Kids will play an average of 100 hours to “get good” at a video game. Will they put in 100 hours to “get good” on schoolwork? As an educator I know they do not put this time into schoolwork. Clearly our “rewards” used in school do not motivate students to put in time like they put time into video games. In a video game, they don’t get grades, they don’t get extra credit, and they don’t win money, yet commit hours to practice. On average, 8-12 year olds play 13 hours of video games per week, and teenagers aged 13-18 years old plays 14 hours a week. I would venture to say that they are not dedicating the same time to schoolwork.
I have to ask myself what we can learn from video games, and whether we can apply that to our lessons for school. What are some key features in video games? If we analyze a video game, some commonalities emerge:
The objectives and goals are spelled out at the beginning of the game.
There are strategies and skills to be learned
There is a vocabulary that must be learned
There is a public measure of how well you are doing
You quickly learn what to do better next time to improve your performance in the game
To help kids learn, we must make sure they understand our lesson objectives. After a 45-minute lesson, if we ask a student how well they did, they should be able to articulate a notion of how well they met the objectives. They should not respond “I don’t know”, although this is a typical teenager response. With any unit of study, we need to explain the strategies, skills and vocabulary that are needed, and we need to give these at the beginning of the unit. A mechanism to track their own understanding of the concepts in the unit will help students succeed. Students need an opportunity to reflect on their work and know what to improve upon for next time.
Putting these ideas into practice will produce a good recipe for our lessons and planning in school.
Edunators.com-The Hidden Connection Between Video Games and Learning
Metrics2.com-video game addiction