Video Games in Education – Finally

I’ve just read an interesting article in the Irish Times about using video games in education. Prof. James Gee of Arizona State University recently delivered a paper to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego advocating more use of video games in education. He argues that games can be used to reinforce complex ideas by allowing participants to experience the learning at a deeper level by activities and a piecemeal approach to delivering what you need to know at the right time. This approach to learning means players and learners can get a deeper understanding of the problems and messages as they progress through the game. Prof. Green has also written a book on the subject, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007).

Finally we're really getting the idea that gaming can be more than just playing and having fun, it can mean having fun and learning at the same time. I’m waiting for the day when I can say, “Kids, come inside and get on the console you have your homework to do”.

References

Ahlstrom, D. (2010, Feb 20). Educators urged to incorporate video games in teaching. Retrieved Feb 20, 2010, from Irish Times: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0220/1224264879480.html

Gee, P. J. (2003 2007). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning. Melbourne: The Learner.

iPad Fever

Apple has just launched their new platform the iPad tablet computer. Steve Jobs presented his new baby from the Apple farm to an expectant and excited gathering of industry geeks and media at the Apple offices in San Francisco yesterday.

You can watch the presentation at Apple.com or watch embedded version here.




This sleek addition to the Apple range neatly fits between the iPhone and the iMac. It works like a large iPhone or iPod except it doesn’t have a camera but luckily it does play the over 140,000 apps available through the Apple App store.

At least 25,000 of those apps are devoted to gaming but most of those games are designed and built for the smaller and highly portable iPhones and iPods. They are great for playing while waiting at the dentist, but the big question is, can these app games available for a handheld really scale up to a bigger platform?

Well, Apple certainly think so, apparently there were at least two members of the game development and publishing industry there, Gameloft and EA, to help out during the presentation and a whole raft of games industry media. Which means that if the iPad becomes as ubiquitous as Apple hope it could mean a whole new era of portable and easy access gaming.

According to the promotional iPad video the whole experience of playing a game on an iPad is different from more traditional gaming platforms. The multi–touch sensitivity built in with over 1000 sensors give gamers a touchy feely experience and the accelerators used within the device mean that 360 degree movement of the tablet could change game design and user experience for ever. The design and development of new games is already in hand as Apple’s army of game developers gear up with the iPad SDK, (Software Development Kit), making game development relatively inexpensive. That of course means that the concept of low priced games from the App store will make gamer access even easier.

But are we ready for this? Don’t we need to have a physical and mental break from gaming when we leave the house and the desk top pc behind and actually go out into the sun?

Having a device that is so potable and ubiquitous could have our children locked into their own virtual worlds all the time even when parents are desperately trying to get them into the real one.

But Apple wants nothing less than world domination, and if not them Google are already waiting in the wings with their offering.

Well I can always look on the bright side and accept the fact that exciting and absorbing portable game play is inevitable and even though we will lose the power of speech completely we will at least be able to manipulate our fingers and thumbs around a glass screen.

References

Apple Inc. (2010). iPad. Retrieved Jan 28, 2010, from Apple: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ipad-video/

Does video game playing really make us smarter?

In the 2009 Entertainment Software Association ‘Essential Facts about The Video Game Industry’: it showed that 68% of American Households play video games, adult gamers have been playing for an average of 12 years, 25% of all gamers are under the age of 18, 63% of parents think that playing video games is a positive part of their child’s life, in 2008 video games sales went up from 8.7 billion to 11 billion dollars and 43% of Americans plan to buy more video games in 2009.

With that sort of data it is clear to see that video game playing is now a major part of how we spend our leisure time and according to the figures it’s not going to go away any time soon. If anything gaming will become the pastime of choice for many more people.

If that is the case then it would be nice to know that all that time couch surfing and flicking a game controller is actually good for us in some way.

We constantly hear about all the negative stuff, you know, it’s bad for your eyes, it’s bad for your physical health, violent game playing makes people more aggressive, it makes kids fat, it stops people from socializing, too much game playing is bad for your posture.

This is potentially very alarming and as a parent and player myself I would actually quite like to get some real facts. Some hard core research about how playing video games really does affect us.

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda co-authored a research paper Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks that showed playing violent video games or first person shooter games actually helped develop visual memory recall and in the paper by MacKenzie, A. H. (2005) The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games, the American Biology Teachers , show that during the period that people have been playing violent video games U.S. crime rates have actually gone down.

At Cognitivefun.net there is a group of free online games that can definiteley help your brain improve. Brain training activities have been around for a while but these online and free games actually help overall cognition. Rather than just training the brain to be better at the particular game you’ve been practising these games develop overall cognitive improvement and thay have the added bonus of being designed by neuroscientists so that has to be good. Careful they’re addictive!

References

Cognitivefun.net. (2008-2009). Retrieved Jan 2, 2010, from Cognitive Fun: http://cognitivefun.net/

Entertainment Software Association. (2008). 2009 Essential Facts about the Video Games Industry. Retrieved Jan 15, 2010, from Entertainment Software Association: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2009.pdf

Ferguson, C. J., Cruz, A. M., & Rueda, S. M. (2007). Gender, Video Game Playing Habits and Visual Memory Tasks. Laredo, Tx: Springer Science + Business Media.

MacKenzie, A. H. (2005). The Brain, The Biology Classroom & Kids with Video Games. The American Biology Teacher , Vol.67, No.9, pp.517-518.

About Me

I am a mother of three and a self confessed tech geek. I have spent most of my working life involved with the IT Industry and I am currently upgrading my skills by studying Internet Studies at Curtin University, Western Australia. I have always had a fascination with technology and the way it has impacted our lives in such a short period of time. Since all three of my children are avid ‘gamers’, one even has a career in the games development industry, I am on a mission to try and find out if video games really are good for you or not.

My Reasons for doing this

Just lately I have read two books ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ by Andrew Keen and ‘The Dumbest Generation’ by Mark Bauerlein, both of these books look at the impact of the new media age upon society in general and our youngest members in particular. These books are more about the democratization of knowledge and the issues related to the actual time spent on social networking rather than just Video Games but gaming is part and parcel of our digitized entertainment industry and a whole new generation of kids are waiting in the wings ready to take part.

I am particularly interested in the long term effects of video games playing on society as a whole. Is there any problem, is it changing us and does it matter?

Two reasons, no three, why I’m keen to do this.

1. I’m a parent of an 11 year old avid gamer boy.

2. My daughter has recently graduated with a Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment (major Games programming) and is about to embark on a career in the industry. Watching her work through this has been a fascinating journey and really opened my eyes to the vast amount of creative work that goes into one game. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that video games are the high art form of the 21st Century.

3. A few years ago I watched the movie ‘The Children of Men’ with Clive Owens, great movie, anyway it was about a dystopian future where society is effectively in decay and women can no longer have children. There was one particular scene that sent shivers down my spine.
The son of an affluent business man was sitting in scene not communicating at all but lost in some brain controlled virtual reality game, his eyes never moving from the hypnotic visual display and his only movement was slight twitches of his fingers.

Brain controlled gaming and certainly eye movement controls are already a reality, and movies like Avatar and its associated game provide alluring inner virtual worlds that are so much more compelling than real life.

As a parent watching my kids play their video games I can see that they are having fun in a safe and controlled environment, engaging with the media and certainly using their brains, it’s the rest of their bodies I worry about.

I want to use this blog to post information about new research and news related to the impacts of gaming and I hope that gamers, parents, teachers and academics will post ideas and thoughts on their own personal experiences related to video gaming.

References

Bauerlein, M. (2008). The Dumbest Generation. New York: Penguin Group.

Keane, A. (2007). The Cult of the Amateur . New York: Double Day.

Hawkins, K. (2007, March 7). Emotiv Ushers New Era of Gaming; Enables Players to Control Games with Their Brains. Retrieved Jan 15, 2010, from gamedev.net: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=438376