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Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming?
netbuzz writes "A new survey finds that more than half of K-12 students believe that educational video games in school would help them learn (no surprise), although only 15% of teachers and 19% of parents agree. Adults might not want to scoff, however, because 11% of teachers are already using video games in class and they report great results. 'Only 3% of elementary school students say they do not play video games of any kind. Students surveyed say learning via video games would help them better understand difficult concepts, become more engaged in the subject matter and practice skills. There's no mention of the games being fun, but that goes without saying.'"
Funny you should say that, because I understood the concept of chemistry through a game called Atomix then from my grade school science teacher.
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In my last year of Primary School, the single class computer was oversubscribed because of the one game it had: a simple maze game, where certain paths were blocked with 'enemies'. On the earliest levels, these enemies would bring up simple addition problems which had to solved in under 10 seconds. I can't recall the exact penalty for failure, but the motivation to get it right was there. On later stages, subtraction, multiplication, division and simple algebra became commonplace. The quickest way around a maze would take you through harder problems - longer routes would evade the problem but reduce your overall score for a level. For a few solid weeks, it became highly competitive amongst all the boys in our class.
Being brought up with games, both at home and in school, I see no reason to oppose them now. Provided they're correctly and professionally designed, appeal to both boys and girls, and are usable by both students and teachers, they'll help increase mathematical, literary, and scientific skills. The only thing they're unlikely to help with are more creative subjects, and I'm sure the spread of computers will be the ruination of handwriting everywhere.
I'm sure slashdotters can suggest some good educational games. My favorite is Oribter, it's a spaceflight simulator, but based on real physics. Playing it teaches kids about the scale of the universe, the energies involved in space travel, general math, and of course, orbital mechanics.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html
Teachers will use all sorts of classic games to kids. I remember bingo, card games and charades all being used to help me learn french in elementary school (Anglophone Canadian thing I guess).
So what is electronic gaming but the next step?
Plus there are all the advantages to exposing our children to technology. Less of a concern today, but it was different 30 years ago. Who would even hire someone today who doesn't use a computer?
They can be an additional method of expressing complex problems, allows for interactive modeling of problems.
Computer games are more automated, allowing for the teacher to spend more one on one time with students.
It levels out technically exposure between sexes at a young age. Video games are still considered (although becoming less of) a boy's toy.
Why the quoted 'adults' and teachers can't seem to draw similar conclussions is beyond me. I realize exactly how much influence having an Apple II was on my education, how much fiddling with memory allocation to get my games running in DOS and resolving stupid IRQ conflicts would eventually mold my education path. I certainly wouldn't have ended up a game developer.
If nothing else, ask yourself where the Amish will be in 50 years... Think of the Amish!
I take exception with this statement. Having seen many supposedly educational games, my impression is that most if not all of then are not fun, and many are not very educational. Many are an absolute waste and should be treated with the disdain that this article indicates that many parents have.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We also had the first iteration of Carmen Sandiego games for geography, which I have to say is a great way to learn about the world.
Kid Pix was like photoshop for elementary school.
And for some reason they let us play Sim City, I don't really know what it was meant to teach us but I feel I learned something from it.
Computer Learning was a huge part of my school growing up. Elementary and Middle School taught with interactive games.
We Had:
Magic Garden (math, vocab, typing speed, was givien to us in first grade on Mac machines and early pcs)
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (was in our library)
Oregon Trail (was in our library, on an early mac)
Accelerated Reader program (quizzing system where books are worth points for reading based on difficulty and size)
I cant remember the others. I remember I learned the words dexterity, vitality, and mana from games when I was young.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Great game for the Apple IIe that we had in my elementary school was Number Crunchers. Great for memorizing your multiplication tables. You'd run around on a grid and eat all the numbers that were multiples of 4 or something while there were some bad things chasing you. And what didn't I learn from Oregon Trail! I would have no idea chimney rock even existed without that game! And I learned moderation. After shooting one buffalo when hunting, no need to shoot anything else because you couldn't haul all that meat away with you. So why waste the bullets?
Well, there's Brain Age, which has done more for the nation's mental arithmetic skills than anything else since Carol Vorderman. That's fun all right, and I don't think it's left the top ten bestsellers list in the last two years.
Other than that: you'd be surprised how much you pick up from Sid Meier. The background information in the Civilopedia and its eqivalents in Colonization and Pirates is really good stuff. OK, so I wrote in that one history essay that the Royal Navy's imperial dreadnoughts had a one in eight chance of being sunk when attacking a city guarded by spearmen. Still, I once got full marks on a geography assignment for writing about a bunch of ecology concepts I'd learned playing the terraforming scenarios from SimEarth. Most kids don't use the word 'biome'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Even in high school, we have a civics teacher who taught us a lot about the world with Civilization (the original board game the computer game is based on, although he had the computer game available also.) And when I left high school, I spent a summer with a group playing games like Diplomacy, Axis and Allies, Shogun, etc. They're obviously not for everybody, but you learn a lot about how the real world works by playing Diplomacy. Especially when you get stabbed in the back by all the other players, and die in a single turn. :)
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I learned more about ancient Rome and Greece, as well as Mediterranean and European geography and history by playing Rome: Total War than I ever learned from sitting in a classroom. Got an A on the Rome test, too.
I learned the basics of Newton's Laws of Motion and the Law of Gravity (or theories or whatever you want to call it) by playing physics-based games.
Learning from games is everywhere, even in the games that are branded with the "bad for children" mark by the media.
We don't hear about it because it isn't quantifiable, and cannot be used on a standard test.
As far as my experience goes, games can teach concepts but not hard facts.
Guess which is more useful in our curent society?
No, I think he means exactly what he said -- games. Standard (non-video) games have been used for years to help teach physics and geometry, among other things. With games that can simplify physics to eliminate certain aspects, you can have a basic no-fancy-spin billiards that teaches angles and collision physics. Various puzzle games (e.g. Castle of Dr. Brain) teach logic and critical analysis skills. A trivia-style game could be used on almost any subject to make learning it more enjoyable than dry textbook reading or standard lectures. Carmen Sandiego games taught me a wide variety of (useless) facts on various subjects. Crisis in the Kremlin taught me about the Soviet Union, economics, unintended consequences, and history.
Sure, some simulations would be great, but game elements can be pretty easily added on top of the simulation to increase the amount of attention paid. So no -- the word is not just simulations, but games.
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And TV's education abilities are proven in iron-clad studies to be more effective than traditional methods?
I have yet to see a legitimate study on video games and television.
Your biased is plain to see from your very first sentence. Is that you Jonathan Green? Maybe if you watched more TV, you would have better comprehension of English.
Maybe:
Yes, a very BIG maybe.
-Very young children don't yet distinguish completely between real and pretend.
If you believe this argument, then to keep from being a hypocrate, you would also have to believe that reading books are bad for children, and in fact even reading to children as bad. Sorry. I'm not buying it.
-Children who watch TV excessively are more passive
Need you be reminded that Corrolation does not imply causation. In fact, any corrolation could more likely be described as "children who are more passive are more likely to watch TV excessively".(I assume that use use the word passive as an antonym to active, not as an antonym to aggressive) Of course, this argument also would apply to reading.
are less creative.
Absolute BS pulled from your ass. Any study that tries to tell you that they have quantified creativity is utter and complete BS.
-TV takes away from play time, which is more valuable for developing children.
Television IS play time.
-TV is a risk factor for childhood obesity
It is called a 'risk factor' instead of saying that 'it causes' because again, correlation does not imply causation. Did you ever stop to think for just a minute that obese kids are more likely to watch TV? We can argue about what causes people to be fat all day long, for example would could get into the fact that most kids eat diets of 90% surgar, and the government even recommends an almost all sugar diet. Trying to pin obesity on TV is at best misleading, and at worst an all out lie.
and poor social development.
Come on, this is just stupid. Let see, is it more likely that kids who know current popular culture are going to have poor social development, or kids who have poor social development are going to do a solitary activity that still lets them see, and in a sense be around other people? The answer is obvious.
-TV correlates to lower reading scores.
Really? They have found that kids who don't read well like to be entertained too? Amazing! What does that have to do with TV being bad. My kid started reading at 2, and now, having just turned 4, reads better than most of the kids I went to high school with. He watches a lot of TV. I have yet to meet even one other child that could read at 2. Heck, was only even able to 1 reference on the internet to a child that can read at 2. Now, you can argue that my son is some kind of super intelligent mutant that bestows him with intelligence beyond that of mortal men, but even in that very unlikely event, I have a hard time believing that if your premise were true, that he would not have been retarded to at least learning to read at 4.
-TV may diminish short-term memory in children.
And it may increase it. What are you talking about here. There is no indication that this is the case.
-TV is linked to more aggressive behavior
Wrong. Parental neglect causes aggressive behavior. Again. You have your cause and effect mixed up. Preventing kids from watching TV is not going to force parents to pay attention to their kids. Heck, even with the "good" parents, most kids spend 3/4 of the year with more of their time under the custody of the government than they do with their parents, is it any surprise that kids who are ignored during the few hours the state allows t
Using Google Earth to zoom in on cities of the world I print out a "snapshot," usually showing a key feature of a city; building, river, coastline, etc. I put it on the board and the kids get three guess each (a day) to figure out which city it is. They eat it up, often begging me to print up a new city as I get to school. Not really a "video game" but a use of amazingly cool software. For this instance, and perhaps it's true for using actual games, it is the competition of winning, of being the first to get the city that is driving many of my kids. I wonder how much the desire to win drives the "fun" behind academic video games.
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