KIDS AND COMPUTER GAMING

Kids And Computer Gaming
Recently I was given the opportunity to be a presenter at a conference in Wellington. The participants were over four hundred year 6-8 students from a wide number of schools in the Wellington region. Aspart of the conference they undertook a wide range of activities during the two days it ran. One of these activities was the workshop I facillitated using software called MissionMaker. Our school is one of five trial schools in NZ for this quite sophisticated software used to create virtual environments in which the creator sets up a mission or scenario for players to explore and problem solve. There are several ideas being explored related to the use of this software.
The first is that gaming based activities are highly attractive to today’s students who are very savvy when it comes to the whole gaming experience, and that this interest can be used to engage students in a medium that has significant educational potential. The second is that students want to move beyond simply playing games into creating games. And thirdly, that educational content can be embedded in the games students create to make a rich, collaborative learning environment.
There has not been much New Zealand based research around the use of gaming software in educational environments so results from the trial of this software is of interest to Ministry of Education researchers. While some anecdotal evidence from England suggests that this software is more useful for older students, I see that there are a significant proportion of the children in Room 4 who like to engage with computer games, especially among the boys.
This topic is one that you, as a parent, may well have an opinion on.