It is anecdotal data, but nevertheless…
From a 4th/5th grade teacher who used Urban Science in her class:
Students with video gaming did better with the zoning maps; they had developed the visual hand to eye skills to be able to infer meaning with their actions. Students who spent less time gaming had greater difficulty with the maps….
The key point? That the visual skills from gaming are not necessarily just hand-to-eye. They are hand-to-eye-to-mind.
That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that video games would actually sharpen the mind, but I can understand how with zoning and maps and similar things, students could be a leg up after having played.
I think the nature of the game strongly influences how it sharpens the mind. If you’re playing Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, these games are all pretty-much exactly the same and they teach nothing new. But if a game presents new and unfamiliar patterns, and an appropriate order of magnitude of complexity, then naturally a boost in sharpened thinking would result would it not?
Isn’t this why games like Sim City, The Sims, and Civilization are strong contenders with the most popular shoot-em-ups?
@Jonathan: It may be that you are correct that “unfamiliarity” is an important part of learning from video games. But in the example above, it seems that this issue is more one of _similarity_, in the sense that video game players are used to interpreting meaning from the results of their actions in an abstract space on the screen. If that is true, then the similarity of a game to some kind of meaningful activity in the world would be more important than its unfamiliarity. Or were you thinking of the issue in a different way?
Thanks for commenting Ben and Jonathon. To add to David’s comment:
One of the things that we think about all the time is the question of transfer. That is, can young people carry learned skills and abilities with them to new contexts? There are a number of possibilities suggested by this teacher’s anecdote. As David suggests, perhaps those students who play more video games are more used to navigating virtual worlds, and thus are better able to infer consequences of their actions in a virtual world like Urban Science.
The key idea is not just that playing video games teaches better hand-eye coordination. Video games require problem-solving, not just hand-eye coordination, and thus are a mental activity. Epistemic Games ask players to solve specific types of problems that we value in the real world. What the teacher here is noticing is that some tech-savvy students seemed to be better prepared to play Urban Science; we similarly propose that kids who play Urban Science are better prepared to play the much more complex “game” that is adult life.
That’s very true, video games often have a problem solving element, which would definitely sharpen the mind over time. I suppose then, it depends on what kind of game the child is playing that determines whether or not it is beneficial to their mental development. Very interesting.