Simple Mind
My first game console was an Atari. There were 2 games that I often play: Pac-Man and Tank (not sure the exact title).
At that time, a game was just another form of entertainment for me. It had no educational significance.
My Atari became lonely when Family computer came out. Let me see if I remember some of the games I played …
- Airplane (After Burner) – not sure of the title. I recall it was an air combat simulation using modern fighter planes. Why did I like this game? I didn’t. I had a classmate who was into tanks, planes, guns, and anything related to the world war. He would talk about the events like a passionate historian. I did not understand where the passion came from. I only had a simple mind. So, I decided to play games that were related to war. I was hoping I would see and experience his perspective. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
- Tetris – I got bored after a week. The concept was simple – maximize the limited space as far as my simple mind is concerned.
- Ghostbusters – I enjoyed this game because of Slimer. While playing that game, I was also wondering if it was really possible to have ghosts.
- Pac-Man – I played this game for 3 reasons: (a) easy to play, (b) I wanted to get the highest score, (c) it involved ghosts
- Bomberman – I like blowing up things without the real consequences …every child’s fantasy? I am glad that my fantasy with bombs did not go beyond the virtual world.
- Spy vs Spy – I could not remember why I enjoyed playing this game.
- Ice Climber – the game made me think and there is a certain sense of adrenaline rush. Again, I did not think of this game as educational at that time. Even the concept of teamwork did not occur to me until now.
I skipped the PC Games generation. I guess I was too busy trying to pass college at that time.
Stop – Forward – Stop – Play
After reading about different learning theories, I came to realize how games can be used to aide learning… But, there must be proper guidance.
Posted in: Week 05: Game-Based Learning
khenry 6:52 pm on October 8, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Schiong,
With reference to Ice Climber and educational content, I too did not relate the educational aspects of my gaming experience until much later. Makes me wonder if they really impacted on cognition or was it a composite of activities? I do believe though that content and tasks/tools required/used within games if cleverly designed can create cognitive development and information processing skills and higher order thinking skills Blooms Taxanomy (http://www.tedi.uq.edu.au/downloads/bloom.pdf).
kstooshnov 9:16 pm on October 8, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
…are easily amused, that seems to be the message of your experience with video games and learning. It is analogous to catching the last five minutes of a police procedural on TV to find out ‘whodunit’ without watching from the beginning of the episode to understand why ‘it’ was done.
Such games provide visceral thrills that many assume have nothing to do with learning, yet the metacognition that goes on whenever a digital native picks up a control pad is awe-inspiring. They learn most often by doing, rather than being told (taught) what to do, whether they are fitting together tetrominoes, escaping from ghosts or busting blocks of ice. In most cases, the game only needs to increase the speed to make gameplay more challenging, and perhaps this is why gamers are able to pick up on the ever-changing nature of technology, while non-gamers repeatedly need to get out the instruction manual when programming their PVR.