Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Harnessing the power of video games for learning

The Federation of American Scientists have released a report, Harnessing the power of video games for learning (1.3MB PDF).

It’s an exceptional research report, and rightly calls for more investigation and understanding. 

On 26 October 2006, Raj inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Good find there.

I think of all the points that come out of that report, the ability to prioritize multiple tasks.  It’s certainly one point that flies in the face of many traditional school environments where there is generally only one task on the go at any given time per class, and teachers generally ignore the fact (or seem to) that there are other teachers doing the same thing.  The traditional model does, technically I guess deal with the multiple points, but it does it in what are essentially silos, where games are requiring synthesis of information from multiple domains and managing tasks generated from this integration.

On 28 November 2006, Lisa Cullison inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Great article!  I did some research (in undergraduate study) on incorporating technology into the math classroom.  I did not include techonology equipment such as graphing calculators, however.  My research focused on using technology such as educational video/computer games and software.  I feel that this article would have fit great into my research paper and presentation to high school teachers.  I wish I had it available to me a few years ago.  I will definitely include this article to my “resource file”.  Thanks for the info.