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Researchers say video games may be key to teaching youngsters
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HOUSTON — Tired of badgering the kids to quit wasting time with those computer and video games and get started on homework? Here’s a news flash for the 21st Century: It turns out many of the games might be better than homework.
In a series of research projects as likely to thrill young people as they are to horrify their parents and teachers, academic experts across the country are unearthing educational benefits in the digital games that surveys show are now played by more than 80 percent of American young people aged 8-18.
At the top of the experts’ lists are simulation and role-playing games, often played on the Internet alongside thousands of other participants, because of the vocabulary, reasoning and social skills they can boost.
But even some of the most violent games, such as the notorious “Grand Theft Auto,” have some valuable lessons to teach in the right circumstances, researchers are finding.
Some researchers even suggest supplanting much of the traditional back-to-basics K-12 curriculum with a new generation of game-based materials to capture the increasingly short attention spans of today’s youth.
“Right now in American schools we spend most of the first six or seven years of math education teaching kids to do what a 99-cent calculator does,” said David Williamson Shaffer, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a recent book, “How Computer Games Help Children Learn.”
“We have this view that schooling is the natural and inevitable way to get kids ready for life in the world,” said Shaffer, a leader in the field of digital learning. “But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when our economy has changed, when innovation and creativity are much more important than rote memorization, that the system needs some real updating to train kids how to use computer games to solve problems in the real world.”
If that sounds like yet another New Age fad, destined for the scrapheap of once-trendy educational ideas alongside “new math,” “open classrooms” and “whole language,” consider this: The prominent Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation (the people who give out those half-million-dollar genius grants every year) is distributing $50 million to researchers to understand how digital technologies are changing the ways young people learn, play, socialize and exercise judgment.
“We realized that over 80 percent of American kids have game consoles at home, 90 percent of kids are online and 50 percent of them are producing things online, so we really need to understand what is going on here,” said Constance Yowell, director of the MacArthur Foundation’s digital research initiative. “This is what kids are doing, so we need to know both the positive benefits and the unintended consequences.”
Hard data is scant so far (most of the MacArthur-funded research projects are just getting under way) but there’s no shortage of anecdotes testifying to the educational benefits of video and computer games and new multimedia tools.
Simulation games in particular have already been embraced by some educators, as well as many businesses and the U.S. military, as effective ways to introduce people to environments and situations that would otherwise be too expensive, dangerous or impossible to access.
Kurt Squire, another University of Wisconsin researcher, has been observing students as they play “Civilization,” a simulation game in which players build historically realistic civilizations and interact with them as they evolve.
“We’ve got middle-schoolers now who are going to their teachers and saying, `I’ve built this historical model of the American Revolution, which took about 40-50 hours _ can I submit this with a paper about it?’” Squire said. “If you look at the crisis in American schools with low-achieving kids, many teachers would jump if there’s a way to keep these kids engaged.”
HOWARD WITT
Chicago Tribune