I recently read two articles on the New York Times website about how video games can be incorporated into the classroom. The one that I will be focusing on is “The Future of Reading – Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers” by Motoko Rich. In the article, Rich talks about many different ways that people have been using video games to get students more interested in reading.
One of these ways is by simultaneously creating a book and a video game that follow the same story line. According to the article, PJ Haarsma did just that:
The online game that Mr. Haarsma designed not only extends the fictional world of the novel, it also allows readers to play in it. At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel.
Apparently, Haarsma is not the only one who has done this. The article also lists off several other examples of coupling a book with a video game. I think that this is a very interesting concept, but I’m not really sure how effective it would be. While many students out there are far more interested in playing video games than reading (my brother being one of them), I don’t know if a book coupled with a video game would produce the same quality reading experience. Students may be inclined to simply skim the book for the answers to the questions that they need to answer and spend all of the rest of their time playing the video game. However, if this was a monitored experience within a classroom, maybe it could be pulled off a little better, with the students reading the book with motivation from the video game.
The next way that the article mentioned about video games being used to promote reading was through libraries. I had heard about this before. Apparently some libraries host video game tournaments in an attempt to get kids into the library. Once they get them into the library for the video games, they hope that they will check out their surroundings and hopefully find books that they would like to read. While this is a nice idea, I’m inclined to believe that most kids who come to the library for the video game tournament probably aren’t going to be leaving at the end of the day with a book.
The article also brought up a way that a video game could be used in a social studies classroom:
Such ideas led Lyn Lord, a social studies teacher at Kimball Union Academy, a boarding school in Meriden, N.H., to introduce students to Civilization, a role-playing game in which players build and lead cultures like the Aztecs or the ancient Romans through thousands of years of historical development.
Holly McLaughlin, a senior at Kimball who played Civilization as a sophomore in Ms. Lord’s class, said that at first she failed at the game, choosing to develop culture and religion at the expense of roads and the military. Playing, she said, helped her gain a deeper appreciation for why leaders made certain decisions.
In short, I find this concept of involving video games in the classroom to be an interesting, but tricky, one. On the one hand, getting to play a video game in class would definitely be a motivator for a large number of students, and could help otherwise disinterested students to have more interest in a subject like English. On the other hand, I think that it is very hard to make certain that having the students play video games really is a learning experience and not just a fun activity. Hopefully, as time goes on and people experiment more and more with this idea this really will become an effective classroom learning tool.
If you are interested in how video games can be used in a math classroom, click on the link to the other article that I discovered: “Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfield: Algebra” by Winnie Hu.
Article: “The Future of Reading: Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers” by Motoko Rich
The New York Times, Published October 5, 2008
