Over 200 academics have signed an open letter criticising controversial new research suggesting a link between violent video games and aggression.
Ashley Tan's insight:
Meta study suggests link between video games and violence; 230 academics object. As long as fear and ignorance rule, there will be sensationalists who will use this tact.
Video source I loved watching this video of a few mothers trying Minecraft for the first time. It is one thing to read opinion pieces of the game, particularly in the context of education, and anot...
Third graders played for just 10 minutes per day, 3 days a week, for four weeks. The comparison group’s class received the same materials and the same instruction, but didn’t play the game. The result of playing was a staggering 20.5% improvement after just two hours of self-guided play. Of course, [...]
The way we understand the expectations and promises of today’s game-based approaches will have a long-term impact on how we imagine and implement them in the future.
Ashley Tan's insight:
The 694 K-8 teachers surveyed have an average of 14.5 years of experience in the classroom. And 30 percent of the teachers said the games are equally beneficial for all students. But there also seemed to be a trend that identified games as most beneficial for “low-performing students,” “students with emotional/behavioral issues,” “student with cognitive or developmental issues.” In other words, students who have been labeled and/or diagnosed because they struggle within the traditional school environment, benefit from game-based approaches. From the study: “65 percent of teachers note that lower-performing students show increased engagement with content, versus only 3 percent who show a decrease.”
By Nathan Maton Remember Math Blaster? Careening through space, shooting apple cores to learn about multiplication? That’s the most common correlation to t
News, Articles and Community for district-level decision makers in K-12 education. Magazine published monthly, with daily news and blogs and online content. Archives available.
Perhaps the best way to think about games in education is not to automatically call everything that looks like fun a “learning game.” Lumping all digital...
Gabe Zichermann is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Works...
Smartphones have turned tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people around the world into players of videogames such as Angry Birds, Temple Run, or Candy Crush. But as the games made their way to everyone’s pocket, reports of addiction to them also escalated.
Ashley Tan's insight:
Some games create a tension between predictability and surprise to give the gamer the illusion of control. These have base effects on the brain and give us pleasure.
If games can be deconstructed based on psychological theory and physiological processes, can we do the same in game-based learning?
Blame, procrastination, self-victimization—this terrible trifecta can sink your career and limit your levels of personal success. We often find ourselves resorting to bad patterns, especially in the workplace. I have noticed one place in my own life where these traits are nowhere to be seen. While I play video games.
Ashley Tan's insight:
Life lessons:
1. Intentions are not actions
2. Rephrase questions like "Why can't I do this?" to "How can I do this?"
The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning explains key ideas in game-based learning, pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. This guide makes sense of the available research and provides suggestions for practical use.
Nobody likes high-stakes testing. The problems are well documented. But maybe games can help to change the way we approach assessment.
Ashley Tan's insight:
We tend to break the school experience into three parts: instruction, practice, and assessment. The teacher delivers content to the student. The student does homework. We test for retention.
Games allow these three processes to take place all at once–instruction and assessment simultaneously happening through practice reimagined as play. The promise of game-based learning is not only about increased student engagement and intrinsic motivation, but also about changing the way we think about assessment so that it is no longer in a category by itself.
Andrew Miller (@betamiller on Twitter) is a National Faculty member for the Buck Institute for Education, an org that specializes in project-based curriculum, and a collaborator with Abeo School C
At the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London, the experts gathered to explore the pros, and some cons, of computer gaming as a learning tool.
Games are based on problems to solve, not content. This doesn’t mean that game-based problem-solving should eclipse learning content, but I think we are increasingly seeing that a critical part of being literate in the digital age means being able to solve problems through simulations and collaboration.
Of the many hobbies one might have overlooked in the past, playing video games is one activity that will soon become unavoidable. Current demands in gaming are directing developers ...
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