“I majored in Gaming” Listen up says NY school… June 22, 2007
Posted by cbaugh in Education In News, History Labs.trackback
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11259040
All Things Considered, June 21, 2007 · The MacArthur Foundation board announced Thursday it will fund a $1.1 million grant for a brand new middle- and high school in New York. The curriculum revolves around teaching kids to make video games.
The MacArthur Foundation says video games and the dynamic systems they use will be key to information management in the future.
Ok, so now you know…I listen to NPR during the commute…at least until I get my Sirius. Another story piqued my interest, this time more in line with the HistoryLabs project I’ve been tinkering with. I was thrilled to hear some positive press on the inclusion of gaming-as-instructional-activity; as for the grant itself, I’d like to see how that goes.
I was practically jumping out of my seat with strong examples of how the connectedness of a gaming environment can match the connectedness of the modern world. I wished the journalist had used some better analogies to explain the connection between ‘real-life’ and video-games (Super-Mario & polar bears? weak…The Sims anybody?).
The real kicker here is that part of the rationale for this experiment is the idea that we need to teach children skills relevant to the 21st century (which implies we’re failing to do so now, no?)…a concept that’s quickly becoming apparent among many educational ‘thinkers’ and probably will serve as fodder for a whole new crop of doctoral theses before being taken seriously.
Within educational circles I think the insight is startling and groudbreaking only to the digital immigrant and defunct instructional practitioner…most instructional practitioners are in the know about this and are clamoring for more curricular time to be allocated for these kinds of activities. Research shows that students who engage in these activities develop a more intuitive grasp of the conceptual framework and can build stronger cognitive connections across the overall curriculum.
When building games or playing them critically/reflexively, the learners see the world differently (as a connected space, with rules, cause-effect, parameters that can be manipulated, etc.)…to know the subject is to take it apart and re-assemble it again with purpose…and with video games and simulations, now more than ever we can manage the ‘reality’ of our lesson’s objective embedded within these activities…and we can do it all within acceptable curricular time-frames and the constraints placed on educators by NCLB.
The dynamic teacher creates activities that capture the child’s natural curiosity and guide his or her natural learning. The goal is to enhance the child’s understanding of the surrounding world and his or her relationship to it.
Drawing from Piaget and Dewey, the dynamic teacher knows that “in order to know objects, the [child] must act upon them, and therefore, transform them: he must displace, correct, combine, take them apart, and reassemble them. From the most elementary sensorimotor actions . . . to the most sophisticated intellectual operations, . . . knowledge is constantly linked with actions or operations, that is, with transformations”. (Piaget, 1970; Rallis, 1995)http://books.google.com/books?id=seYCAAAACAAJ&dq=Dynamic+Teachers+++Leaders+of+Change
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