21st Century Twist: Video Gaming Now Belongs in the Classroom
My two oldest sons Brady (age 9) and
Cameron (age 7) are addicted to the video game Minecraft. If my wife Erica and I didn’t heavily limit their
time using it, it is quite possible they would spend days on end building new
worlds in this interactive game. Last weekend, they built a model of the
Manchester New Hampshire airport, complete with a baggage claim area and
several aircraft parked at gates and getting ready for take-off. Like many
parents, Erica and I embrace the use of this game because we see so many learning
opportunities for our boys.
Recently The Atlantic’s Rey Junco reported out on the educational benefits
of games like Minecraft in the article Beyond ‘Screen Time:’ What Minecraft Teaches Kids. Junco encouraged teachers to incorporate the game
into their classrooms, with suggestions that included: Letting kids share what
they are building in the game and having them describe how they are interacting
with their peers; setting up Minecraft hackathons where students who know how
to use certain game skills can teach others how to do so; and devoting some
class or after-school time to allowing kids to work on Minecraft-based
assignments.
In a recent Scientific
American article Fact or Fiction?: Video Games Are the Future of
Education, author Elena Malykhina reported
out on the increasing use by teachers and parents of educational video games as a learning tool
for children. “If educational video games are well executed, they can provide a
strong framework for inquiry and project-based learning”, says Alan Gershenfeld,
co-founder and president of E-Line Media, a publisher of computer and video
games and a Founding Industry Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Games and Impact.
Over the last few years, video games
have started to become a regular fixture in classrooms across America. The
movement is known to educators simply as gaming, and it is considered by many
to be one of the next great disrupters that is changing the landscape of
education in our schools. The online blog Mind/Shift has published and entire set of articles on the
topic, their Guide to Games and Learning. Their articles range from explaining what gaming is,
the do’s and don’t’s for selecting games and integrating them into classroom
instruction at various ages, and what the research is already telling us about
gaming as a classroom tool.
In Mind/Shift’s article the Benefits of Gaming: What Research Shows, author Jordan Shapiro referenced a recent American Psychological Association study that identified four types of learning skills that
are positively impacted from video games on the kids who play them: cognitive,
motivational, emotional, and social. Shapiro reminded teachers that these types
of skills go far beyond the twentieth century view of a teacher’s role as one
who simply transmits content and facts. In a follow-up article, Shapiro cited research that was completed by GlassLab (the Games and
Learning Assessment Lab), which concluded some significant gains were made by
students who used gaming in the classroom in their cognitive competencies and
their abilities to generate simulations of real world experiences.
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