The Role of Video Games for Children

jZnat wrote in to alert us to a BBC article discussing the role of video games in the classroom. The New York Times (registration required) has a more general article regarding young children and their relationship to video games. It's interesting to see the major news outlets refer to gaming in an academic light, and without the usual "the sky is falling" theatrics.

Comments

Re:Video games have NO place in the classroom.

[Ieshan]

Yeah, and no sorts of other learning games, either!

You've obviously not been back into a grade-school classroom in years, where games are played for learning *all* different sorts of materials.

We don't want our kids thinking up insightful solutions, building creativity, learning to deal with competition, or any of the other things Video Games provide.

I'm not saying we should be playing Doom 3 with our third-graders, I'm just saying we ought to be open to the possibility that, yes, there are things you can learn from the computer. Social interaction is *always* good, but the computer is a serious tool of the future that our kids need to be intimately familiar with.

Re:Video games have NO place in the classroom.

[Vaevictis666]

Ah, so hand-eye coordination, analytic thinking, history, math and spelling ability (from the reader rabbit etc. series), etc. don't qualify as learning? And that's off the top of my head without reading the article - when I was in elementary school we had games in the computer lab that taught all those things.

Kids + games = interest. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing has a racecar driving mode, and from what I recall (going back 10-15 years) that's what most of the computers were doing during typing, rather than the boring screen plus keyboard. Anything you can do to learning to help make things *fun* for the kids is an important step towards getting them interested and motivated on the material.