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Study Finds That Video Games Hinder Learning In Young Boys
dcollins writes "Researchers at Denison University in Ohio have shown that giving PlayStations to young boys leads to slower progress in reading and writing skills. Quoting: 'The study is the first controlled trial to look at the effects of playing video games on learning in young boys. That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' game habits, but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to receive a PlayStation or not ... Those with PlayStations also spent less time engaged in educational activities after school and showed less advancement in their reading and writing skills over time than the control group, according to tests taken by the kids. While the game-system owners didn't show significant behavioral problems, their teachers did report delays in learning academic skills, including writing and spelling.'"
Thanks to Legend of Zelda my basic math sucked for years. I did however beat Ganon with the wooden sword.
Did they really need to do a study to prove something we already knew? At least they fully admitted that it was just a matter of parents making sure that their child's time spent with video games is limited. Of course, that won't stop parents from blaming video games anyway.
Games reduce the intelligence of men, too. For example, Slashdot editors have not learned to be editors.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. There could be a perfectly logical reason why kids who play video games are dumber than those who don't.
As these gamers mature into adulthood, I think that any correlation between gaming and real-world performance will be enhanced due to the smarter kids eventually growing out of it.
I'd be interested in seeing what games were used in the study. I played a lot as a kid, but mostly the RPG's and I'm pretty sure it helped my reading in the long run. My school had me pegged as reading at a college level by grade 5, and I'm pretty sure I didn't pick that up at school.
They don't even have to be educational games if the mechanics are complex enough you end up teaching yourself new basic skills simply to master the game.
I wonder if the researchers thought to look for correlations between parents who were willing to let their children get away with not doing their homework before doing leisure activities, computer game related or not?
Because I doubt playing text heavy RPG or adventure games has a negative influence on reading.
Saying video games are bad for reading is like saying eating food makes you fat.
If they want to see the REAL consequences, they should get a group of 1000 straight A students and see how many of them had video games for the last four years. I am sure the results will be the other day. I am sure many people HERE have been great students and did have a NES or some other console during their school years.
As the article says, these consoles where given to kids that where anxious to have them (they did't have it before but played them at their friends houses). Get a man that haven't had sex in 6 years and give him a girlfriend and analize what happens. Anyone has considered that those consequences might have happened because (1) those kids didn't have a console BEFORE (the novelty factor) and (2) those kids wanted to get the most out of the console because of subconscious fear that it might be taken away from them later.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
- I shall now replace Video Games with Not Being Locked in a Library.
...
The study is the first controlled trial to look at the effects of not being locked in a library on learning in young boys.
That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' library avoidance habits,
but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to be locked in a library or not
Children not confined to a library showed less advancement in their reading and writing skills over time than the control group.
- Clearly, All children should be locked in libraries immediately !
What is this Fox news? Come on people!
So, why don't they give them books and pencils instead?
Some people.
... kids who spend less time reading and writing by doing [insert activity here] has less developed learning skills, stay tuned for more!
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I let my kids (3.5 and 6) play on our Wii. But it's supervised, and only a few hours a week. Usually I'm taking part too. (New Super Mario Bros is more fun when you can go into the bubble and daddy can clear the hard part of the level. ;)
I'd argue in our family gaming is a net positive activity. The kids learn motor skills, cooperation, and given that I emphasize social games, get used to do gaming together as a group.
Any fool can tell that dumping a Playstation on a kid and not moderating the activity will likely be harmful. Any activity is bad for you if you do too much of it...
It it really so hard people?
.: Max Romantschuk
Games (along with books, comics and films) taught me most of the English I know today. I would expect this effect to be significant in general, especially for kids today. But of course, for kids who already speak English, the effect is likely different.
Anyway, I'm sure you could find this effect for any two activities for kids. Games slow down studies, studies slow down athletic achievement, athletic achievement slows down something else. And as someone already pointed out, sex could potentially slow everything else down.
They breed 'em dumb in Ohio.
Wonder what sort of metrics the study would generate if it was done in Japan, or India, or anywhere OTHER then Ohio.
However, initially I'm going to call "bullshit". This is partially because my experience with psychology studies (I did psychology in university) leads me to believe that very few research psychologists have a good handle on technology. Every video game related study I saw had rather deep flaws that showed a lack of understanding of videogames.
In this case, based on the article, I see two potential major flaws:
1) The study was fairly short term. That doesn't tell you anything. All kinds of changes can happen in the short term with a child, and are not meaningful in the long run. You need to evaluate development over a period of years, not over four months. If you look in to the literature on child development you find that many things that taken in a small context that look worrying don't matter in the long run. A child will start talking or reading 6-12 months later than peers, and yet have normal language skills at graduation, for example.
2) It only dealt with kids who got a new toy, not with ones who had it. Even in adults, when we get something new we are more enamored with it and want to spend more time using it. That dies down after a little while. There is no reason to believe that videogames are any different. As such if you believe they are, you need to test that. There needs to be controls with kids that have had videogame systems for long periods of time.
As such I don't think the results of the study are valid. I think there are confounding factors that could falsify their theory. They need to run additional tests with those controlled before I'm willing to accept it, and I imagine such additional tests would falsify the theory.
What needs to be looked at is the difference between kinds with and without videogames over a long period of time. Ideally from like elementary school up to graduation. At this point, the ship may have already sailed on that as videogames are a very popular form of entertainment in our society.
Ultimately I don't think it is the case that videogames are causally related to school performance at all. Goofing off is, but then people goof off in all sorts of ways. I admit I am biased in that when I grew up videogames were not all that popular. They were more limited to the nerdy types, like me. However my observation was that the videogamers tended to be the higher performers. The kids who goofed off by playing videogames when allowed to seemed to do better in school than the kids who goofed off by watching TV or playing sports when allowed to.
I don't think the videogames caused that, but it does make me doubt that videogames are special in any way at hindering academic performance as opposed to other kinds of entertainment.
This study doesn't really show anything new.
It is well known that any student who spends less time studying will learn less then a student who spends more time.
Kids who spend a lot of time with sports, or have an artitic career tend to do less in academic pursuits. Of course there are exceptions but it ain't generally a surprise to find most jocks and girl/boy-bands to be dumb as shit.
There are other pursuits as well. Remember this one, the less sex you have in high school the more intelligent you are. (My IQ? 20... yes really. I swear... oh okay. 200)
Well no shit sherlock. There are 24 hours in a day, no matter how you try, you can only do so much in a single day and if you spend 30 seconds having sex, that is 30 seconds less study time.
So basically, kids who study less, learn slower. Shocking! Deny this study and you just look silly and are basically saying that a guy who spends all his time on the track should expect to be an A student.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sick burn.
+= E
haha haha haha hahah aha haha haha haha haha hahah aha haha
A FOX News' joke about a story not from FOX News!!!
haha haha haha hahah aha haha haha haha haha hahah aha haha
You should make one of these jokes in all the stories that you think are stupid. They are just gold!
Games are more fun/interesting than learning?? Stop......
Ok, we had to program them when I was a kid. But through fussball, handheld space invaders and other late 70s/early 80s devices and systems, I learned to love the gadget world that I now depend on for a living. So, /eloquence mode off/ go screw yourself Mr Ohio!
Oh, and my boy can read and write fine (for a five year old) despite the odd burst of Lego Star Wars or Mario Kart!
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
...games were more picturebook than cinema. One of my strong motivators for learning to read earlier than my peers was wanting to play text-heavy NES games like Dragon Warrior, Xexyz or Faxanadu.
Perhaps in this age of of movie-like games we should start our kids off playing text adventures...
It's already been pointed out that this is a rather obvious result (not that I personally think that means the study wasn't worthwhile). Given the option, of course boys are going to choose video games over basically any other activity.
Personally, I think computer games harmed my intellectual development as a kid. Here's my anecdote.
I grew up around computers - my dad was into them and basically gave me free reign over whatever systems we ended up with in the house. He didn't ever teach me very much, leaving me to learn it all on my own. Of course I was most interested in games (Commander Keen era) but I spent a lot of time exploring what else was possible. I learned a whole lot about computers at a very early age that way.
A few years later, computer games for me really took off - especially because of Star Wars games like X-Wing, Dark Forces, and the rest... I had pretty much all of them, couldn't get enough. At that point, my primary intention when I fired up the computer was to get into the X-Wing cockpit as quickly as possible; I was no longer really interested in anything else.
This kind of went back and forth over the years... there would be periods when I'd briefly get really into something besides games (3D modeling, photoshop, basic programming, all kinds of stuff) - but that only lasted until the next great game came out, and I'd forget all that stuff. The only thing that really stuck from those interstitial phases was photo editing, which I consider myself an expert in now :)
Now, this still put me way ahead of the pack - I knew more about computers than anyone else at school. The reason is that I was actually using computers in all my spare time (even if I was just gaming) rather than playing Nintendo. I never had a console or handheld like every other kid seemed to have. In the mean time I played all the big computer games, and a lot of small ones, up until 2001 or 2002 when I lost interest. When I stopped playing computer games, I went straight back into learning all I could about computers and various software, and though I was still way ahead of most people I knew, I was actually way behind in general. I'd lost several years of computer knowledge to games, and I never really caught up as much as I think I could have.
Also during that time when I was constantly gaming, I missed out on other stuff. I didn't watch a lot of good films (now a major passion of mine), I didn't read a lot of good books (I have quite the collection of Star Wars books, though...), the only music I knew was The Beatles (not that I regret that), and so on. Thus, though I was still an unpopular nerd in high school, once I stopped playing computer games I found all this time that I could suddenly use for more interesting cultural and intellectual pursuits, and I'm really grateful that I didn't waste all of high school playing games.
I still do like games, but I take them in moderation and I wait a while after they come out to decide if I really want to spend time on it. I play through one or two games a year at most (most recent ones I spent a lot of time on were Civ IV and Fallout 3; I do also play most of the Call of Duty games as a guilty pleasure...) The rest of my time is spent doing things that are more intellectually stimulating or otherwise useful.
So what's my point... well, given the chance - and given that they aren't going to put much thought into how this will affect them in the future - boys are going to choose video games. If parents want their kids to know more than how to play first person shooters when they grow up, they should probably do some parenting. I'm very grateful that my parents let me do whatever I wanted growing up (more or less), but I don't think most kids can handle that responsibly. Most of my actual learning took place outside of school, and if I spent all my time playing video games like a lot of kids do now, I would be a completely different person today.
You know I'm not exactly down with the gratuitous of a lot of the stuff in society today - either sexual or violent, but, to just go and say video games are bad is entirely wrong.
My pre-school son is autistic, and one of the most helpful things that I ever did with him was to get him to play Lego Star Wars. First, we worked on the basic controller stuff, up, down, left, and right, and jump, and from that he was able to make the verbal connection between the play and he learned to not only do the controller, but could also communicate directions. Building on that, I worked on teaching him how to describe different things in the game, like colors, sounds, and from there, characters. Cut scenes proved to be really useful in getting him to be able to relate stories as to what was taking place. He's learning to share, and to ask for help, and to ask to do things, and get this, he's even learning how to give directions himself. He can ask to go back to Mos Eisely spaceport when he doesn't like a board. He's starting to understand money and getting better with saving and counting as we spent a weekend saving up to buy the Emperor. He's solving puzzles and he can describe situations where he gets stuck, and he can respond now to verbal cues in response. I can say "you have to jump on that platform and build this thing to climb up", and he will. He's learning bonding, as we sit next each other on a big beanbag the whole time we're playing. We're even getting into some of the moral lessons in the tale. Darth Vader was first a good guy, then became a bad guy, then became a good guy, so he's kinda getting the idea that there is redemption through action, and he's understanding some of the themes of helping your friends. And, honestly, its been a great spring board for me to engage him in his activities and at his level. I can sit down with him and do toy soldiers in the sandbox for four hours and really enjoy it.
Are there downsides? Sure... he lightsabers the dog too much and he gets carried away when he has to fight the bad guys in socially inappropriate situations. But, if you take the thing as a whole, I'd say my son is infinitely better off with Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones and the XBOX 360 than he ever would have been with just traditional instruction. Video games let you learn by doing, bond by sharing, and he's doing just that, and that's helped him grow as a person. If you are willing to blow hundreds of hours playing video games with your children, it will be one of the best things that you've ever done.
I highly recommend it.
This is my sig.
I'm going to add to this, even though my details are purely anecdotal.
My youngest son has learning difficulties and we've put in a lot of work to get him to the stage that he can learn at a normal school. it's an autism spectrum issue.
He plays a LOT of games, probably about 6 hours a day on average. No PS3 or X360, but PC games. Mostly BF2 Sandbox and games where he interacts with real people.
As a result, he has to do a LOT of typing and spelling while playing. It seems to have quite a positive effect, with teachers reporting an improvement in his english. His spelling is perfect and he's putting sentences together a lot more effectively than he previously did.
Communicating through forums and games on the Internet seems to have had a profound effect on him. he's motivated to learn while he's creating stories and worlds and co-ordinating other players.
The solution is simple. Mindless games lead to mindless results. Challenging games lead to academic improvement. Online games with other players lead to social improvements and communicating through messenger has left him learning more after-school than he's able to during class-time.
Even first person shooters can be educational, but it tends to me more on the PC multiplayer games where strategy and communications are key elements of the game.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It's obvious that we're growing MUCH dumber people than we were fifty years ago. -Well, obvious to those who take the time to explore the issue, and by explore, I mean, compare stories.
If you are in your thirties, then talk to people who are twenty years older than you. Get them to tell you their stories about being a youth, then compare those stories to your own. Unless you stayed away from TV and electronic media in a big way, you'll be ashamed and distraught by how big a wuss you sound like by comparison to all the real-life Indiana Joneses out there. Sharp, educated, brave and bruised; people who experienced real adventures and lived to tell the story. And I'm just talking about basic rural living. There was a lot more heart to go around.
Then compare your own stories with the latest crop of plugged-in kids. Even you will sound like a superhero by contrast.
Like it or not, in broad strokes which cannot be easily summed up in statistical analysis of video game studies, THIS is the direction human evolution is going.
Interacting with the physical world and the people living in it teaches kids how to interact with the physical world and the people living in it. Nothing else does it better. -Whereas interacting with media teaches escapism.
I mean, sure, there are certainly pros and cons; the internet for instance can be used to waste time or it can be used to read and absorb real knowledge. The user's intent matters. But the fundamental truth is that when drugs are freely available, drugs usually win. Knowledge obtained through work, by contrast, is not addictive. Walking uphill is harder than rolling down a slope.
Amazingly, you can still raise brilliant, powerful kids. The human machine is fundamentally the same as it was before the advent of TV. Simply follow this protocol. . .
Don't have a TV in your house. Don't play video games. Don't be a computer addict. Eat non-toxic foods, read a lot and get outdoors to play a lot. Do all that as a parent and aside from loving your own life, your kids will follow suit. Oh, and hugs and love. Everybody needs love and hugs!
But it's not going to be an easy world to inherit. If there were any Huns, they'd be at the gate right now.
-FL
Maybe video games have just become too easy. When I started playing video games at age 9 I had to be able to read and write to even start them up on my inherited Apple II and I had to learn English to understand what was going on...
I wonder how would the results compare if they used a decently equipped PC instead of a PS3...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It was a little over ten years ago, I turned off the voice option (he didn't know there was one) and got him interested in Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers. He got incredibly interested because of how dark it was (hook, line, sinker). He would sit on my computer for hours reading the conversations between the characters, and I would help him with the hard words. His grades went up significantly at school after getting interested in that game.
He's in the Army now, take that as you like, but he went from a special slow learners class to a gifted and talented program.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Why do they thing nature invented games? It’s training for reality. Or in other words: Learning?
The only question is: What do you learn?
And that is a decision, parents have to make.
But hey, it’s so easy for incompetent parents and governments, to just blame games.
Maybe those people should have played a bit more with puppets, dogs, and other children when they were young...
But hey... to them, school is still considered good education. When all it is, is drill, to create obeying little drones. Just like Bismarck wanted it when he invented it as some form of military training, but for children.
(And you wondered why the grading system is so fucked up, and why you hated some things in school, that you later found out you loved. [Math, writing, team sports, etc.])
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'd venture to say they didn't specify what type of video games in their questioning of these kids.
Anyone who wants to bash the gaming industry as unproductive can just interview kids who play a certain subset of mindless action games far more than they should, with a pitiful sample size, and claim it's the games that make them dumb instead of the hours of time poorly spent and lack of parental guidance.
Marilyn Manson's music makes you kill people right? If you played grand theft auto you're going to steal cars and slap hookers, right?
There are plenty of more educational games and programs that can actually increase people's learning and comprehension rather than write over it with combo chains and the locations of the best weapons. Educational software, math building, reading building, typing tutors, instructional drawing programs, flight simulators, many puzzle games, math quiz games like Sudoku...these all HELP the user to develop cognitive or applied real-world skills.
It's far too generalized to say stupid kids are that way "Because of video games". That's like saying our country is in the shithole "because of the government".
I was always completely useless at geography until I started playing Xcom now I can pretty much point to anywhere major on the globe so I disagree. Mind you I suppose they don't make games quite like that now.
Here in the Netherlands English ain't a native language, still most people understand/speak it.
While school start with English lessons at younger ages then 10 years ago, I think TV and games also have a big influence on the speed young Dutch people learn English.
Last week a cousin from just 7 years old come to my birthday. I was amazed that he could read and pronounce almost all in games texts.
All games he played on his Nintendo DS where in English, so I guess cause of all the English around him he gained interested in the language now has an advantage of people that don't play English games.
So for non-native English speakers the games are a good thing. (I can't say if it influenced his other educational activities)
Because the researchers raise your second point themselves:
"More research is also needed to determine if these findings apply over the long-term, Weis said.
"It could be that the novelty of video games wears off after four or six or eight months, and they basically don't play as much as they did when they first got the system," he said."
My Journal
This kind of study really annoys me. From the article:
>The researchers think the learning problems result from the drop in after-school actives with educational value.
In other words, it isn't actually video games that are the problem, but the kids doing less "after-school actives with educational value" - i.e. this is an issue for the parents.
I let my six year old son play his Playstation for some hours at the weekend, on the condition that every night he reads to me. Learning to read is hard work, using the Playstation to motivate him actually works really well. My son is learning to read much quicker than many of his classmates, thanks to the Playstation...
I would like to see a study done where my children are tossed into the mix.
First of all, all three have a very strong desire to read which I instilled into them thanks to bedtime stories, reading times, and the allowing of the children to stay up late if they weren't tired...provided that they were reading.
This didn't impact sleep as the most determined of them only made it 45 minutes as a record before sleep clubbed them like baby harp seals.
They also enjoy interactive past times such as Role Playing games. Granted the current kick at the moment is Car Wars (I still have my compendium and Uncle Albert's Catalog from Hell), but there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a bunch of children applying the math they learned figuring out how much armor they can mount on the car and how fast they can get it to go. But, even then they have to read the manuals, they laugh at the jokes and they're getting interested in GURPS ( I'm so proud) and that involves a lot of reading.
Sure they play video games, but unlike many parents, I do not let the PS3 or the Wii become the electronic babysitter. They get some time per child per day and on weekends when the weather is nasty as all heck they'll get more time on the video games...but I monitor and make sure that they do not become so sucked into the world of electrons that they do not enjoy the world beyond it.
So, I blame the parenting. The simple fact that so many parents allow their children to be raised by electrons is the real cause as to why the test scores are showing a difference between those with and those without. They need to run a third grouping of those with and with parental guidance.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Now if they had said excessive game playing negatively impacted room cleaning and bathing...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I wonder why they didn't study girls?
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Video games wastes their precious time and adversely affects their mind and eyes as well. These should be banned. http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/top-grade-acai-extreme-review-how-effective-it-is-2000622.html
That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' game habits, but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to receive a PlayStation or not
There are a couple things wrong here, for some reason I don't necessarily believe that the control group is without video games, it just possibly has a slightly lower occurrence of them. The only thing the experimental group has noticeably more of is Playstations. Conclusion: Sony causes learning disabilities.
Through other correlative studies, we know that video games do not hinder other types of development (such as determining whether a kid is obese or not), but we do know that when you put a TV in a kid's room, their rate of childhood obesity skyrockets.
Wait... what's that? You need a television to use a Playstation!?
Games that give instant rewards for simple motion actions like first person shooters will train the brain to seek out actions IRL that require a small amount of brain activity to provide the 'rewards'. Games that challenge the child to combine information from multiple viewpoints and create a greater reward in the end (parent involvement could do that trick) will train the brain to be useful in a sciencelab.
At least they aren't selling their souls to the lord of darkness and butchering innocent people in the depths of their underground lairs in order to obtain the dark powers that will enable them to conquer the world!
"we're getting more violent, we're dumber, etc."
truth is, violence has gone way down, and literacy has gone way up, on a number of time spans
food has gotten safer (food spoilage kills way more than whatever trace chemicals scare you this month), new and different media has increased social skills
watch tv and play video games: both can be used for your personal growth and enjoyment, and this makes us far smarter, happy, and wealthier than past, more brutal, dumber generations
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Personally, I think playing text adventure games when I was a kid greatly improved my reading and writing skills. I'm old.
How dost thee explain that?
IMO this problem is being caused by a lack of competition in schools. Boys want to compete, video games allow them to easily compete in games of skill and get the results of their competition very quickly. On the other hand much of the past 20 years has been spent removing competition and the concept of success and failure from schools. This study just shows the result of that.
But through fussball,
That's the one where you take your ball and go home, right?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I grew up playing video games. I've had an Atari, NES, Genesis, several Game Boys, a Game Gear, PS1, PS2, Xbox, 360, and played computer games. Also played sports from around 2nd grade all the way through college. I am now in a Political Science graduate program at a research university that emphasises methods. That means a strong reliance on math, language, and critical thinking. It has nothing to do with the time that kids have. For about half my life, I was playing in at least 2 sports a year. That takes up a lot of time. It's all about the motivation and desire to actually learn something.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Full text avaliable at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/02/17/0956797610362670.full
As the article says, these consoles where given to kids that where anxious to have them (they did't have it before but played them at their friends houses). [...] Anyone has considered that those consequences might have happened because (1) those kids didn't have a console BEFORE (the novelty factor) and (2) those kids wanted to get the most out of the console because of subconscious fear that it might be taken away from them later.
I'm more curious about why these kids didn't have game systems (no, I didn't read he article). In my experience, even lower middle-class families have game systems (sometimes in higher variety than upper middle-class; NHL 2010 for XBOX is a lot less expensive than playing real hockey). Only _really_ poor families are the ones doing completely without, and don't kids from poor families do worse in school on average anyway?
Math skills don't make money.
Being intelligent might land you a middle class job if you are lucky.
But if a middle class job is all you want, basic social skills are all you need (to be a manager).
If you want a real job...the kind that pays $1000 a day...you need connections (again, not intelligence).
So play your games....but play them with your friends.
When I was like 2 years old the eye doctor told my mom to buy me an NES to help exercise my eye ( I had a lazy eye ). Well, the NES fixed my lazy eye and I believe helped me build problem solving skills and helped my education. I spent ALOT of time playing NES as a child and believe it contributed to my reading, writing and mathematic skills. I had a few educational games ( The sesame street one ) but mostly played other games like Mario and stuff like that. I could see where blowing your entire afternoon playing playstation could have an adverse effect on learning....I guess it really depends on what kind of games you are playing. It seems to me though that heavy text based games or strategy games that make you think would be beneficial.
Or to summarize the study a different way...
Kids who received Playstations who had parents that let them play on the console every day did worse in testing.
I have two boys (7 and 9) and have a house full of gaming systems (including a MAME system for education in classic gaming). Our simple rule is no video games (or tv) on school nights. They do try to max out their play time on weekends but we end up with tons of time for homework, board games and other family activities the other 5 days of the week. The one tv exception is Nova and they beg to watch it all the time!
I learned myself reading and writing English on a much higher level than my classmates by playing Baldurs Gate when I went to school.
would help the kids enormously. Hell, it would help us *all* enormously. I'm not holding my breath on that one though. I mean, "im not holding mi breth on that wun tho."
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The current education model is pre-industrial, perhaps the games teach a different set of skills in a manner that engages more of the students senses. Perhaps if learning could be re-engineered to be as engaging as gaming things would change.
My kid's lvl 80 DK pwns honor students
Hope is the currency of fools
i'm reminded of the film "no country for old men"
the movie is a set piece of horrible violence and tragic cause and effect, including a psychopath, around nothing more than a drug deal gone bad
the movie starts with the sheriff whining about how everything is going to hell
he whines about the world inexorably changing for the worse a few other times in a few other ways, how every day there's some new act brutality like never before that all points to things going horribly bad in the world, commiserating with another sheriff after one set piece of violence about how everything is changing for the worse, clucking about some awful news in the newspaper, etc. he whines about this all movie
finally, at the end of the movie, after constantly whining about things are changing for the worse, he finally meets his match:
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what it doesn't answer is whether alternative types of learning occurred in place of slightly lower language scores...like spatial reasoning skills perhaps. males are already predisposed to the latter. while language is important, it's not the only holy grail in education despite what certain socio-political groups want us to believe.
I had video games as a kid, and was always reading at a much higher level than most of my peers.
Video Games had nothing to do with my poor grades, it was the fact that I didn't like to do the work.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
Well, I would buy one of those WorkStation for my kids with titles like "Duke Learnem" or "Final History VII"
Kids loves Consoles&Games, and can spent so much time on it, by themselves. Some gameplays might be adjusted to fit some learning objectives, im quite sure those lessons would be assimilated faster than the same one on a more traditional media...
Games (computer, system and otherwise) can actually aid education. My parents never bought a game system so I spent a lot of time reading and playing music, but when I got that natural urge to play some sort of interactive game they'd pop in Number Munchers, Reader Rabbit or another similar educational program. I would even do my chores and homework so that they'd let me play. Perhaps a bit tricky but I was having fun so what's the difference?
Personally I see computers and the Internet as *potentially* the world's most profoundly effective, and socially equalizing, educational tool. OpenCourseware is a good start and I look forward to seeing it mature. Eventually I'd like to help design, and distribute for free, interactive games based on this content. Universal access to high quality education has never been more feasible.
I think that the perception that students who study less learn less is slightly flawed. While it should hold true for students at the same level of intelligence. In a school setting there is a wide array of students. An intelligent student who studies less than an unintelligent student will still probably learn more, depending on the difference in their intelligence. TFA lists 64 test subjects. That seems like a small sample size to assume that the individual IQ's of the subjects has no effect on the study. I'm using the definition of intelligence as the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc (from dictionary.com). I understand that every child is a special snowflake, but some are smart and some are not.
because of nike sweatshops in indonesia
if china surpasses the usa on some measure: trade, military might, miles of high speed rail, good for china. but its not a zero sum game: life in the usa will still be good. the usa can detach from the world if it wanted to because its might, its projection of power, is an aftereffect of its domestic strength. in other words, the domestic strength of the usa is not dependent upon that foreign force projection (except in the realm of petroleum, which is why we need to go all nuclear/coal/solar and electric cars asap... but the usa was on a trajectory of world dominance even before petroleum became important in this world)
in fact, there's plenty of places in the world that whine about the usa, like pakistan, that are mightily dependent on usa aid and usa power to continue to exist the way they do. no more aid to pakistan: hello fundie nutjobs taking over the country (and its nukes, and therefore war with india). no american bases in japan: japan deals with china and north korea by itself. what the hell we're still doing in germany though, i have no idea, russia is toothless. american foreign military bases and economic aid really serve the countries those foreign bases/ economic aid are in more than they serve the usa, in terms of security and stability. i have no problem giving those up. and besides lip service given to the whining local radicals, neither do the people in power in those countries either: they know the real score
as for rome, rome actively depended upon the parasitical feeding off of and tribute from subjugated states. but the usa is an empire unto itself: we have everything we need domestically. in fact, if we stop importing from china, we'll simply revive a lot of moribund manufacturing sectors in the usa that will only help job growth. and that might still happen if china gets unstable. but right now, china is just too damn cheap
the usa rose to dominate millenia and centuries old cultures and nations in under 200 years. why? because of our constitution, the values of our society. in other words, the situation with rome is: might makes right. but the situation in the usa is: right makes might
"right" in the sense that how the usa organizes its people and the values people believes in here. it actually works better than in other countries with competing values that are OBJECTIVELY inferior. for example, saudi arabia does not value woman's rights. which you may say is morally equivalent to the usa's valuing of women's rights. but in terms of the power of its societies to manufacture happiness and stability and economic prosperity, allowing half the population become wage earners simply means your society is objectively more powerful, more "right".
and this why the whole world is gradually becoming democracies since the usa came about: the rest of the world slowly absorbs the wisdom of the american governmental and social model and abandons their archaic governmental structures like monarchy, theocracy, despotism, etc
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
don't you get tired of the constant whoosh sound people make at you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, it's Fux Yews.
I vaguely remember a sound bite report that Finnish kids had very, very high literacy results before starting primary school. Didn't the intelligentsia establishment feel smug about themselves. Then someone pointed out that kids had to learn to read Finnish to understand the subtitles of their favourite cartoons, from America. I wish I could find a link but I heard it listening to the ABC radio (equivalent if NPR or the BBC).
Back before they had things like graphics, my video games were text adventures.
So, basicly, this isn't a video game fault, is the graphic card manufactures fault.
Be seeing you...
How much schooling do you need to remote-pilot those Predators in Afghanistan from a bunker in Las Vegas? Gamerz rule.