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More Videogames, Fewer Books at Some Schools?
A News.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings. That's one plan put forth by some educators who feel that current learning plans don't fully engage today's classes. By offering real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting ('discover why fish are dying in a park'), teachers hope that games will turn kids onto the idea of learning, and eventually lead them back to books. The article covers several of the projects geared towards exploring this idea, as well as research on the subject. "A game designer, Salen is working with a group called New Visions for Public Schools to establish a school in New York City for grades 6 through 12 that would integrate video games into the entire curriculum. 'There's a lot of moral panic about addiction to games. There's a negative public perception, and we know we have to deal with that. But teachers have been using games for years and years.'"
.. by introducing principles in games like ZZT, for instance. ZZT came with ZZT-OOP (ZZT Object Oriented Programming Language) so that you could create your own rooms with puzzles involving monsters that interact with the player and other monsters (or other objects). Each monster could be programmed with its own set of instructions (where it's told to start or react to specific events). ZZT is a great teaching and learning tool. I have 2 decades of programming experience (starting with BASIC on an 8-bit Amstrad), and the stuff I did as a child left the deepest impression (although it was, unfortunately, the BASIC language). So teach them when they're young.
"Fewer books" is not the right answer. Educational videogames can be a lot of fun--I'm reminded of Rocky's Boots (digital logic for kids) or Fraction Action (Okay, so graphics have improved over the years)--but "Fewer books" is almost always the wrong answer. There are so many incredible books out there--books that are written with beautiful language, books that can be enjoyed and explored.
(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)
I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.