Skool Daze

When i was a kid i never saw the point in doing my homework. I was too busy running around with my friends to spend any time as boring as math. While i did read quite a lot in my free time, school was completely separated from the world i knew and lived in. I got on the bus every morning and was transported to a world of boredom, and when i hit puberty awkwardness. Much of modern educational theory focuses on engaging students in activities that challenge their minds but engage their interest. You can't make in education, outside of Florida or Texas, without really working to be creative about student learning.

Personally i had never thought of video games as potential tools for learning but when presented with the information in the article we read for today in addition to some of the lesson plans from the WOWinSchool website i must concede that it shows promise.

Comedians know that a good joke depends on the context in which it is told. The situation is everything. Writers also know that what is appropriate for one audience will not be appropriate for another. Clearly video games have contextual value to teach and entertain depending on the context in which they are presented and used.

Any good lesson includes specific objectives. Take a look at the math lesson objectives and you find standards and objectives with a clear purpose. DPS is a common statistic that people use as part of almost any online game environment to compare the value of different weapons or items. The question of how DPS is calculated will eventually occur to anyone who plays these games long enough. A good lesson will satisfy that curiosity.

How much should you use these tools? It is clear that these tools cannot be overused. I can see this as a laboratory type activity that might run once a week over the entire school year.

Inevitably the questions of violence comes up in any discussion of video games and it may be made more poignant by their use in a classroom setting. Research shows that young kids and teenagers can differentiate between real and imagined violence and that playing games that include fighting does not lead to further violence. While this question continues to rage around the subject, it has a history of being used as a political tool to incite voter rage in rampant censorship of media which threatens our ability to make informed decisions.

While the censorship debate is a topic for another day it is a part of the bigger issue regarding stereotypes of game players and the culture which is slowly being debunked.

For tomorrow please review the video on the front page regarding the Hero's Journey and we'll discuss it in tomorrows forum post.