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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.'"
This is a brilliant idea. Obviously there are many things to be concerned about... it's not necessarily a good thing to just get games so that the kids will be entertained, but to get them to learn something, to develop thinking skills, and to keep them interested in the subject being taught.
Obviously when talking about games, and school, many of us think of calculator games. For the most part, the use of graphing calculators to play games has just been a way for students to not be bored during class, or for the lonely students to not be bored between class. There are also many calculator games that serve educational purposes in some ways, and they can easily be implemented in the classroom, since the a lot, if not the majority of high school students already own a graphing calculator.
The purpose of going to school isn't necessarily to learn, but also to learn how to learn. And there are many puzzle games that help that cause - they develop the brain in ways that traditional school just can't do. Reading helps the memory, but playing puzzle games help the way the brain actually approaches certain problems and situations.
There is a certain level of interest that is absolutely necessary in order for a student to learn. The difference between the gifted students and the not so gifted students is generally their interest level.
Generally what I saw when I was in high school was that the teachers always fought against the use of graphing calculators (especially playing games on them), but if I ever become a teacher (which I probably won't, and this might be the reason for that), I will utilize the technology available to the greatest extent, and gaming will likely be a part of that.
And... a poll:
Do you think your education would have been better had the teachers utilized games in order to help the students understand?
Yes,
Maybe.
They DID! and that's why I turned out so great!
They DID! and that's why I turned out... the way I am...
No.
A New.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings.
Look, I learned everything I need to know about the Great Western Expansion by playing Oregon trail. Such as, it is very easy to die of dysentery.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Thats easy, its cos I keep rail gunning them.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
.. 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.
I strenuously object to the hasty, ill-concieved rush to computerize education by turning everything into a video game. Pretty soon, everyone will think science only takes place inside a computer. Let me give an example.
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter. I went back to visit it about 10 years ago, all those exhibits were gone, replaced with computer kiosks. Really BAD computer kiosks, uninspiring, ill-planned junk that had all the bells and whistles, but little educational content. I thought about the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on developing and deploying those horrid, amateurish kiosks, and how they replaced a whole museum wing that represented the technological development of America, and I can only consider it the greatest educational tragedy I ever saw. I remember being inspired, as a little child, seeing those monuments to science, but that will never happen again. And it's a damn shame.
"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.
National Endowment for the Arts Report: Reading At Risk
That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listening to, and things to learn and to enjoy--but reading is at least as important, and in many ways more so in that it stimulates the imagination.
Also, ask a teacher from inner-city schools thirty years ago for their horror stories... and then ask one from inner-city school teachers today.
This seems like a never ending cycle of catering to attention deficient children. Western culture is so much more media driven, than ever before, that attention spans are dwindling. There is a reason we didn't need jazz up science 100 years ago to get people interested. That is because science is interesting. If we start catering to an inability of focusing and building desires by yourself, we are more hurting the children then helping. They will get to a point where they expect everyone and everything to cater to them, especially if they show a lack of interest about something. It just seems like a bad idea. It almost seems like dropping computers altogether, and getting back to basics in a way that forces them to focus would be of utmost benefit. The only downside is the lack of information sharing that the internet brings, simulation capabilities that computers offer, and disability services that computers give.
je suis parce que j'aime
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Games are great. I grew up playing them, and I still play them. But games aren't a replacement for the tried and true combination of reading, writing, and hard work. Wrapping learning in a sugary coating may make it taste better, but that won't make it nutritional.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Calling a virtual-model a game only serves to denigrate the whole concept. :p Really, interacting with a model sounds a lot less cool than "playing a game" but it is a much more accurate description. Controlling a simulation in this sense sounds, if done properly, like it could be a very engaging form of learning versus rote memorization of books. Complimenting traditional studies this might actually be able to accomplish it's goal: engaging developing-minds in ways linear text doesn't.
Shh.
I think many educators do not understand that engagement in a game does not mean a child will be learning anything from it. Here's the difference:
The information you gain when playing a game is very fragmented, because you only absorb enough that you need to get you closer to winning. As the parent poster noted, you don't know what dysentery is, you only know that it's bad and it kills your characters.
Teach these kids how to learn, not how to play a game. (Perfect example: MadTV Hooked on Phonics Parody)
Games are written. Just as books are written. And the writer has his/her own biases.
If you read a book, you can read two books. You can read a dozen books. You can find the biases.
If you play one "educational" video game, you've pretty much played them all. There aren't very many. So you'll be stuck with whatever bias the person who wrote it had.
That's not education. That's programming.
It's slightly off-topic, but my question is: Why are all students expected to buy graphing calculators starting in like 7th grade? I'm a teacher at a school where it's MANDATORY for all middle school students to purchase a graphing calculator. The most complex thing these students do with these arcane hunks of plastic is play some sort of tetris game and painstakingly spell out obscene messages to each other. It's been going on for like 15-20 years now and I don't get it. Maybe twice a year someone does the extra credit problems and graphs a couple of parabolas. They're utterly useless for almost everything that school students do. I did quite well on the AP Calc test without ever touching one. Why should every parent toss $100 in the toilet (or send it to Texas, which is worse) on a baffling, never-used brick of never-touched buttons?
Note: I'm not a technophobe. I'm fully in favor of every student having a laptop now or in the near future. But I've been really perplexed by the whole graphing calculator thing for years now. It just seems like a huge waste of money for a tool no one uses. Why not force all students to buy defibrillators and bone saws for health class while we're at it?
Games are a media, like books and film and images, and each media has its strengths. Books are good for teaching because (Besides touching on literacy skills), they can be read over again, at the reader's own pace; films are good for teaching because they compress information relatively densely, and are much better at giving a sense of scale or displaying events than a book (What's better? Telling people about the size of the universe, or showing them Powers of Ten?).
Games are good for helping students understand complex systems by interacting with them. Being able to play with a historically accurate strategic wargame is more interesting, and provides a deeper insight, than just reading what happened during a war. Being able to watch small simulated lifeforms reproduce on a screen is a stunning display of natural selection. There are some subjects which are better explained through a particular media.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
Ok, so a caveat: I was a researcher of educational gaming... but I quit the field when I realized how poorly gaming could translate into the kind of learning that kids need to succeed in the world. Some questions to consider:
How do you transfer game learning to test contexts? After all, standardized tests matter to governments. If you teach in one context, it is very hard to utilize the skills in a different context. Moving from screen to paper is, for instance, tough.
A game requires simplification. What happens to history when it's all burnt into a 15 minute game? While simulations can be helpful for testing dangerous or invisible things (such as genetic combinations, hazmat training or airplane simulation), they're generally poor at proving background.
Some educational games are built on a research base. For instance, there is a math game that will build upon a learner's growing base of rote-memorized solutions (automaticity; measured in Sec. to answer) by scaffoling new and old together. These games are few and far between. MOST games are simply multiple choice, or weird adaptations of Doom-for-math-learning.
End point:
Does what we can teach through gaming actually matter in real life? What does, and what doesn't? Therefore: what should we continue to teach with books and discussion, and where can gaming be used positively?
Anyhow, that's some general food for thought... without raising issues of gender bias, stereotype threat, etc etc.
Kids learn better by engaging them. Kids are engaged by video games. Thus, kids will learn better from video games,
I know I look forward to learning about Greek Mythology from God of War II.
Seriously though. I'm all for engaging kids. The better job you do, the more likely they are to engage themselves and learn on their own. You know one thing that doesn't engage students? Spending all your time teaching to a standardized test. Why go outside and show kids plants, plant a little garden, let them learn from that. Instead, we can just show them a picture in a book and force them to memorize what geotropism.
Let's not forget that as you dumb down the curriculum and spend more time going over and over the same stuff so that all the kids can memorize it for the test, the kids who are smart (and already got it) and even those who are just normal (and got it 6 times ago, unlike the kid in the back who eats paste) are getting bored and tuning out. You may get them back, or they may learn that "school is boring".
I like the idea behind "No child left behind." I think holding teachers accountable, as radical as that may be, is a good thing. It's just too bad that everyone decided to implement it by teaching to the test all the time. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school. They would teach us stuff, we'd learn, things were good. There was usually at least something interesting. Until that time of year. Yes, time for the CAT (California Achievement Tests) or whatever other yearly test we used. For the month before the test they did nothing but teach to the test, which was boring to no end since it was always below the stuff we were currently learning.
More hands on lessons. That's what schools need. Hands on stuff, experiments, field trips.
How many people here think they would even remember what the Oregon Trail was if it wasn't for the game? How many people here remember all the historical stuff from the game, and how many just remember seeing how fast you could get your friends killed or trying to get a tombstone so you could write something on it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Exactly. Many people think too narrowly about video games in school. There's little point in deathmatch Quake in the classroom, but something like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is almost ideal. Phoenix Wright requires a lot of reading and also makes the player exercise critical thinking, e.g. "what in this witness testimony contradicts the evidence I have?"
We also shouldn't forget multiplayer games - we've been playing those in gym class for years! A fun game with a competetive aspect will be well-received for sure.
As others have stated, I don't like the "less books" part of the bargain. Different things require different teaching methods, and I don't think games are appropriate tools for a whole lot of 'em. Games' strength as a teaching tool lies in logic application, and their weakness in teaching facts. If video games are to be used in school, serious thought needs to be put into finding out where they are appropriate and engaging.
Your brain is not a computer.
> It seems to me that too many young people today want everything to be fun and easy. ... back when I was young, we wanted everything to be boring and difficult!
We are gutting education to the extent that it won't be verifiable anymore. If you reduce education to a videogame, you can't very well test on it, and you won't have quantifiable data to point to to show that little Johnny is an idiot. They'll dazzle you with buzzwords about emotional intelligence and self-esteem while fighting standardized testing. I don't blame the teachers all that much--they are subject to the demands of parents, and parents have long brought their power as consumers and taxpayers to bear on the school systems. The parents don't want to fault their own little angels because to do so would call their own parenting into question. It isn't even about the kids.
Frankly, we shouldn't even have computers in the classrooms until high school. It should be all books, chalkboards (cheaper than dry-erase boards/markers) and that's it. Kids need to read. For that matter, adults need to read. But will it change? I doubt it. Parents view teachers as their own contracted employees. Even when I was in high school back in the 80s it was changing--one of my best, most challenging teachers was fired becasue parents complained.
Now see, in 15th century printing press and the paper were the big thing - new technological stuff that made it possible for knowledge to be more easily transferred. This has resulted in the world we know today.
Today, we have graphics, sound, internet, computer. These are the big thing now.
We need to use them just as people used printing press back then - as the primary source of spreading information, and education.
There is a forced inclination to think that 'people should read books'. We have to give that up. The book concept is being conferred much more importance than the value it provides as a medium. It can easily be said that the importance conferred comes more from traditional conditioning of 'books are good' (correct at any date pre-1997) than the actual value books carry in disseminating information and education today.
Visual aids are ALWAYS better. This is why we had illustrations on any printed material during the course of history whenever it was possible. Today we have virtualization, games, sound, graphics, anything you can imagine to make the utopic futuristik education themes in sci-fi movies come true.
And we should do as such, for faster, better and less stress-inducing teaching of children.
Read radical news here
More like if parents actually had time for the kid. Now I know that an anecdote isn't exactly data, but let me tell you how it worked for me.
I learned to read and write long before I got to school, because my grandma took the time to teach me that, and to make it interesting. I can't remember much from that age (she started with it when I was 2-3 years old), but from what I'm told it involved pictures of animals whose name started with that letter, and stuff like that. Kids are pretty much pre-programmed to hang around and learn from a parent or, in this case, substitute parent, so playing some game with letters with grandma and getting lots of attention, hey, it must have been fun times.
I already had basic understanding skills in English and French by the age of 7. No, I couldn't have written Les Miserables, but it was a start, you know? Grandma is again responsible for French, using some Pif comics as material. Kids like to be told stories, you know? _Illustrated_ stories with a cat and a dog doing mean things to each other? You tell me if that doesn't sound like fun. Plus, again, hey, I was getting lots of attention from grandma. Mom and her English language tapes are responsible for English, but again, some time doing it together was involved. (It worked too. I think I'm doing decently in English, wouldn't you say?)
Incidentally, in school, I have grandma to thank for another piece of wisdom, which strangely enough the school didn't teach me. School told me to just keep reading something again and again until it's memorized. Except at some point you feel like your head is numb, and keeping at it any longer isn't getting you any further. It just gets you more frustrated. I can see how lots of kids just concluded that learning is boring, and gave up. Grandma gave me this little piece of advice: so take a 10 second break. Nowadays I know that that's just enough to flush the brain's shortest term buffer. Why couldn't school teach me that? She also helped check my homework and stuff.
At some point, you know, a kid gets to ask stuff like "why is the sky blue?" My parents, bless their nerdy souls, gave me some physics books. You'd be surprised how I could accept the real explanation just as well as other kids accept the fairy tale versions. The whole family, all the way to the great grandma, also were always available to talk about it, which is always a plus. In retrospect, it might have been a tad boring to listen to a kid ranting and raving about a transformer, but someone or another always had time for that. I should be thankful.
Dad also helped provide some maths knowledge needed there, such as teaching me to do a derivative, and how to get there by way of really small delta X... in elementary school. It helped with, for example, understanding mechanics early.
Computers... ok, now for that one I didn't need any special encouragement. It was experimenting with something and seeing some results, which is fun. Still, in retrospect, it wasn't as much spontaneous interest in programming, as Dad showing me how some small BASIC programs are entered and run. I was pretty quick to get interested from there. At some point, basic was kinda slow, so Dad gave me the CPU instruction set manuals and a very quick introduction to Assembly. And to translating it all to hex by hand, because the old ZX-81 had 1k memory total, and an assembler just didn't fit in there. It would be another half a decade until I understood _why_ assembly is faster than BASIC, or how does the computer understand either of them, but it got me happily coding away anyway.
By contrast, the things I was the _least_ interested in was the stuff that just came pretty much by royal decree, so to speak. (Not meaning actually from a king, but from any authority figure, parents included.)
So exactly what are you going to solve by just turning off the TV? "Young man, go to your room and don't come out until you've done your homework." Damn, if that had been all the parent input and attention I got, I'd probably be w
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I agree with your line of thinking. Part of the trouble in having literate students is not just that they are not able to simply read, but they don't even know where to begin to search for information on their own. OK, sure you can tell them that Google has everything, but then they don't know how to critically analyze the sources of their information. Part of literacy is being able to think critically about what it is you are reading/watching/listening to. This is a critical step that many teachers and schools are now being forced to gloss over, simply in order to teach dogmatic standardized-test-answers.
It is one skill that you can teach kids that they will end up using regardless of anything else they do in life.