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Kid Health Experts Attack Video Game Summer Camp
Jack Action writes "The University of British Columbia runs a summer camp where kids get to play computer games for three hours a day. The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.' However, health professionals declare they are 'troubled' by the camp. A professor in UBC's department of medicine says kids should be outside and engaged in 'unstructured play,' while the CEO of an NGO that monitors kids' health chimes in that they already spend too much time in front of screens and not exercising. Do the health experts have a point, or are they just criticizing something they don't understand, or perhaps is not to their taste?"
Just Cause 2 is pretty unstructured.
...at video game camp...
the day is still 24 hours. Are three hours of video games more detrimental to their bodies than 6 to 8 hours of school classes?
These fat kids are just going to end up violent killers ... that is the more troubling issue!!
The sunlight makes it too hard to see the screen!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
24 hours in a day.
As a kid, we'll say you SHOULD be getting 9 hours of sleep a night. Thats what the health experts say, anyways, especially for teens.
So we're down to 15 hours already. Okay, lets say an hour for each of your 3 meals. Normally breakfast is a bit quicker and dinner is a bit longer, but it should all even out. So 12 hours. Lets say you want 3 hours of some kind of lessons. 9 hours. 3 hours for video games? 6 hours left.
Thats 6 hours left to exercise outside, is that not an incredibly high amount? That's almost as much as a day job. These kids should BE so lucky.
they'd have no problem with it. In fact they'd probably praise it for being innovative. Double standard. - I think a gaming camp is a cool idea, especially if the games are oriented towards RPGs (reading) or simulations (strategies). Plus it's only 3 hours a day.
They get exercise the other ~10 hours in the day.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Are all summer camp activities involving running, jumping, climbing trees (etc.)? Sure, three hours is a chunk of time. But it's not an entire day and it seems that the camp involves more than video games - which might actually be a subtle way to get kids running, jumping, climbing trees. As the article itself notes:
The camp might be a step towards working against that national average they're so concerned about.
FTFA: "Time is alloted each day to playing outside."
I don't see the problem here... "OMG VIDEO GAMES!!!!! THINK OF THE CHILDRENSSS!!!!"
Uhm, if they weren't at camp, they'd be sitting in their basements for 5 hours a day playing video games. I don't see how going to a camp makes them worse off.
Actually, three hours of video games is probably substantially less than a lot of them would normally be playing.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Please tell me Jack Thompson isn't still alive and now trying to "Bacon" Canada; God help me if I ever meet that sorry excuse for a disbarred lawyer.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
Why does everybody try to force kids to do sports _all_the_time?
a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.
That's IMHO a very good argument. There are many kids who simply don't like sports (I was one of them) and don't like to go to a 'sports camp'. Shouldn't they have other options?
So they play games for three hours a day.
Assuming they leave about 10 hours for sleep/dorm time and 3 hours for eating, what happens the other 8 hours of the day?
The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.'
Back in High School we had a really cool teacher that let us setup a LAN with 5 computers in his classroom; We mostly played Quake and Warcraft II. It even expanded to the point that we had one guy running a D&D campaign, others would bring their MTG cards, and one guy was messing around with building robots. Point being, a good bulk of the guys that showed up were guys that weren't getting any meaningful peer interaction otherwise, because the other clubs and activities weren't up their alley . Gaming would happen, yes, but since there were only 5 computers a lot of socialization happened as well.
If it was 3 hours a day of Wii Fit?
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I guess they would be against my Couch Potato Camp also. A shame since the kids love it and Coke and Frito Lay provide all the snacks for free. This keeps my cost down and allows me to accept children with special needs such as diabetes. I suppose they'll want the gov't to step in and regulate this like so many other intrusive measures. McD's also supplies us with Happy Meals which goes over especially well for Violent Movie Mondays where the kids veg for hours in happy bless. What is the world coming too?
They could ban the camp and these kids can spend 10 hours of their day playing videogames at home, not interacting with other people.
If they really wanted the kids to have unstructured play, they wouldn't be forcing them outside (which is a form of structure). If it was truly unstructured, the kids would sit in front of the video game for five or six hours - break to eat -- then get right back on that controller.
Parents are more than capable of handling this decision on their own. These days people trying to eek out a living and doing something beyond the norm to set themselves apart don't need bad publicity because some think-tank believes that these types of things are too much for parents to think about. This doesn't need to controlled or mandated.
These kids should be in a field smoking weed, not inside playing those damn computer games!
This is non-sense. If they are upset it should be over the fact the games the kids are almost certainly playing are non non-free... hehe. Of course that wouldn't make any sense. Now three hours a day during the summer when kids aren't in school is nothing to get upset over. I bet they probably have plenty of mandatory "play time" where they are required to exert physical energy and run around. Which is in my opinion totally fscked up. Do you really think that is going to encourage kids who HATE physical activity to like it? Not a chance. It just makes them despise you- the authorities and those with physical talent even more. They'll do everything to NOT be like those people. WTF do you think so many geeks are so overweight? They do the exact opposite of what those who they despised when they were younger made them do.
Spend the whole summer in your house, being utterly ignored by your parents 'cause let's face it, they don't want you around 24/7, locked up in your room either playing single player games, internet games with strangers or watching tv?
This camp sounds like a great idea to do what you like with your friends or, even better, socializing with new people who share your same interests. So why are these "experts" against it? Health, they say? The 3-hour dose seems much healthier than the 8hr the kids will get at home. Plus, once the 3hr is over, they'll probably just go play outside with their new friends and have a hell of a time.
Too bad I don't live in Canada (plus a 25yo would exactly fit in, I guess).
I had assumed that at these "camps" children might engage in a couple 2 hour sessions a day, but for the most part they would be encouraged to interact in other ways.
I mean, when you go to a camp for any topic, you spend most of your time on things vaguely or not at all associated with that topic.
They could have kids play a sports game on the computer then play it for real and compare, or kids that like role playing might re-enact some of it outdoors (Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!)
If they actually allow kids to sit around inside and play for 12 hours a day every day then I have a problem with it too!
It is not a video game camp if they spend the vast majority of their time doing things not related to video games.
3 hours is only a small percentage of the waking day, so IMHO this camp sounds like a normal balanced summer camp.
But seriously, 3 hours of video gaming and they are getting criticized with health concerns?
How many hours a day do these kids have to be engaged in physical activity?
If you take a 24 hour day and remove 3 hours for video games, 3 hours for eating, and 9 for sleeping then that leaves you with 9 left.
I do not know about the average kid, but 9 hours sounds like a lot of exercise and a lot more then I would expect an average person to be able to even do.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
yet, we put maybe more than half of the people in front of screens to work 8 hours a day sitting on a desk, yet, somehow it is alright to do so.
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This one time, at video game camp, I put on my robe and my wizard hat...
Playing video games sounds a hell of a lot more fun than making those little plastic key chain rope things we made when I was a kid. And three hours a day isn't much at all if they're spending the rest of the day, you know, hiking and sailing and such.
I have this suspicion these "kid health experts" don't actually know that much about children.
When I was in 7th grade or something, I went to a "math camp" at a small state college in another town. It was basically a bunch of nerds hanging around. During the day, we took a few classes that touched on topics like architecture and design. Then in the evening, we went and played sports and ran around or had little shows or watched a movie together, whatever. The point being that it wasn't completely inactive, and I'm willing to bet that a camp based around getting people together to be social probably won't entirely restrict itself to sedentary activity.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
The article would be better discussed if it went into detail. But for the most part it has been shown time and again that there is a vast list of skills being developed when kids play video games. I actually encourage my kids to play video games, but not in excess. There are always pros and cons in everything. I could say the same things about hiking, boating, biking, swimming, and running (just to name a few). But hey lets forget that you can break your leg hiking, you can drown boating or swimming, you can crash while biking, and you can screw up all sorts of things just running. But hey you have to weigh the pros and cons when it comes to your kids and in the end if the parents agreed to this camp then I support them.
If the point is social opportunity, then these provide a good social opportunity that does not require sitting in front of a screen. It arguably also requires a bit more thinking than the average video game. I'm of course, talking about games like Puerto Rico, Small World, Tigris & Euphrates, or Battlestar Galactica. Not games like Monopoly.
I find it incredibly unlikely that kids would go to this camp at the expense of some sort of athletic opportunity. That said, what recommends a camp where kids play games on mainstream game systems? I call that singularly uninspired. How does the "camp" aspect even improve the experience? I guess it lets you play non-networked multiplayer console games without friends...and you get to interview video game developers on a field trip ("it would be the best job in the world if only I made money, too..."). The rest of the time, though, there is a serious dearth of novel experience.
/. reader plowing through it. Suffice it so say that it combined exercise (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), fun (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), and education (studying geology and applying it to explain cave formations found on aforementioned belly-crawls) with motivation (abandoning campers/clients who fail to successfully apply geology to cave formations). The only aspect I hadn't quite worked out yet was liability, but maybe there are some good caves in Somalia...
Before high school, I had attended summer day camps with the theme of model rocketry and (once) taxidermy (We dissected and stuffed roadkill squirrels. I recall now that I had convinced my fifth-grade classmate--the son of an ENT surgeon!--to come along, but unfortunately taxidermy camp may not be for everyone; he was unable to continue). I also went to week-long Huntsville Space Camp (which was surprisingly banal--the best part was probably playing "Lander" and the shuttle landing simulator in the space museum) and Boy Scout summer camp (hellish, unlike other recreational camping--I've never had so many bug bites in my life, to say nothing of the primitive sanitation facilities). The only one of those that involved any exercise was BSA camp, and (imho) we don't need more of that.
My last camp was actually after the ninth grade (I think); it was one-week Policy Debate (my "sport" then) camp at Indiana University. This cleverly combined critical intellectual activity (policy research & debate) with exercise in the great outdoors (attendees had to walk from the dorm to the library, after all). Oddly enough that camp influenced my life considerably for ten years at least: I read my roommate's copy of Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and Virtual Light (William Gibson). I know now that he (a guy named Mark, I think...) was a fan of cyber-punk. Unfortunately, I have never had any sort of memory for proper nouns or numbers, so it was not until my first year of college that I finally found a copy of Snow Crash in a B&N, remembered the title and author, and read the rest of Stephenson's books, followed by most of the "great" works of science fiction (and quite a few that were not so great). Around the same time I switched majors from Electrical Engineering to...Computer Science. I still love debating--and reading about!--policy, too. Most of my posts get a lot more research than this one, I promise. I could certainly argue that that experience was a summer camp success. At the very least it was more convivial than BSA camp. The IU program doesn't appear to be extant, but I'm sure sending your children to Stanford's summer program would be more effective anyway.
If people want to bitch about the summer camps that children are sent to, why not bitch about the lack of critical thinking at camps. Even at NASA space camp, you won't find much critical thinking (or novelty, or fun...damn you, NASA!). Maybe "Space Academy" or "Advanced Space Academy" is more fun (when I was there I'm pretty sure they just had "Aviation Challenge," for which I was too young), but waiting until kids are into high school (or college: awkward) to offer interesting, creative and intellectual activity seems to risk being too late altogether.
I (tearfully) deleted around 400 words about my modest (but awesome) proposal for spelunking summer camp (or corporate team building exercise). I just couldn't imagine the average (or the uncommon)
Sounds like the complaints are coming from people who missed the computer revolution as children and are failing to see the big picture. I went to a computer camp in the 1989 as a 10 year old, and I had a blast. There were outdoor activities mixed in as well, but I still remember how amazed I was with even the most primitive of coding. Today, I do most of my coding on PIC's, but that early exposure to computers is what sparked my interest in this career path, and led me to pursue education in that field.
It really wouldn't surprise me if one of the profs pushing against the creation of this camp is my landlord. She also won't let me have wifi (a fact that I was not informed of until AFTER I signed the lease, so I can still get away with it) since she's afraid her kids will get cancer and die (but she uses her cell phone all the time).
Ultimately the way in which computer games are played is decided by computer programmers and other people who do not have the motivation of young people's psychological development and are instead driven by commercial concerns whereby the enjoyment from the game is nothing more than a way to sell more products in the future.
Individual computer games, unlike games like chess, go or even the various card games (those played with the standard 52 card deck), have no basis in a person's formal culture (e.g. West Europeans ought to learn about their musical traditions, East Asians ought to learn about Chinese (as in, before 1000 AD) history and so on). This is what separates computer games from music, literature and fine arts when deciding what a permissible activity is for young people.
Bah, I went to space camp a couple of times and we didn't do sports. It was all about learning and experimenting. Quite fun, but no sports. Is that such a bad thing?
However, if I had kids, I wouldn't send them to a gaming camp. I'd want them to be challenged and learn some cool skills about science, nature, arts, or whatever they like. That video game camp could be good if they try to create a game or a mod on their own though.
Okay, time to end the fake snobbery. Video games have been around for a long, long time. My dad (who will be 60 soon) owned an Atari 2600 before I or any of my siblings were born (ie he got it of his own free will). The original NES came out in the US almost 25 years ago, giving us games like the Final Fantasy series, which people spent hours and hours playing. At least *some* of the people in charge *know* what video games are, how important they are to kids and what role they play in society. However, the point of summer camp (at least as I remember it) was to give you something different. Most kids don't have the opportunity to go hiking in the woods, shoot rifles, ride horses, sail/row boats, etc at home. The point is to have a *real* adventure, the kind of experience that will stay with you for a lifetime. Spending three hours a day playing video games is a complete waste of time at summer camp as you can do the exact same thing at home. I'm sure I bitched about the rules when I was a kid (who doesn't), but I'm thankful that I was forced to "unplug" and try new things. Thanks to summer camp, I got to learn how to use woodworking tools, how to sail catamaran, how to shoot a muzzle loader and how to *properly* use a compass among other things. I'm sure at the time I would have thought it was cool if I got to play video games as well, but in retrospect I'm really glad I was "forced" to go outside and play.
Playing Wii is not the same as learning to code at computer camp or doing cool problems at math camp. Video games at summer camp are the same as video games at home. This kind of clueless convolution rings about as hollow as the "cool adults" who talk about how "tech savvy" modern kids are because they are always texting.
Am I the only one who read the article title and at first thought that health experts had literally attacked a video game camp? Chubby sun blinded children cut down like wheat, PS3's and Xboxes thrown in a bonfire, etc.
Studies have more or less proven that children that play video games together build stronger trust relationships. It's a mentally healthy thing to have. You have to trust someone if you're playing a co-op shooter for example. You have to equally trust them in a 1 vs 1 shooter as well. Video games are a trust building exercise and in this case it's being used to bring together kids who like the OP pointed out, won't find other meaningful peer interaction. I'm too lazy to look the research up but the specific study is in a TED talk I remember listening to a few days back where a woman argued that the world needed more video gamers. She had a minorly flawed but persuasive argument for it.
Anon coward
3 hours is only a small percentage of the waking day, so IMHO this camp sounds like a normal balanced summer camp.
Some camps are more intense. I once came across a daily schedule for a girls gymnastics camp, and it read like something from Army basic training. Workouts from 0700 to 1700. A good riding camp will have kids in the saddle five hours a day. Camps for competitive sports are so intense they're scary.
I was thinking of this subject just this morning. Kids sitting inside and playing video games is considered bad, they need to go outside. But once they are outside, there isn't really anything for them. Sure, some people play football or similar, but they're the ones that would do so anyway. In the end, the best society has to offer seems to be spray cans for painting graffiti.
Why is it that we (society) try to encourage these kids to go out and paint graffiti, instead of playing games?
No? Then, stfu, and quit trying to act the expert when you clearly are not, and you have no data to back you up.
Yeah, but we're adults, so the natural inclination of corporations is to use us like the expendable batteries that we are. Force every hint of productivity out of us, then discard us when we're broken and no longer of use.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
The solution is to actually have Health Experts attack the camp. You know, paint ball guns and the like. That would get those kids up and out and active.
Geez... people who complain without bothering to actually DO something about it really bug me.
I would have loved the opportunity to try out my game skills against my peers instead of having my canoe oar stolen by some arse hole of a kid canoeing up the river. Health isn't just physical, it's social health too and as others have pointed out, 3 hrs of video games a day leaves plenty of time to socialise.
But no, per subject above: clone53421 is the "master of all things mystical", including law, chemistry, psychiatry/psychology, and computers (LOL, not). He does it, amazingly, without degrees in those fields to his name or professional experience on his part in any of those fields no less. Show us some valid research from a respected entity and perhaps we'd believe you clone53421. Otherwise, it's obvious you use multiple registered accounts to mod yourself up clone53421.
That’s not even clone that you’re replying to, apk. Quit demonstrating to the world what an idiot you are. Proverbs 17:28, “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.”
As I understand the issue the problem with screen time is twofold. You are sitting still and thus are not exercising and burning calories, building muscle, and hopefully playing well with others. Second, many kids (and adults) couple that still time with eating. Video games require you to use your hands so they are actually less likely to include overeating. Therefore if the camp included some physical activity and the gaming wasn't accompanied by copious amounts of snacks, there is no problem, precisely the opposite-the camp could be a godsend.