Once again, I was browsing the web to find more articles to support my belief in using Video Games in the classroom, and I came across an article about the University of Wisconsin's education program. Apparently, the University has started a Video Games in education awareness team called the Education Arcade. The main goal of the group is to encourage teachers to use video games in the classroom and also to encourage software developers to develop more games geared to the classroom. I believe that this program is a great idea and UCF should adopt it as well. Not to repeat myself, but video games can be very beneficial in the classroom and it is refreshing that there are a lot of other people that believe this same thing.
Article: http://wtnnews.com/articles/513/
I know our program offers some courses in gaming for educational purposes, but I'm not ready for them yet. I do think this is a great idea and liken it to some of the older mechanical games that science museums installed. Even as an adult making things move and watching the patterns the physicists said were dictated by nature is very convincing and memorable, much more so than looking at diagrams and doing the math in a physics class.
ReplyDeleteI know the math is important, but is it always, even in physics, the most important part of the process? Not from what I have read about or studied. The math is the language. Anything that helps ideas to be more interesting is important. Bored students either already know the information or don’t care to know it.
We're lucky we're teaching in such inventive times and that these times are going to be even more inventive and offer us greater choices of sharing ideas. I know some adults, particularly many older teachers, would pre-emptively decide using video games in education will be the end of civilization, but calculators and spell checkers haven't brought on the apocalypse like many parents and teachers said they would when these devises were introduced. Socrates objected to writing ideas down. He felt that once an idea was inscribed, it was finished, dead to development. Imagine any educator or parent objecting to writing today!
Keith White