Educators Turn To Games For Help 17
Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the increasing use of games to educate and simulate in the learning field. The article discusses the fact that "...video games have come under tremendous political pressure in recent years because of an increase in violent and sexual content. But schools soon may be using the technology that powers those games to help teach America's children." It goes on to mention a number of academic initiatives, including MIT's Games-To-Teach project, currently developing titles such as Biohazard, which uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, and "...helps train emergency workers to deal with a cataclysmic attack. To succeed, teams must forge new communication lines while fighting a toxic accident."
If it helps kids to learn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If it helps kids to learn... (Score:5, Interesting)
As the article pointed out, though, it's not violence or controversial storylines that make a game inappropriate. Another game they made (other than the one they mention in the
The point is to get people to learn and, at the same time, to see the consequences of bad choices without having to suffer the real-life consequences. It enhances the experience over simply telling people (or having them read out of a book) what happens if this is done, or what happened in the past. Additionally, they mention that the games are used as an enhancement of a more 'normal' education, not in place of normal student-teacher interaction (in other words, there would still be normal lessons to make sure, for instance, that if someone actually manages to win the American Revolution as the British in a simulation, that they understand where their actions deviated from those of the British to allow them to win).
Re:If it helps kids to learn... (Score:1)
Glad to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personal Experience (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Personal Experience (Score:1)
Re:Personal Experience (Score:1)
Whatever happened to... (Score:2, Interesting)
It actually did test you on various things, forcing you to look things up (geography etc...). Before the Internet it made things slower (rushing to an Atlas for instance) but these days with Google it would be much faster to play.
They could even integrate an internet search into the game, allowing you to look things up as you go. Ap
Learning music with games (Score:3, Informative)
Right now the games aren't very exciting... (yeah, yeah; I'm working on it) but they're definitely highly effective. I've had a previous generation of the site running at the college I went to for the past 6 years, and I've gotten a lot of very positive feedback from students and teachers.
Practicing this kind of thing (music theory skills) on paper is *deadly*
Re:Learning music with games (Score:2, Interesting)
Additionally, it would probably be easier to do (once the program is written) than actually assembling an orchestra simply for the purpose of teaching a theory class.
Other things I could think of that may help for teaching would be the ability to hear changes made to a piece of music, which may help some students to associate the notes on the page to the not
Sex ed? (Score:3, Funny)
Biohazard (Score:1)
I learned a lot from games... (Score:2)
Ah.. perhaps we should just ban 3D shooters from kids. That'll teach 'em. =)
New Class Schedule (Score:1)
If Joe pays a hooker $105 for sex, then beats said hooker up and takes a total of $120 from the hooker, how much profit did Joe make? Extra credit for anyone who can tell me the percent increase in Joe's money!"
very last post, i suck (Score:1)