Are Video Games Making Your Kids Smarter?

Sure, video games are often seen as a time waster, and in a lot of cases, you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking so. But do they have an upside? James Gee, the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Chair of Literary Studies at Arizona State University thinks so.

It’s not the content of video games themselves, but the environment they provide for students to interact with. He says, “We tend to teach science, for example, by telling you a lot of stuff and then letting you do science. Games teach the other way. They have you do stuff, and then as you need to know information, they tell it to you.”

The article goes onto make an interesting connection between standardized testing and how performance is assessed in video games.

The idea of video games as an educational tool is becoming an increasingly accepted notion. President Obama and the Macarthur Foundation have started a competition with incentives for technology companies who can develop the best video games for teaching math and science.

The full story at Science Daily. Photo by sean dreilinger.

Tagged as: unconventional-learning, video-games