Norman S.

Morales

Do Video Games have any Value for Education? One of the most important aspects of our society is developing education. As our society keeps changing and evolving, so does education need to be reformed. With every new generation teachers are facing new problems in and outside of the classrooms that affect the childrens learning the most. Because todays college students grew up in a technology growing world, they learn differently than the way that most professors learned while they grew up without much technology ( Prensky, 2000, pp. 35-46). Teachers sometimes feel hopeless as none of the old methods that they used for teaching work and students suffer academically. While older teachers choose to stay on the same path because they feel that those methods have work in the past and students need to adapt to them, but younger ones decide to try new innovative ways of teaching. Some turn to technology and social media using movies, TV series and blogs to give students a new experience. One of the newest methods is using video games since its one the forms of entertainment that is in the rise. By using video games the teachers are combating one of the biggest problems that are keeping the students interested and focus on the class. In a survey conducted by Jessica Millstone and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop in collaboration with BrainPOP (2012) found that 70% of teachers agree that using digital games increases motivation and engagement with content/curriculum(p.6). Video games have become one of the biggest forms of entertainment in the world. According to the ESAs (Entertainment software association) 2012 report on video games about 49% of the US households have a dedicated video game console. There has been an increasing debate weather video games provide any positive things to ones intellectual and social development where so research says yes while other are inconclusive. The reality is that video games have many mechanics that make them greater for people to develop them self in different ways that

Norman S. Morales

they may not have had the opportunity if it was not for video games. Some of these mechanics are cooperative play, problem solving, complexity and reward system. All of these mechanisms can be apply to education to help keep students interested while still teaching them value lessons. Still a lot of people argue the bad things about video outweigh any of the good things. They argue that video games are a waste of time and that they are even addictive. There is also the fact they those people think that most video games promote violence. Cooperative play is just one of the mechanisms that video games have. When games first started to appear most were pretty simple puzzles or text base games. Later on as technology got more advance so did video games with creations of arcade games like Galaga, Street Fighter and racing games. Moving forward in time when home consoles started to be more common in households better 2-d side-scrolling, fighting and racing games were created in which player could play against each other. All of these games offer only one option of cooperative play and that is against each other. One of the first type of games to offer cooperative play in which players help each other was MMOs( massive multiplayer online games) in which player could joint together to battle enemies or complete a quest. On modern games, developers decided to start offering local cooperative play so that friends could help each other beat a games main story if they found it to difficult to do it by themselves. Now a day cooperative has move to the internet were a players can connect with friends or strangers to play side by side to beat a game. In an educational view cooperative gameplay promotes teamwork as cooperative play is all about joining forces to complete a common goal. Most teachers like to give students group projects to promote teamwork but the really is that for many students these are bad experiences in which they end up doing most of the work. On the other side think about how gamers actually enjoy cooperative play and how everyone actually do their part of the job to go towards a common

Norman S. Morales

goal. It does not matter if the video game is violent as long as it has a cooperative option as describe by Greitemeyer (2012 ) playing a team-player violent video game leads to more prosocial behavior than playing a single-player violent video game appears to be due to its cooperative part (p.1467). Another aspect that cooperative play may help develop is leadership. In more complex video games like MMOs a player can a guild in which many people come together to help each other and benefit the guild. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas argue that the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a totalimmersion course in leadership. Now the owner of this guild must set a standard of the rules to follow and the requirements that he deems worthy to join the guild. On top of just running the guild he may have to assign different officer positions to people on the guild to help support the guild when he is not available and to help him manage the many different resources. The guild master, as the owner is often refer as, must also develop different strategies if they are battle a big enemy or attacking another guild taking into considerations everyones in the guild strengths and weakness on top of the enemies strengths and weakness. Also if the guild has a safe house and money then he must manage what gets priority when spending that money to benefit not him but the guild as a whole. So video games can offer a person otherwise shy a chance to step up as a leader given them valuables skills that without video games he would otherwise not have. Now it will definitely would benefit him more if it was real life since he would have to battle his shyness but at least through video games if he sees that there was no difference between all the work he put into the guild from the work he may have to do in real life, he may be more motivated to step up and be a leader.

Norman S. Morales

Video games are also teaching its player the scientific method as propose by Steve Johnson in his book Everything bad is good for you, when a player first enters the video game world they are learning the scientific method (2005). At first one might think that video games have no learning value but in fact they do. Those values are the ones in which the game itself is built on like the physics of inside the world and other rules that define the gaming experience. Now a days players decide to dive head first into a game before learning all the mechanics that the game has to offer proposing different hypothesis and then testing them. This happens when a player decides to see the different trick shots he may be able to do or test the world boundaries to see if they can find a glitch. As a game becomes more complex the players will be more incline to engage in more scientific discussion about strategies in game going as far as to develop mathematical models to explain and support their ideas. This is mention by Steinkuehler and Duncan (2008) game communities such as those in WoW [World of Warcraft] engage in important forms of science literacy meaning that it does not always follow the complete scientific method but that some parts of it are applied. All of these discussions arise from the fact that there may be many different ways about killing a specific boss or enemy in a multiplayer game. Another example is strategies to beat a certain level the fastest or the most efficient way to level a character in game. Games also help players lose the fear of failure because of the way games are design. So a gamer at least in game is more open to trying new ways about solving a problem since even if they fail they can just reset the game and try again. After stripping away all the crazy stories, powers and magic, video games are about problem solving. Most games have a hero, most of the time the player, going around the virtual world following clues and doing basic task that in the end will lead them to solve the problem which may be, save a specific someone or the whole world in which you are playing.

Norman S. Morales

A great game that has been integrated into many different types of class is Minecraft. Minecraft is an open world game in which players can gather materials and use them to build or create new objects inside the game. Jeremy Biddle is a 6th grade teacher who is using minecraft to teach history. He decided to simulate the problems face by the first civilizations in the Near East when they were building. By doing this a teacher could give students group projects in which each team could be a different tribe and they have to, by doing research, build historically correct structures. According to MinecraftEdu there are almost 1000 schools that have integrated minecraft into their school in some form or another. Some of these schools have created minecraft clubs for student to play before or after school while others have had different teachers integrated into their curriculum in some manner. Mrs. Gielen (2012) writes in her article Wonders of Minecraft about how she presented the 7th grade English teacher the idea of giving the students a project around surviving in the minecraft world in which they would have to create a scenario that placed them in the game (e.g. boat wreck, plane crash, etc.) and write a daily journal/diary of their experience. There is a misconception that video games are always violent when in reality there are many different types of video games. It has been shown that violent video games do increase aggression in its players immediately after playing but that does not mean that it will always lead to violence. According to Sarah Glazer (2006) researchers still have not found definitive proof of long-lasting negative effects from video violence. In a recent study done over a period of three years by Christopher Ferguson found that exposure to video game violence was not related to any of the negative outcomes. The violence that might come from playing video games is most likely because the person committing the violence had already a violent nature. Teachers can decided whenever they want to adapt a normal video game to their class or use one

Norman S. Morales

of the already available educational video games like the ones from FilamentGames in which case they would most likely not be violent. Those games cover topics including science, math, history, politics, writing and economy. There is a claim about a problem in the younger generation about video game addiction. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association does not include video game addiction since it is still not clear that it presents all of the symptoms of other addictions like gambling. Some centers have acknowledge that their seems to be a problem with teenagers and adults that play to much video games and even offer help in healing them of their addiction. According to Sarah Glazer gamers who play for extended periods of time rarely meet all the characteristics of addiction which include a physical withdrawal, needing to increase the play time to get the same thrill or being distract to the extent that it damages the players health and family relationship. So even though video games seem to be addictive in some manner, it is still up to the parents to monitor and manage the time their children spend playing to avoid this. Video games just fall under the same rule as everything, where too much of it can be bad. Video games are a great form of entertainment that has been growing every year. It has also become a great tool for teachers to give different lessons while been able to engage students and keep their focus. It is necessary to understand that video games may not be effective all the time for teaching and that they must be used in moderation. According to the ESA the average gamer age in 2012 report was 30 years and it is very possible that this age will continue to increase as video games become more easily available with the development of cheaper technologies and that those who play them get older. This could bring the idea that video games will become more

Norman S. Morales

accepted in education since the older generations will have grown playing them and understand their value pass the entertainment aspect.

Norman S. Morales

Biddle, J. (2012, June 3). Minecraft.edu? I can totally dig this!. Digging for Truth Minecraft Blog. Retrieved April 17, 2013, from http://minecraftbiddle.blogspot.com/2012/06/minecraft.html Bringing Minecraft to the Classroom. (n.d.). MinecraftEdu. Retrieved April 6, 2013, from http://minecraftedu.com/ Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2006, April). You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! . Wired, 14.4. Retrieved April 6, 2013, from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html Entertainment Software Agency. (2012). Essential Report About Computer and Video Game Industry. Retrieved from http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2012.pdf Glazer, S. (2006). Video Games: Do they have educational value?. CQ Researcher, 16(40), 937960. Greitemeyer, T., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Osswald, S. (2012). How to ameliorate negative effects of violent video games on cooperation: Play it cooperatively in a team. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(4), 14651470. Johnson, S. (2005). Everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter. New York: Riverhead Books. NPD Group Inc. (2009, May 20). More Americans play videogames than go out to the movies. Accessed at http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090520.html Mrs.Gielen (2012, March 22). Wonders of Minecraft. Minecraft at SAA . Retrieved April 10, 2013, from http://saaminecraft.edublogs.org/2012/03/22/wonders-of-minecraft/ Prensky, M. (2000). Digital game-based learning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Steinkuehler, C., & Duncan, S. (2008). Scientic Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds. J Sci Educ Technol.