games are good

[Ag Au]

so i just read this great article in ode magazine "the future of homework: why our children absorb more in an arcade than in a classroom- and what schools can learn from that". it bascially talks about the benifits of learning through the interactive play of games, and how if schools really want to get kids today interested in school, they need to get more games into the classroom. i thought everyone on this board could appreciate this idea, and hey, maybe even few of you could work towards making this a reality. seems like a area of study worth looking into. you can read the aricle here:

http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4345

[Ag Au]

this was also in the magazine, i thought it was good too.

If games had come before books...

In his book Everything Bad Is Good For You, Steven Johnson contends that video games and television programs are making us increasingly intelligent. What if video and computer games had been invented first, he wonders, and books had come later?


“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the long-standing tradition of game playing—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page.
“Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”

Excerpted with permission from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter (Allen Lane, 2005)

[duckplucker]

school is boring. public school is run in much the same way as our prison system.

if school was games and fun, more kids would want to learn.

i think we have all known for a while how educational video games are.

it just takes a while for the majority of the herd to get what the smart peeps have been saying for years.

[False Alarm]

1“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the long-standing tradition of game playing—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page.
2“Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
3“But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”
i love video games. got my first PC when i was four and have gamed on PCs ever since. the local arcade, the machine, was my favorite place in the town where i grew up. i once won the tekken shirt off talking sandwich's back on playstation. and i agree with the general premise of this thread and the article--that games can be a vital pedagogical tool.

that said, it's pretty lame for the dude to boost games by stepping on the head of books, as if the media are mutually exclusive or some shit. i assume he's just tryin' to sell a few more copies by making some contentious statements; i doubt he even believes what he says. still pisses me off.

1. correct, books don't overly stimulate the senses. to which i say, so what? is that their function? do our senses now need constant stimulation? never mind that the tactile and olfactory elements of a book do indeed stimulate most book lovers i know (and thus don't "understimulate" anything). books stimulate the imagination, and because they do so by requiring a reader to work to translate that simple "barren string of words on the page" into vivid scenes, cogent arguments, or whatever, they usually stimulate that imagination a hell of a lot more than most video games, where the images and forms are simply handed to the user's senses.

2. isolation is tragic? no one's advocating locking up a kid with a superbookshelf and slipping her meals under the door till she's 18. from what i can tell, most kids have plenty of opportunites to interact with their peers and play games that flicker on the screen. reading with any amount of regularity isn't gonna squander a significant number of those opportunities. i imagine the sight of their kids "sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers" would be a relief for the parents of the trillion ADD kids running around these days. i'm sure those parents wouldn't mind a little balance in their kids' lives.

3. "Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one." if the page is covered with a simple, barren string of symbols that don't stimulate us, then how can we be inactive in the process of making sense of those symbols? we can't, of course. we have to perform cognitive functions to make sense of them. reading's an active, collaborative process between the writer and reader, and not everyone reads the same way, and different peeps damn sure don't interpret on a larger scale in the same way, and you're gonna try and sell me that this is a submissive, stagnant activity that's actually "dangerous" in how it teaches passivity to kids? hilarious.

[Ag Au]

good response false alarm, and i agree with you about books. i just posted that exerpt because i thought it was funny. i think the author thinks its funny too. i think his point was just a thought exercise in how we as a culture are sometimes too quick to judge the value something new, especially when it involves technology perceived only as entertainment. i read his article with a smile on my face, because, after all, it is exerpted from his book, and is now printed in a magazine. obviously he believes in the value of both of those formats.

[False Alarm]

oh yeah i'm an idiot. didn't pay attention to the context.

i should read better.:(

[Simolean2]

yeah I think they should just have video game consoles on each desk and specially designed games by the school system to target specific subjects. I know Id have learned alot more in school if I was learning it through a game, and not an under paid, mid life crisis, joke of a teacher that would chalk the lesson on the board and sit the rest of the class browsing online or reading a book. Or worse talking on a cell phone.

school sucked!

[Laci]

Great information