Tribune Article on Educational Gaming
Danny Rose over at Dallas Baptist sent me an e-mail about a recent Chicago Tribune article by Howard Witt headlined, Skip the Textbook, Play the Video Game. The article presents a snapshot of some of the research being done in the field of educational gaming, and offers some of the dissenters a chance to express their opinions. David Williamson Shaffer at Wisconsin, author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn is mentioned prominently, as is Kurt Squire who has been highly prolific with a whole slew of articles on educational gaming.
An interesting tidbit from the article: “The prominent Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation–the people who give out those $500,000 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.” This should indeed spark much additional research since financial incentives sweeten the pot for professors and departments of education considerably.
In order to give naysayers their due, the author devoted the last four paragraphs to concerns about the digital divide, concerns about instilling creativity in children, and a couple of statements by Edward Miller over at the Alliance for Childhood. Miller said that video games are only good for teaching violence, and that there is no research supporting problem solving or higher order thinking skills in video games.
I found Miller’s statements particularly interesting since the Alliance for Childhood is a big advocate of playtime for children in education. What better way for children to play, explore, and engage in learning content than in an educationally-appropriate, open-ended three dimensional learning environment? And of course there is research supporting problem solving in video games. Every complex video game has tons of problems to solve built into the game; that’s a big part of the fun in playing. A blanket statement to the contrary is simply ludicrous. As for higher order thinking, I would point Mr. Miller and others to my own article, “Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games” which came out last month in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education.
