school students in Los Angeles create the “Zombie Apocalypse” computer game to master character development. And elementary students in Hampstead, N.C., build a virtual city to understand spatial reasoning.

These seemingly playful adventures represent a new frontier in education: videogames as teaching tools. Though it’s still a budding movement, scores of teachers nationwide are using games such as “Angry Birds,” “Minecraft,” “SimCity” and “World of Warcraft” to teach math, science, writing, teamwork and even compassion. In Chicago and New York, entire schools have been created that use the principles of game design in curriculum development.

The movement is driven by a generation of young teachers who grew up with computer games, a national push for innovative teaching methods in K-12 classrooms and a need to reach children whose obsession with videogames sometimes desensitizes them to the traditional, slower-paced classroom lectures.

Proponents say videogames can be powerful classroom instruments that prod students to think creatively to solve complex problems. They provide rapid feedback that forces students to rethink and alter strategies. And they can empower students to work together to conquer specific tasks.

Fail and Try Again

Joey J. Lee, an assistant professor who runs the Games Research Lab at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, says videogames allow students to explore, be curious and persist through negative outcomes. “In many of these games, the best way to learn is to continually fail and then reassess and try again,” he says. “This creates a positive relationship with failure, especially because the stakes are so low.”

Minecraft: A medieval village created in “Minecraft” by Rocky Point high-schoolers for elementary-school kids to use.

Geovany Villasenor, a senior at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy, says he liked building virtual cities in “Minecraft” during his after-school club because it let his “imagination go wild.” He adds that the game, which his teacher now uses in his architecture course, “taught me how to work in a community to get things done.”

The use of games in school isn’t without its critics. Opponents say games are addictive and violent. Some parents worry that children already spend too much time in front of glowing screens, while others argue that the games are based on rewards, corrupting the idea of learning.

Teachers have long used computerized games designed specifically for education. But the new wave of innovation takes popular videogames and transforms them into learning tools, often creating lessons around the Common Core math and language-arts academic standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Some companies are even experimenting with building assessments directly into video games.

Shari Hiltbrand, a 49-year-old middle-school physics teacher at the private Kinkaid School in Houston, began using “Angry Birds” in her classroom two years ago. For the uninitiated, the game, a product of Finland’s Rovio Entertainment Ltd., prods players to slingshot feathery critters of various sizes onto wood, rock or glass towers where pigs hide. To knock out the pigs—and move to the next level—players must get the birds’ trajectories just right.

Ms. Hiltbrand, an avid “Angry Birds” player, researched the physics behind the game and spent a few months creating a lesson plan. Today, her students spend a week playing the game and writing blog posts about the birds’ arc through the air, their descent and collision in terms of Newton’s law of motion, force, mass, speed and velocity.

In past years, Ms. Hiltbrand, a 27-year teaching veteran, had students learn these topics by crashing balls into each other on the floor or timing cars as they passed markers. But in the “Angry Birds” lesson, students are far more enthused and write blogs with “such amazing clarity and precision, I see a deeper understanding of physics,” she says. “I want my kids to be informed, scientific thinkers, and I saw I had hooked them.”

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Lauren Rubenstein, 15, says she had trouble understanding the difference between potential and kinetic energy—until the “Angry Birds” lesson. “It made sense to me because I could see it,” she says.

No one can say exactly how many teachers are using games in classrooms, but to give some idea, hundreds like Ms. Hiltbrand are discussing ideas in weekly webinars and Twitter chats and are posting videogame-related lesson plans on such sites as Educade.org, an online database for innovative lesson plans. Organizations like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pumped millions into research and the practice of gaming in schools. Since 2010, students have competed in the National STEM Video Game Challenge, a contest that promotes skills in science, technology, engineering and math by inspiring students to create videogames. Amplify, the education subsidiary of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, has more than 30 educational videogames it will begin selling next year.

Soft and Hard Skills

Many teachers say they use videogames to develop students’ “soft skills,” such as self-control, persistence, self-confidence and ability to work in a group. A growing body of research has shown these traits are critical to success in later life.

D.L. Anderson for The Wall Street Journal: Students at Cape Fear Middle School in Rocky Point, N.C., play “Guild Wars 2.”

The Pender County Schools in coastal North Carolina use a games curriculum in 12 schools to develop hard and soft skills. Elementary-school students work together in “Minecraft” to build virtual villages and conquer such tasks as crafting a fishing pole to catch 10 fish, saddling and riding a pig, or building a mine cart and putting down rails to ride it on. Middle- and high-school students play “Guild Wars 2″ and go on quests to retrieve stolen relics.

Zeelie Scruggs, 13, an eighth-grader at Cape Fear Middle School in Rocky Point, N.C., says she looks forward to language arts class all week because she gets to play “Guild Wars 2.” “I like it because we learn how to work with each other to overcome challenges,” she says. “And we can keep trying something until we figure out the best way to do it.”

Lucas Gillispie, the district’s technology coordinator and architect of its gamification, smiles when his students talk about the classes and notes that they rarely mention the learning.

In the “Guild Wars 2″ class, students will analyze the mission statements of Avon Products Inc. and Nike Inc. before writing their own mission statement prior to the quest. They’ll write short stories about their character and they’ll read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and talk about choices in the virtual—and the real—world.

Mr. Gillispie calls it “ninja teaching.”

“The academic stuff is there,” he says, “but it is so subtly woven into the fun and engagement that they don’t realize they are learning.”

Ms. Banchero is the national education reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Email:stephanie.banchero@wsj.com.