In a series of research projects as likely to thrill young people as they are to horrify their parents and teachers, academic experts across the country are unearthing educational benefits in the digital games that surveys show are now played by more than 80 percent of American young people aged 8 - 18.
At the top of the experts' lists are simulation and role-playing games, often played on the Internet alongside thousands of other participants, because of the vocabulary, reasoning and social skills they can boost. But even some of the most violent games, such as the notorious Grand Theft Auto, have some valuable lessons to teach in the right circumstances, researchers are finding.
Replacing rote memorization |
Some researchers even suggest supplanting much of the traditional back-to-basics K-12 curriculum with a new generation of game-based materials to capture the increasingly short attention spans of today's youth.
"Right now, in American schools, we spend most of the first six or seven years of math education teaching kids to do what a 99-cent calculator does," said David Williamson Shaffer, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a recent book, "How Computer Games Help Children Learn."
"We have this view that schooling is the natural and inevitable way to get kids ready for life in the world," said Shaffer, a leader in the field of digital learning. "But it shouldn't come as a surprise that when our economy has changed, when innovation and creativity are much more important than rote memorization, that the system needs some real updating to train kids how to use computer games to solve problems in the real world."
"We realized that over 80 percent of American kids have game consoles at home, 90 percent of kids are online and 50 percent of them are producing things online, so we really need to understand what is going on here," said Constance Yowell, director of the MacArthur Foundation's digital research initiative.
"This is what kids are doing, so we need to know both the positive benefits and the unintended consequences."
Simulation games in particular have already been embraced by some educators, as well as many businesses and the
The computer games and tools being studied are generations removed from the static, linear educational software commonly found inside many of the nation's schools today -- software that girls and boys quickly master and then discard as boring.
"There are a lot of terrible educational games out there, where you have to do something un-fun, like solve five math problems, so you can do something fun, like play a game," said Ben Stokes, a games expert at the MacArthur Foundation.
Instead, the experts are interested in the educational benefits of commercially available games that were not expressly designed for school use -- simulation games like Zoo Tycoon, in which elementary school-age children build virtual zoos by selecting animals, creating appropriate habitats, managing food budgets and even setting the prices of popcorn at the concession stands.
The verdict on the potential benefits of computer and video games is not unanimous, however. Some critics worry about the persistent racial and economic gaps in access to computers and the Internet: 60 percent of white households, but only 36 percent of black households, had Internet access at home in 2003, according to the Census Bureau.
"The only thing we know for sure is that video games are effective at desensitizing people to extreme violence," said Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the
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