Video Games and Teaching?

            I myself am a gamer, to a certain extent, so naturally the subject of gaming as it relates to the world was interesting to me. If I get a day off I love nothing more than to sit around and play video games for hours on end. Though I have a very narrow selection of games, I love to play them as often as possible still. My wife currently does not allow me to play very many video games though, and I can see why. They do take you away from the real world and as an adult I need to be responsible about real life things. I agree with Gee in the sense that video gaming does help you escape the real world, because the life in the game is structured so that you are doing something extraordinary, and the game is structured to make you struggle to reach that point. Shouldn't school be set up more like this though? Shouldn't school push students to extraordinary measures and help them to accomplish their goals in a sense where they enjoy it and can take pride in their work? The schooling I was involved in never did so, but it's an intriguing concept. I have no idea how you could set it up, but I'm definitely interested and think it could be applied to class.

            I had never thought of the possible implications that gaming has. Once the thought was put out there for me to see though an invisible barrier broke in my mind and I was all like, "Whoa". I actually went and got my wife(who restricts my video game time) and said something around the lines of "You see, I need to play the video games. So that I can be prepared to save the world in real life". To which she responded with a quick "no". From what I said there though you can see the struggle with this concept. How do you relate the want to learn and save the world in video games to real life?

            Gee's reading and McGonical's talk at Ted were both very interesting. I agreed with almost everything Gee and McGonical were saying. For instance Gee talked about how in the video games if we fail we can just try again, but there are harsher consequences in the real world. These games really do push young people to try hard to build knowledge, if only we could translate that to the real world. McGonical talked about blissful meaning, social fabric, urgent optimism, and epic meaning. If we could apply these concepts to schooling it would be a much more enjoyable place, and we may get better results from students. However, I do not think the solution is to use games but rather to take principles from games and apply them to how you set up your class. For instance, McGonical talked about games that students could use to learn... As a young person and a gamer myself I can tell you that nobody is interested in playing an environmental saving video game. You can force them to in the classroom, but the majority of kids would much rather be having fun playing mario or call of duty. (This blog is being weird and I can't see the bottom of the screen where I am typing now.. so I am typing blind and if I make spelling errors I apologize.) Of course I'm sure they could make educational games that are interesting, but they won't be interesting to the level that a real game is.

            I believe that you can use this information to set up your class modeled after video games. The 16 learning principles provided in the Gee article are what you should look to in how to relate video games to the classroom. Though I'm not sure how I would do this or set it up, I did find this topic to be very interesting and would love to see if this develops more in the future.