Category Archives: Games and Learning

Part 7 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Games and learning advocates often come up against the video game stigma. Despite the fact that we’ve now seen decades of game play, and that a generation of gamers has grown up without a civilization collapsing, the bad reputation persists — and it’s mostly based around fear. News stories abound: games make kids hyper, violent, stupid, anti-social. It’s not only that people are generally wary of the unfamiliar, we also live…

Part 6 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. As game-based learning increases in popularity, it’s easy to get pigeon-holed into one particular way of thinking about it or one way of employing it. This is true regardless of how teachers feel about gaming in the classroom, whether they’re for or against it. One common objection to game-based learning is that students will sit in front of screens being taught at. Sure, games are interactive, but on some level, don’t…

It seems that hardly a week goes by without a news story touting that digital games like Minecraft are gaining a stronger foothold in American classrooms. Publishers and game developers are eager to make headway in the educational technology marketplace, and school districts throughout the country are rolling out one-to-one computing and BYOD classroom programs. But what do the teachers themselves have to say? In 2013, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center conducted a survey of 694 U.S. K-8th grade classroom…

Part 5 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Nobody likes high-stakes testing. The problems are well documented. But maybe games can help to change the way we approach assessment. At least since John Dewey, educational theorists and scholars have been clear about the inherent shortcomings of thinking about education in terms of standardized, quantifiable outcomes. In order for instructional strategies to be successful at a large scale, they need to take individual differences under consideration. Not all students are…

Personally, I believe in general, when you look at the new assessments, you look at the new standards, you look at what employers want, you look at what people really need to thrive, they tend to align well with inquiry-based learning, blended learning. … But the fact is it’s really hard to design, develop, implement and support those types of learnings. I believe the people who can do that are going to experience enormous success. – Alan Gershenfeld, president and…

Part 4 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. For years, most people thought that video games were like candy: mostly bad, tempting to children, but okay in moderation. Now we understand that they can have more “nutritional” value than our parents ever imagined. My brothers and I played Space Invaders and Pac Man, Asteroids and Breakout. We pulled the plastic casing off the Atari joystick and stuck the accordioned bottom end to our foreheads like a suction cup. These…

Are we living in a fantasy? Of the 70 or so panels, celebrations, play tests, and keynotes that took place last month at the 11th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York, nearly all made some mention of the potential for educational games. So what’s with all the hype? Why games and why now? As the Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael Levine put it in his speech on the last day of the festival, “In the face of global…

Part 3 of MindShift’s Guide To Game-Based Learning. For far too long, school has organized learning into divided disciplines: English, science, history, math, and so on. It seems fine because we’re all used to it. The problem, however, is that students then internalize a divided conception of knowledge; they’re conditioned into a view of life where specialization reigns. While categorized subjects made some sense for the industrialized 20th century, they may not be the best bet for this century. Game-based…

Part 2 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Those who still think of content as the driving force of education may not be ready for game-based learning. What do we mean by “content”? In this age of digital media, “content” is what web designers, TV producers, and media moguls talk about. Articles, TV shows, YouTube videos, photos — that’s all content. In the classroom, what we usually call content is what students have retained if teachers have met their…

This post is part 1 of the MindShift Guide to Game-Based Learning and originally appeared on MindShift. By now, you’ve probably heard the buzzwords: “game-based learning” and “gamification” are pervading headlines in education coverage. Video games have always been popular with kids, but now increasingly, educators are trying to leverage the interactive power of video games for learning. Why? It turns out games are actually really good teachers. Think about the compounding way in which Angry Birds teaches the rules,…