James Paul Gee argues in his essay "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" for schools to incorporate the advantages video game literacy into their curriculum. Gee believes that video games teach students to be their own individual thinkers. He makes the example that popular video games give information that is in demand and 'just in time' not "out of contexts of actual use or apart from people's purposes and goals" something he believes happens way too often at schools.
"People are quite poor at understanding and remembering information they have received out of context or too long before they can make use of it." That sentence struck me, it reminded me of my excel and access class I took last year. I learned all this information and forgot it when summer came around. I work for ITS as a lab consultant, and just last week a girl came up to me and asked me a question about formatting a chart in excel and I had no idea what to do. It was unbelievable, I spent a whole semester on excel and I realize because I had stopped using the program for a couple of months it was if I had never learned anything about it.
Gee describes video games as a motivated form of learning and thinks that schools should look to video games to bring some of the enthusiasm into the classrooms. "Games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles, which can, in turn, become powerful motivators for new and deep learning in classrooms and workplaces."
I wonder what Gee is suggesting and what that would look like. Will there be video games in schools, or video games with certain academic subjects. Like a renaissance video game? A mathematician video game played in math class?
"People are quite poor at understanding and remembering information they have received out of context or too long before they can make use of it." That sentence struck me, it reminded me of my excel and access class I took last year. I learned all this information and forgot it when summer came around. I work for ITS as a lab consultant, and just last week a girl came up to me and asked me a question about formatting a chart in excel and I had no idea what to do. It was unbelievable, I spent a whole semester on excel and I realize because I had stopped using the program for a couple of months it was if I had never learned anything about it.
Gee describes video games as a motivated form of learning and thinks that schools should look to video games to bring some of the enthusiasm into the classrooms. "Games can show us how to get people to invest in new identities or roles, which can, in turn, become powerful motivators for new and deep learning in classrooms and workplaces."
I wonder what Gee is suggesting and what that would look like. Will there be video games in schools, or video games with certain academic subjects. Like a renaissance video game? A mathematician video game played in math class?
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