Recent posts for How Computer Games Help Children Learn
Obama and the Stereotype Threat
A recent study showed a wonderful finding:
A performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The study has not been published yet–the report is from the New York Times, with hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But the results are not actually that surprising.
There have been a number of studies in the last decade that show that what students think about their abilities has an influence on how well they do on tests. In the mid-1990s researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson called the phenomenon the stereotype threat.
From the Classroom to the Football Field
In a recent article on the website Sports are 80 Percent Mental, the writer cites David Williamson Shaffer’s work, stating that if a game is realistically based on real-world situations, players can learn critical skills and dispositions. The rest of the article “Video Games Move From the Family Room to the Locker Room” examines EA Sports’ SportMotion, a football simulation, and the Madden NFL game. After all, games aren’t just child’s play – even experienced sports professionals can learn from them too.
Blog Examines Microworlds and Explanatoids
Check out David Learns Games to read one blogger’s thoughts on tech development, academic research, and game-based learning. In a recent post, Microworlds, Explanatoids, and Extending the Islands of Expertise Theory, the author synthesizes David Williamson Shaffer’s book How Computer Games Help Children Learn, with other scholarly work David has done with Gina Svarovsky. The blogger, who is a game designer himself, ends with the comment that, “If it is true that a game seeking to deliver learning through exploratoids must be not only iterative and autoexpressive but also expressive then I fear that I may be in a hot spot!”
MMOG Madness!
In a Fox News segment on the dangers of kids losing their “moral compass” through playing online games, David responds to the fears of online kids gone wild by suggesting the ways adults can encourage children to play video games responsibly. As he explains in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, the most important things parents can do is play and talk about video games with their children.
David Williamson Shaffer in the Rocky Mount Telegram
David was recently interviewed for “Got Game?” [link removed by source], an article that ran in North Carolina’s Rocky Mount Telegram newspaper. In it, he argues that video games can teach children specific skills and give them motivation to solve real-world problems. “Learning how to play the games first might even inspire people to try new activities when they see the tasks are more possible than they thought,” David said.
