Double Entry Journal #2

"Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex. As an educator, I realized that this was just the problem our schools face: How do you get someone to learn something long, hard, and complex and yet enjoy it." (Gee, 2012)

 

I never thought about this concept before, and it makes me want to start designing video games. I want my kids to think critically and solve problems, and I often have to drag information and reasoning from my students. If students actually put as much determination and work into school and their education as much as they do in video games, the United States would be on the higher end of the educational scale for the world.

"At a deeper level, however, challenge and learning are a large part of what makes good video games motivating and entertaining." (Gee, 2012)

If we, as educators, could channel this motivation and entertainment used for video games and look at the aspects of interesting video games for our own classrooms, then learning can be fun for students. We already present them with challenge and learning in the school system; however, it’s not working. We need more than just these two aspects to encourage learning. So what are we missing? Interaction and application. We can give students relevant problems, but it’s not until they are interacting in trying to figure out the problem that it’s just another problem for homework.

"So the suggestion I leave you with is not “use games in school”—though that’s a good idea—but: How can we make learning in and out of school, with or without using games, more game-like in the sense of using the sorts of learning principles young people see in good games every day when and if they are playing these games reflectively and strategically?" (Gee, 2012)

I noticed this week, that when I use games, the students learn the material better. I have gone over rules of exponents for my Algebra Support students for the last month. However, it wasn’t until this week, that it started clicking with the majority of my students. Why? I played MATHO (which is the same thing as Bingo, but the kids had to solve problems in order to get their answers on their answer sheets). The second day I cut up pieces like a puzzle and the kids had to tape problems to answers, and when finished, it made a 4X4 square. These games allowed my students to remember the rules for when they took the test. They did better on this test than they had on any other test. I was impressed, and I’ll be using games to review before tests often.

Gee, J. P. (2012, November). Good Video Games and Good Learning. Retrieved February 1, 2013, from Academic Colab: http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/MacArthur.pdf

Other Resource:

Video Games and Learning
This video talks about the separation of educational games and entertainment games.

Floyd, D. (2008, September 8). Video Games and Learning. Retrieved February 1, 2013, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN0qRKjfX3s