Category Archives: Games and Learning

Part 15 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Most people agree that implementing game-based learning makes sense for older students, but what about really young kids? Do screens have a place in early childhood education? How young is too young for screen time? If you have small children, you know that this is a hot topic among new parents. Some moms and dads believe that screen time will ruin their children. Others see tablets as an exceptional parenting gadget,…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center needs your vote for the SXSW Interactive 2015 conference! We have pulled together heavy hitters from LEGO, Nickelodeon, and MIT Media Lab to talk about how the engaging power of games can be used to promote playful learning. The design experts will share lessons learned from applying the latest research to produce transformative AND popular games. Vote for our panel if you want to hear their best practices for such integral processes like research gathering,…

Part 14 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that today’s technologies will one day be obsolete — we shouldn’t be too enamored with any particular educational tool. Teachers will always play the most important role in the classroom. Although ed-tech has a lot to offer, even the most interactive, adaptive software cannot provide the social and emotional benefits that a good teacher can. Early psychoanalytic research already made it clear…

Part 13 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. In education, it seems as if innovation and revolution play like the song of the Sirens in a culture of perpetual obsolescence. It seems as if we’ve got an unhealthy fetish for new-ness, indiscriminately choosing the convenient disposability of shrink-wrap over the sustainability of the well-worn. Digital games can be amazing tools, but only when used to make it easier to contextualize the gifts we’ve received from Shakespeare, Socrates, Euclid, and…

Part 12 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. We often think about game-based learning as if video games can become robotic teachers. In the same way that software file systems have created more flexible and efficient file cabinets, we imagine that video games can make great instruction more scalable and accessible. In the same way that email, text messages, and social media have provided more efficient methods of communication, we imagine that digital analytic systems will streamline assessment. These…

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post. According to a recent New York Times piece that has stirred a highly emotional debate among my many colleagues, parents across the U.S. who once felt confident helping their children with homework until high school are now feeling helpless when confronted with their first-graders’ Common Core-aligned work sheets. Stoked by viral postings online that ridicule math homework in which students are asked to critique a phantom child’s thinking or engage in complex…

Part 11 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Teachers have found many different ways of using digital games in the classroom. But what kind of games are these students playing? And how are teachers incorporating them in the classroom? Last year’s report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, “Games For A Digital Age,” made the distinction between “short-form” and “long-form” learning games. Short-form games are designed to be played during a single class period. “They focus on a particular…

Part 10 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Most people involved with games and learning are familiar with the work of James Paul Gee. A researcher in the field of theoretical linguistics, he argues for the consideration of multiple kinds of literacy. The notion of “New Literacies” expands the conception of literacy beyond books and reading to include visual symbols and other types of representation made possible through, among other things, current digital technologies. At this point in the…

Part 9 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. The games-and-learning landscape is changing quickly. What’s happening in classrooms now will look very different in a decade, so what really matters right now is how we frame the conversation. The way we understand the expectations and promises of today’s game-based approaches will have a long-term impact on how we imagine and implement them in the future. It’s critical that teachers, parents, and administrators understand not only the research, but also…

Part 8 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.   Keith Devlin is a well-known mathematician and the author of many popular math books. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute and is well known as the “NPR Math Guy.” He’s also a big fan of using video games as a teaching tool and the founder of an education technology company called BrainQuake. Devlin believes the future demands a substantial change in…