How Skills Learned from Video Games Transfer to the Classroom

    

    Blumberg and Altschuler’s article, “From the Playroom to the Classroom: Children’s Views of Video Game Play and Academic Learning,” seeks to understand how video games impact how and what children learn—more accurately, how gaming skills transfer to academic learning. The authors collected a focus group of boys and girls in urban fourth, fifth, sixth, and grade classrooms who play frequently and infrequently. One of the main goals was to learn how children problem-solved in both video games and the classroom, to compare how similar or dissimilar students’ strategies were. Surprisingly, results were similar in many instances. When in need of help during their games and in an academic setting, children answered that they seek the help of someone (friend, parent, or teacher [in an academic setting]) or that they simply used trial and error—this was actually a large number of students. During video games, especially, children said that they did not read instructions or learn rules, rather, they just try different things until they get the result they’re after.

     As I mentioned, one of the things that this study aims to show is that skills learned while playing video games transfers to the classroom. For example, many studies show that there is an increase or improvement in spatial ability, visual attention, and problem-solving skills (Blumberg & Altschuler, 2011, pp. 200-202).

     While it may harder to incorporate video games into the learning process since teachers would likely have to find video games that fit what they are learning in class, that doesn’t mean that teachers can’t use video games to help with the general skills that were previously listed, such as problem-solving and spatial awareness. While it would be hard for a teacher to create a video game, they could create or find other games that are more closely related to the subjects they are teaching, for example, Kahoot or Jack-in-the-Box games—these aren’t video games, but they are digital games, so the skills may still transfer. This may be especially beneficial, since many of the children in this study reported that they feel their games are higher stakes than classroom, since there are greater penalties for losing in a game, but also greater rewards for winning the game. If teachers are able to incorporate more games into their lessons, students may treat those activities with as much gravity as their video games, because they would feel the stakes are higher, whether they win or lose.

Educational Interest: Videogames continued . . .

For this week’s blog post, I wanted to actually find a “classroom” videogame. Apparently, Minecraft (I’m not familiar with it, but I’ve heard the name, so I know it’s well known) has an educational series called “Minecraft: Education Edition.” I looked into it, and apparently, there is a chemistry themed version that allows student to do things like use elements to create compounds that can be used to help them during the game. There’s also an aquatic version of Minecraft that lets students explore the underwater biome. I thought this was really cool and I was surprised to find out this popular game had educational versions. I am not a video game person at all. I don’t know anything about them. So to me, this was like hearing there was an educational “Grand Theft Auto.” Very cool.

 

References

Blumberg, Fran C., and Elizabeth Altschuler. “From the playroom

to the classroom: Children’s views of video game play and academic learning.” Child Development Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 2, 10 May 2011, pp. 99–103, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00163.x.