What Can K-12 School Leaders Learn from Video Games and Gaming?.

Abstract

Schools have much to learn from video games and the gaming community. By providing compelling activities for motivating otherwise indifferent learners, video games can potentially help teachers improve the design of learning environments. However, there are considerable rhetorical and practical barriers between the schooling and gaming communities grounded in fundamentally different approaches to learning. Whereas schools are moving toward increasingly standardized learning experiences, games offer the prospect of user-defined worlds in which players try out (and get feedback on) their own assumptions, strategies, and identities. It is difficult, at first glance, to see how gaming can help teachers meet the demands of an increasingly standards-driven public schooling system. The adversarial relation between the two cultures heightens the contrast between the underlying theories of gaming and schooling. Many school leaders and teachers react negatively to video games and gaming culture, bashing video games as diversionary threats to the integrity of schooling or as destructive activities that corrupt moral capacity and create a sedentary, motivation-destroying lifestyle. Apart from embracing a few games such as Oregon Trail or SimCity, schools have typically acted to eliminate or marginalize gaming. The strong content and the addictive play of games such as Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Everquest have led non-players to overlook the learning principles incorporated into the game design. Thus games have come to typify the essentially subversive side of computing in

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