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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.'"
A bigger school problem in the future will be actually getting students to the centralized school buildings. Our fleet of big inefficient yellow school buses are going to be prohibitively expensive when gasoline (and diesel fuel) reaches $4-5 a gallon.
It's time to rethink the whole idea of 'school' anyway. It's a 19th century institution in a 21st century world. Most of it is focused on getting young people into college when at least half of the people in college don't really belong there and would be better off earning a real living at the job that they have been training for since they were 14 years old.
The charge that video games (and by extension, all computer usage in the classroom) is bad for students because it straps them to a television set for many hours a day is basically correct. But the best way to approach this is to make the computers really small (hand held) and wireless and integrate them with cool data collection sensors. Fish dying at a local pond? Don't run video game simulations in the classroom. Go down to the pond with your handheld and take real measurements. Get outside into the real world. For a change.
One time on the Simpsons the class was using calculators and one kid say LOW BATTERY and then the teacher said whatever.