Emerging Technologies Consulting

You might think it’s weird for an education blog to post about a game for the Nintendo DS, but I think this game and its ilk are things that kids can really learn from.  First, the game requires kids to come up with creative solutions, typing in things that might work for any given objective.  For example, to cross a river, one could build a bridge or a ramp and a motorcycle to jump over it.  It’s not as scripted as similar games might be. What seems more interesting to me as an educator is the ability to write your own game.  There is a simple scripting language kids can use to build their own levels.  From that, they learn the logic needed to excel at things like programming or even transportation management and they have the ability to be creative.  Increasingly, I think that’s where the best learning happens and where teaching should be focused, on that intersection between the creative and the logical, much like writing a sonnet.

This little nugget about an NYU course on video games and cognition popped up in my reader.  It sounds like a cool course, but the end of the article focuses on parents thinking that it, like other courses on popular culture, is watered down.  This is a common reaction to courses by everyday folks, and especially parents, who are shelling out thousands of dollars, thinking, “if I wanted my kid to learn about video games, I would have plopped her in front of the xbox.”  But not studying video games is actually a bad idea.  We want students to think critically, and one way to do that is to have them read and write about Shakespeare.  But, much as Shakespeare’s ideas still hold true today, students don’t always connect the dots to today.  Taking a closer look at video games and how they are shaping our culture gives students the opportunity to think critically about something they may do every day without really thinking about its effect on their lives.  The NYU course proposes to focus on cognition, which could be a quite fruitful avenue to explore.  How do people learn to play Guitar Hero?  What strategies do they use?  And can those strategies be applied to other areas, such as math or science?

While parents may balk at these courses, we can’t just ignore the world around us.  Video games are a part of our lives and learning more about them is one way to learn more about our world.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Game and Learn: An Introduction to Educational Gaming (hippasus.com)
• Yet another study taking down gamers (infocult.typepad.com)