What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
James Paul GeePalgrave Macmillan2003ISBN: 1403961697$26.95
For any parents who have begun to despair at the amount of time their children spend playing apparently mindless video and computer games, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy offers a ray of hope. The author contends that they are actually quite intricate learning experiences that have much to teach about how learning and literacy are changing in the modern world. In response to the question, “Is playing video games a waste of time?” he replies with a resounding, “No.”
Gee, professor of reading in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, explores many of the most popular video games and considers how they are designed and played. He argues that 36 important learning principles are built into good video games, principles supported by research on human learning in cognitive science. They include:
how one forms an identity;
how one connects different sign systems such as words, symbols and artefacts;
how one chooses between different ways of solving a problem;
how one learns from non-verbal clues; and
how one transfers abilities learned while performing one task to doing another.
Widening the scope of his argument, Gee compares learning and literacy in video games to the learning and literacy at work in both effective and poor-quality teaching.
The book contains plenty to interest anyone who seeks to know what really happens when someone sits down to play “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”,“Arcanum” or “Deus X”. You may not agree with everything it says – but you will certainly have plenty to talk about with your colleagues in the staff room.
