Video game and education. These two sounds weird together. There are people who think video game are useless entertainment at best. There are the other kind of people think otherwise. In the 21st century, there is one thing to be certain, video game is here to stay. So, can we put two together, and get some benefit that both sides can agree on?
One of the most accepted theory about learning, I think, is that youngsters learn many things by playing. This belief is established from many researches and observations. Many of the observations are from watching animal youngsters, wild or domestic. I mentioned this because I believe playing video game cannot be excluded from this conclusion. So what can video games provide for educational purpose? The foremost benefit, is the most basic for any kind of education, or craft learning, Video game is great for repetition.
Repetition, sounds so boring. But considering, if you were playing a FPS game, what is that you do? You watched the monitor, moved you mouse on to the target, click. And yet, this action could be repeated through a period of time from 1 minutes up to two hours, yet most players will be happy and exciting. This is pure repetition. For a classic adventure gamer, in order to progress through a story, they have to solve many puzzles, no matter if it's logical, or insane. For a historical strategy gamer, in order to play and compete with other players online, he would try to remember the different outdated tank names, air plane models, and different gun ammunition. For some Chinese players, they would remember many poems from a very popular video games. All of these players has to go through prolonged and often repetitive actions to play their games. By keeping at them, most FPS players learned "Roger that". They learned how to cooperate a strategy against the other team. The problem is how to cooperation them into video games.
For my personal experience. Video game is very good language learning tool. I played very few classic adventure games, but in order to play them, I have to understand the language. I also have vivid impression from playing sacrifice and many other games, because the voice over and the scripts were top notch. Some of the phrases just imprinted into my brain. I do wonder though, if the game provided me with a quick dictionary function, so I did not have to look up a dictionary manually, would I still remember them? However, by keep go back to play those games, I ought not to forget them.
Repetition is essential to learn. In my personal experience, Kumon is a good example in teaching kids learn by repetition. But Kumon is also one of the most boring method ever. And frankly, if you sent most kids out to sell stuff all day long, for a few months, it will produce the same results as Kumon. Video game should not have the same problem.
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