LG2G Advisory Meeting: Thoughts on Games and Learning

"I don't think we as educators always recognize where our students are. Our students are so much more comfortable with the technology and that's what interests them. And they will stay for hours with games or the technology or whatever interests them, they're willing to stick with it. But if we're still teaching them using a paper and pencil or something [copied] from the Xerox machine, we're not going to hold their interest. And they're not going to learn if we don't have their interest."

"The thing I've kept thinking about with students [is that gaming gives them] that ability to try without fault, without - I don't want to say criticism - but without that eye on them of you're doing it right or wrong, gaming opens that door up. So if you have students trying to do problem-solving [in a game] and they can try the problem multiple times and try each and every avenue without penalty - in other words, there's not a grade attached to it… just bringing that over to the math classroom opens up many avenues that we don't have now. Students shut down now when they [give] a response and it's not right… whereas with gaming, they don't shut down. They'll try it over and over and over until they figure it out."

"I see kids who would maybe give up with a pencil and paper type activity explore [and] stick with it a little bit longer when they're playing games. They're excited. They're motivated. It's very, very rare that they stop in the middle…. I think it [gaming] is the answer…. They play video games all the time so if we can just build the math in there, I think it will come very naturally to a lot of kids, who think they don't do well in math."

"We're simply trying to find out whether a really promising new technology has the potential to be effective to teach students. We think that games are exciting because of their potential to engage students, but also because of the ways in which they allow students to explore and really construct knowledge. We think it's a great way for students to experience things in a way that's probably a better link to what they'll experience later in the workplace [and] with their life outside of the classroom, too."

"Well, I know as a middle school teacher, many of my students have problems with the basic math facts. And I guess it was the way it was presented to them. Yet we all know that they can learn the lyrics of a song in a heartbeat, because that's interesting to them. So maybe we can find a way to just make learning more meaningful to them and make it more active than it is [for them] now."

"Gaming is a bridge for me and my students to relate to each other. They're obviously very inclined to play games, and I think this is a great way to incorporate learning into an activity that they already enjoy doing - kind of meeting them at their level, so to speak…. With games, they can take a game home and in two hours, they've mastered the game. In 10 to 20 hours, they've finished the game and are moving onto the next game. That shows how much they can get involved in something as long as they're interested in it. And this [gaming] is a way to get them interested in what they're learning."

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