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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.'"
think of the children
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
I don't know about your parents but mine were rife with "I didn't have it, why do you need it?" mentality. Luckily I convinced them to get a computer but it wasn't until I moved out that they had the internet ...
It's about breaking down barriers and proving that games can be more useful than just leisure and entertainment. Collaboration, teamwork, and problem solving are just a few things that come from games without the edutainment factor predesigned into them.
My work here is dung.
I remember those games where the math game gave you a series of equations and once they were all solved it would tell you how many you got correct and your overall statistics and speed. Was about 10 years ago but it really helped me a lot. With the amazing progress in computer science these 10 years I imagine if someone made something similar, maybe wrapped a better interface around it with more interactivity, kids would really benefit from it.
I don't really care *how* kids learn, so long as they really are learning.
Far too many educational methods (both regular and games) are ineffective as teaching tools. Many so-called educational games just teach nothing (yes, there are many that are effective).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This game was bad ass. I never thought of it as educational as a kid, but I certainly wouldn't have any problem with kids playing that in school.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Is the second half of that simply made up by the submitter? It's certainly not in the link and I don't see it in the link's link.
Take that out and this basically comes down to "Parents don't think children should have candy for breakfast; children disagree".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You haven't looked too hard have you? A quick check on google turned this up. http://shop.knowledgeadventure.com/Departments/JumpStart-Series.aspx
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'll be damned if my kid hasn't picked up some from her Leapster. All the games have some educational content, and she loves the animal games. They use a reward system like XBox Achievements to get them motivation to play more mini games. And the mini games are things like fill in the missing letter, and simple math. My daughter is 5 and she loves it. There are plenty of games to pick from too, so there are options for everyone.
Back when I was in school we played a lot of games in the classroom as part of the curriculum. Especially in the lower grades. Sure video games can be an educational tool, but so can the non-video variety. And games that allow a large number of students to participate at once have their own unique dynamic that I think every kid should experience. And it's not something you can really get with a video game. Sorry, but an MMO is not really the same as 20 students in a class room all trying to play a game together in their noisy and chaotic way.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
...something that the teacher wasn't even teaching, and that I wouldn't be taught for near 5 years. In second grade, I was able to teach myself algebra by analyzing problems and their solutions as posed by an educational game that we were encouraged to play (for its arithmatic game, but that was too easy). If someone had then taught me the order of operations and negative numbers, I would have had a much better start in my math education. Sadly, this did not happen, they taught multiplication tables instead, ugh. The point of this is that if a child likes doing something, and there is opportunity to use this to teach them something, this should be employed to do so. I was eager to zap those math problems as they went across the screen, and the algebra was offered as a higher difficulty level, so I tried it. These tools can be used to introduce topics before they are taught, to provide exposure to a problem before the proper analysis is taught, and can be continually used to hone the skills involved in learning the analysis.
- WWII weapons suck and are extremely inaccurate.
- Always lay down suppressing fire and try to flank the enemy.
- When engaging the enemy, use overwhelming force whenever possible.
- If you pull back on the stick while firing afterburners, you will black out.
Joking aside, I think gaming has snuck in a variety of educational facts into his noggin. Planning, thinking logically, history, reading, and problem solving are just a few of the things I've noticed rubbing off in the name of fun.Back in the day when I taught high school biology, I wrote a dog breeding program that taught genetics. The kids loved it, even though the interface was simple and the genetics were overly simplified. The key is that a game must be fun first and slyly sneak in some educational content along the way.
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...
These kids are so right. I learned at least 90% of my personal skills through Quake Team Fortress back in the late 90s. Or should I say 5kyllz?
It was a simpler time...
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.
So the point is we're at a standstill. Education authorities don't believe in the teaching power of games, and the games industry believes there is no money in education. It is no small wonder games aren't widely accepted in curricula yet given no one has bothered to throw a budget at the issue.
Me, I remember being an 12 year old kid trying to explain to my father how MUDding was extremely educational. I think in within 10 years someone will gamble on a high-budget education project and come out extremely profitable.
1 - gcc
2 - Firefox (w. Google & Wikipedia)
When their powers combine, you can build anything. It's like Legos on crack. And who doesn't like Legos?
Educational methods that revolve around memorization, be it in games or anything else, are usually very ineffecient. Teaching facts is along the lines of giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to do so. Once you learn that fact, it does little to nothing to your overall education in other areas.
The most effective teaching methods involve giving students the tools to be able to learn how to learn. Most learning will be done on a student's own through exploration, even if much of it is passive.
That's where video games come in. Legend of Zelda may not teach you Mayan history, it might not show you, directly, how to do algebra, but it develops problem solving and creative thinking skills in fairly complex ways that will make a student's job in learning those things FAR easier. Zelda isn't even an "education game" but its innate problem solving is more involved that almost any story problem you'll encounter in HS, and kids play Zelda in grade school. The problem is, it's not easilly quantifiable because there are no hard-and-fast facts being learned, but as I said, fact learning is one of the least inefficient educational methods. Sure, facts must be taught, but there should be much less emphasis on fact learning and more emphasis on critical thinking skills.
Meanwhile, over the course of Zelda, or even an adventure FPS, RPG, or most other modern games, you're reading a lot of on-screen text, you're doing mathmatical computation for stats, puzzles, and the like... and all surrounded by various time limits that act as drill. And to top it off, it's fun and doesn't FEEL like work. What more could an educator ask for?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Except that PE today consists largely of simple exercises and the most non-competitive games you can find, because it'd be a real tragedy to tell a child that they might not be good at something.
Not a typewriter
I say make them play portal to improve their reasoning skills, and teach them to think of creative solutions to complex problems. Also to keep them paranoid of rogue computers and robots, since that is a future threat our kids will surely have to face.
Educational Gaming is *ALREADY* here and it's already making a killing in the market, not only for kids but particularly for adults.
Some of the best sellers on the Nintendo DS could easily be classified as Edutainment. Games like Brain Age, Flash Focus or Brain Coach are all games that will also teach you to use your abilities. More recently, games like my French/Spanish Coach or My Word Coach are designed to improve your mastery of your language or start on a new one.
Those "games" work by making the necessary repetition of teaching (especially for language) less tedious than "classic" methods. After all, it does not really matters how little Johnny learnt to associate head with cabeza, it just needs to be drilled into his mind until the association is automatic. If it takes simple games to take the tedious part away, I'm all for it. I personally "play" My Spanish Coach and this has been the easiest method for me to get motivated and learn that language (YMMV).
The DS has been a revolution on that front, seen as a very nice gadget by lots of adults on top as a game console for kids. The touch screen interface blends the genre and allows new type of software for such a cheap gadget (~$100, far cheaper than a pda and much wider spread).
Check some of the games available on DS. Lots of choices.
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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