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More Videogames, Fewer Books at Some Schools?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 18, 2007 07:16 PM
from the if-you'll-turn-to-level-3-3-in-your-text dept.
from the if-you'll-turn-to-level-3-3-in-your-text dept.
A News.com article highlights a plan that may please word-weary students: more games, fewer books in some educational settings. That's one plan put forth by some educators who feel that current learning plans don't fully engage today's classes. By offering real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting ('discover why fish are dying in a park'), teachers hope that games will turn kids onto the idea of learning, and eventually lead them back to books. The article covers several of the projects geared towards exploring this idea, as well as research on the subject. "A game designer, Salen is working with a group called New Visions for Public Schools to establish a school in New York City for grades 6 through 12 that would integrate video games into the entire curriculum. 'There's a lot of moral panic about addiction to games. There's a negative public perception, and we know we have to deal with that. But teachers have been using games for years and years.'"
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My take on this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously when talking about games, and school, many of us think of calculator games [calcg.org]. For [calcg.org] the [calcg.org] most [calcg.org] part [calcg.org], the use of graphing calculators to play games has just been a way for students to not be bored during class, or for the lonely students to not be bored between class. There are also many calculator games that serve educational purposes in some ways, and they can easily be implemented in the classroom, since the a lot, if not the majority of high school students already own a graphing calculator.
The purpose of going to school isn't necessarily to learn, but also to learn how to learn. And there are many [detachedsolutions.com] puzzle [calcg.org] games [calcg.org] that help that cause - they develop the brain in ways that traditional school just can't do. Reading helps the memory, but playing puzzle games help the way the brain actually approaches certain problems and situations.
There is a certain level of interest that is absolutely necessary in order for a student to learn. The difference between the gifted students and the not so gifted students is generally their interest level.
Generally what I saw when I was in high school was that the teachers always fought against the use of graphing calculators (especially playing games on them), but if I ever become a teacher (which I probably won't, and this might be the reason for that), I will utilize the technology available to the greatest extent, and gaming will likely be a part of that.
And... a poll:
Do you think your education would have been better had the teachers utilized games in order to help the students understand?
Yes, [impoll.net]
Maybe. [impoll.net]
They DID! and that's why I turned out so great! [impoll.net]
They DID! and that's why I turned out... the way I am... [impoll.net]
No. [impoll.net]
Re:My take on this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My take on this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your employer does too. That way he can pay you for 30 hours when you work 40, and you'll never know the difference. And let's not EVEN get into telephone bills.
Parent
Yeah, because... (Score:3, Funny)
is this bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Look, I learned everything I need to know about the Great Western Expansion by playing Oregon trail. Such as, it is very easy to die of dysentery.
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Re:is this bad? (Score:5, Funny)
The part that irks me is that no textbook I've seen ever mentions that farmers who made the trip successfully were awarded triple bonus points at the end.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I suspect the best use for videogames in education is as bribes. Once a student shows he has learned the material
taught in a class, he doesn't have to sit still watching other students fail to learn, but can have a little fun while playing games, rea
Mod as Funny, not Insightful... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think many educators do not understand that engagement in a game does not mean a child will be learning anything from it. Here's the difference:
The information you gain when playing a game is very fragmented, because you only absorb enough that you need to get you closer to winning. As the parent poster noted, you don't know what dysentery is, you only know that it's bad and it kills your characters.
Teach these kids how to learn, not how to play a game. (Perfect example: MadTV Hooked on Phonics Parody [youtube.com])
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery [wikipedia.org]
You feel any better now that you know what you made 500 virtual people go through?
Fundamental issues with gaming in education.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, so a caveat: I was a researcher of educational gaming... but I quit the field when I realized how poorly gaming could translate into the kind of learning that kids need to succeed in the world. Some questions to consider:
How do you transfer game learning to test contexts? After all, standardized tests matter to governments. If you teach in one context, it is very hard to utilize the skills in a different context. Moving from screen to paper is, for instance, tough.
A game requires simplification. What happens to history when it's all burnt into a 15 minute game? While simulations can be helpful for testing dangerous or invisible things (such as genetic combinations, hazmat training or airplane simulation), they're generally poor at proving background.
Some educational games are built on a research base. For instance, there is a math game that will build upon a learner's growing base of rote-memorized solutions (automaticity; measured in Sec. to answer) by scaffoling new and old together. These games are few and far between. MOST games are simply multiple choice, or weird adaptations of Doom-for-math-learning.
End point:
Does what we can teach through gaming actually matter in real life? What does, and what doesn't? Therefore: what should we continue to teach with books and discussion, and where can gaming be used positively?
Anyhow, that's some general food for thought... without raising issues of gender bias, stereotype threat, etc etc.
Parent
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Fundamentally, gaming can teach one thing: the game. Number munchers was very good at teaching how to quickly solve math problems while avoiding ghosts. Sim City taught resource management in a constrained system, as well as the civic arrangements that the city bothered to model.
In other words, gaming teaches you HOW to do something. And if how you do something requires knowing facts, ala Carmen San Diego, then those facts can be l
Discover why fish are dying in a park? (Score:5, Funny)
A good way to teach programming.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A good way to teach programming.. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I object. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Up on the second floor, there was a permanent display of historic scientific apparatus, like a Wimshust Generator about 20 feet in diameter. I went back to visit it about 10 years ago, all those exhibits were gone, replaced with computer kiosks. Really BAD computer kiosks, uninspiring, ill-planned junk that had all the bells and whistles, but little educational content. I thought about the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on developing and deploying those horrid, amateurish kiosks, and how they replaced a whole museum wing that represented the technological development of America, and I can only consider it the greatest educational tragedy I ever saw. I remember being inspired, as a little child, seeing those monuments to science, but that will never happen again. And it's a damn shame.
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I hear you. In a museum, those computer kiosks need to be restricted just to the kinds of things it is not practical to demonstrate "live" on-site. Like a Tokamak reactor. Otherwise, you might just as well have stayed home and surfed the same content there.
Imagine going to a live concert, but you get the seats so far from the stage, that you have to watch it on the video screen, with piped-i
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I object for a different reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read a book, you can read two books. You can read a dozen books. You can find the biases.
If you play one "educational" video game, you've pretty much played them all. There aren't very many. So you'll be stuck with whatever bias the person who wrote it had.
That's not education. That's programming.
Parent
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More like if parents actually had time for the kid (Score:3, Insightful)
I learned to read and write long before I got to school, because my grandma took the time to teach me that, and to make it interesting. I can't remember much from that age (she started with it when I was 2-3 years old), but from what I'm told it involved pictures of animals whose name started with that letter, and stuff like that. Kids are pretty much pre-programmed to
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I had the same experience when I went back to visit the Royal Tyrrell Musem [tyrrellmuseum.com] in Drumheller, Alberta -- perhaps the premiere dinosaur museum in North America, if not the world -- and was shocked to see how it had changed in the fifteen years since I'd been there.
I had the same experience as the parent -- the well-made dioramas and informative visual displays and had been replaced by literal flashing lights, kiosks, ominous music and so forth. I actually did learn something, but that was from an old exhibi
Good news, bad news (Score:2)
want to engage? introduce real world APPLICATIONS (Score:2)
this kind of apprenticeship will require a little bit of checking, but could probably relieve labor costs a bit in the local community.
it will also help break down that wall separating academia from reality by integrating actual "practice" of that theory.
Fewer books? (Score:5, Interesting)
(On a tangent, schools which assign BAD books to be read are pretty criminal--there's so much good stuff out there the last thing you need to do is assign a book that's going to turn someone off of reading before they've graduated grade school.)
I applaud the use of video games for education--and I have no problem with having video games to play, for children or adults. But how much would we gain by simply having a month each semester, or each year, when all the children at a school were told "No television and no video games." With more books assigned in that period--even if it's a question of asking each student to pick five or ten books out of a hundred choices. Television and video games are more immediately engaging, and maybe you need to starve someone of them for a little while to make them be more willing to try a book. If there's nothing else to do, even the most avid watcher of cartoons might eventually pick up a book and read for a while.
Why are we doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is an extremely insightful statement right there.
Science and nature are inherently interesting. When I was younger, I used to be fascinated by numbers. And whenever I could, I would play around with numbers, trying to do weird things.
And as I grew up, I built Tesla coils and other things and learnt science by doing something with my hands, which is so much more fascinating. Or
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-uso.
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-------
In my middle school, a retired teacher came back to teach an extra science course before regular classes started. He taught us all kinds of things, all hands on. We soldered together electronic kits, dissected animals (including a shark one of his friends caught... who needs preservatives), fermented wine from raisins, distilled it into alcohol, then burned it, mad
Language skills are still key (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Games are great. I grew up playing them, and I still play them. But games aren't a replacement for the tried and true combination of reading, writing, and hard work. Wrapping learning in a sugary coating may make it taste better, but that won't make it nutritional.
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Literate citizens? You're trying too hard. What's wrong with the current system where everyone depends on their television t
"real-world dilemmas in a virtual setting" (Score:2)
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Better yet, drown the buggers in the lake. Oops, sorry I'm the parent of 2 teenagers...
Kids need to be able to think abstractly (Score:2)
Models. (Score:3, Insightful)
graphing calculators (Score:2, Interesting)
Games have their place in education (Score:4, Insightful)
Games are a media, like books and film and images, and each media has its strengths. Books are good for teaching because (Besides touching on literacy skills), they can be read over again, at the reader's own pace; films are good for teaching because they compress information relatively densely, and are much better at giving a sense of scale or displaying events than a book (What's better? Telling people about the size of the universe, or showing them Powers of Ten?).
Games are good for helping students understand complex systems by interacting with them. Being able to play with a historically accurate strategic wargame is more interesting, and provides a deeper insight, than just reading what happened during a war. Being able to watch small simulated lifeforms reproduce on a screen is a stunning display of natural selection. There are some subjects which are better explained through a particular media.
This will solve the problem. (Score:2)
Reality Check Time (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids learn better by engaging them. Kids are engaged by video games. Thus, kids will learn better from video games,
I know I look forward to learning about Greek Mythology from God of War II.
Seriously though. I'm all for engaging kids. The better job you do, the more likely they are to engage themselves and learn on their own. You know one thing that doesn't engage students? Spending all your time teaching to a standardized test. Why go outside and show kids plants, plant a little garden, let them learn from that. Instead, we can just show them a picture in a book and force them to memorize what geotropism.
Let's not forget that as you dumb down the curriculum and spend more time going over and over the same stuff so that all the kids can memorize it for the test, the kids who are smart (and already got it) and even those who are just normal (and got it 6 times ago, unlike the kid in the back who eats paste) are getting bored and tuning out. You may get them back, or they may learn that "school is boring".
I like the idea behind "No child left behind." I think holding teachers accountable, as radical as that may be, is a good thing. It's just too bad that everyone decided to implement it by teaching to the test all the time. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school. They would teach us stuff, we'd learn, things were good. There was usually at least something interesting. Until that time of year. Yes, time for the CAT (California Achievement Tests) or whatever other yearly test we used. For the month before the test they did nothing but teach to the test, which was boring to no end since it was always below the stuff we were currently learning.
More hands on lessons. That's what schools need. Hands on stuff, experiments, field trips.
How many people here think they would even remember what the Oregon Trail was if it wasn't for the game? How many people here remember all the historical stuff from the game, and how many just remember seeing how fast you could get your friends killed or trying to get a tombstone so you could write something on it.
Re:Reality Check Time (Score:5, Interesting)
- I get to charge the district for all my overtime. I'm contracted for 37.5 hours a week. I work an average of 52 hours a week. The longest break I get is 20 minutes, if I lock my door shut during lunch period. I get time-and-a-half for the three to hours I put in every Sunday.
- I get to charge the district for all of my personal money I spend on supplies. This includes tissues, pens, pencils, notebooks, markers, batteries for calculators, cleaner, and pies (for pi day!)
- My school gets a full time counselor.
- I have an administrator who does more than stop by for 13 minutes, then leave a two page report, highlighting mostly, the lack of student work on my walls.
- I have time to sit and talk with my colleagues about students, school issues, and curriculum planning. "Time" is defined as contiguous periods longer than 7 minutes in length.
- The school district agrees that art is an integral part of the curriculum and begins bringing back art offerings to every school.
Whew. Sorry. Rant. Yes, hold teachers accountable. Honestly, I don't mind. I'm proud of my work. However, teachers are not the problem. A good 85% of us are working to the threshold of exhaustion all year.We should think about the university system. Why don't we yell about holding professors accountable? Cause if they suck, you go to a different school. I think we need to look into bringing that model to public schools.
Parent
lazy teachers, lazy parents, lazy kids (Score:3, Insightful)
We are gutting education to the extent that it won't be verifiable anymore. If you reduce education to a videogame, you can't very well test on it, and you won't have quantifiable data to point to to show that little Johnny is an idiot. They'll dazzle you with buzzwords about emotional intelligence and self-esteem while fighting standardized testing. I don't blame the teachers all that much--they are subject to the demands of parents, and parents have long brought their power as consumers and taxpayers to bear on the school systems. The parents don't want to fault their own little angels because to do so would call their own parenting into question. It isn't even about the kids.
Frankly, we shouldn't even have computers in the classrooms until high school. It should be all books, chalkboards (cheaper than dry-erase boards/markers) and that's it. Kids need to read. For that matter, adults need to read. But will it change? I doubt it. Parents view teachers as their own contracted employees. Even when I was in high school back in the 80s it was changing--one of my best, most challenging teachers was fired becasue parents complained.
About time already ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Today, we have graphics, sound, internet, computer. These are the big thing now.
We need to use them just as people used printing press back then - as the primary source of spreading information, and education.
There is a forced inclination to think that 'people should read books'. We have to give that up. The book concept is being conferred much more importance than the value it provides as a medium. It can easily be said that the importance conferred comes more from traditional conditioning of 'books are good' (correct at any date pre-1997) than the actual value books carry in disseminating information and education today.
Visual aids are ALWAYS better. This is why we had illustrations on any printed material during the course of history whenever it was possible. Today we have virtualization, games, sound, graphics, anything you can imagine to make the utopic futuristik education themes in sci-fi movies come true.
And we should do as such, for faster, better and less stress-inducing teaching of children.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the first study that came to mind. Granted, it's not necessarily reflective of the quality of someone's education that they choose to spend their time doing something other than reading--but when reading as a whole declines, there's a whole wonderful part of culture that becomes diminished, in a way, by the shrinking community. Not to mention that the potential readers lose out. Other mediums have good stories too, and ones well worth listenin
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Kids today have it easy. Bring back corporal punishment I say. There's too much damned spoon-feeding nowadays. The odd eraser thrown at a random student was a great way to keep us awake. The smacks on the wrist with a ruler let the lefties know their place in society. And of course you learned a lot more when the material was yelled at you than from a damned video game...
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We also shouldn't forget multiplayer games - we've been playing those in gym class for years! A fun game with a competetive aspect will be well-receiv