Professor of Literacy James Gee gave a talk recently at the 4th Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, to get across his message that computer games can help educate.
In his talk, “Beyond Games & the Future of Learning”, Gee explained that games can create Passion Communities, which encourage people to strive for achievements when they normally would not. He gave an example of a girl who made clothes for her characters in The Sims; when she had used all the patterns, she taught herself to use Photoshop so she could design more. She eventually went on to Second Life and sold her designs to people.
WoW mods also got a mention in the talk. Apparently, player-made mods or addons are a perfect example of successfully giving people tools to make things easier for themselves, and players have taken on the challenge whole-heartedly. If only this could be applied to schools:
Give students smart tools and let them use them and modify them to suit their purposes.
Gee is the author of ‘What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy’ (2003) and ‘Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul’ (2005).
Educational games have really helped my son learn both reading and math, as well as allowing him to master the computer pretty much at 5. He’s so good I had to put blocks on it because he started typing daddy, mommy, etc, on the search engine (yes, he knows how to spell and use google.com). Of course, typing mom or mommy might get you some…..non child friendly sites.
I know I learned alot of critical thinking from turn based strategy games, enspecially the civilization games. I’d read all about each technology tree, learning history while having fun.
Not every game should be educational but that doesn’t mean you cannot learn from them (think Portal). Most are indeed not “pointless fun”.