Hands-On Learning with Video Games

Here is a great video about hands-on learning through video games. Thanks to Dan Pink for this great piece. 

Comments

[twitter.com/LHSSchmidt]

Excellent video - the more we can get this kind of info out, the sooner education can get off this wrong track.

[laurie fish]

I am raising three boys. They are now 22, 19 and 15 - digital natives. They learn by doing. And they are excellent gamers.

I recently found video games designed to help teenagers deal with the social pressures of growing up. I found a series of video games at http://www.campus.willinteractive.com. I asked my sons to test them out. I made it sound like I was leary of them, even though I had run through them before I passed them on. The WILL Interactive video games are full motion picture - you choose a character to play and play out different scenarios. At critical points of the story you have to make decisions for your character. These games challenged my boys to make decisions around tough social situations that I know they face in their own lives. Will they allow their character to give their presciption meds to a friend, or say 'no' and deal with the fallout? Each choice plays out a different outcome. And the story moves on. And their are lots of choices to make!

Any parent of a teenager will tell you that the lessons around drug abuse, sexual responsibility, even Internet safety are topics we need to talk about but don't often have the words or a receptive 'ear'. The question is how do we get through to our teens? How do we teach the skills to make good desicions?

Not surprizingly each one of my boys played out the game more than once. Not only did they engage, they brought the topics out of the games in discussions with my husband and I. Now if I had tried to sit down and have the same converstion, with the same messages I may, if I were lucky, had ten minutes of their attention...maybe. I believe what we are seeing at http://www.campus.willinteractive.com is just the very beginning of what I hope is a trend in online educational learning tools that finally ask the user to participate - not in a limited page oriented environment, but in a fully interactive universe where they can influence the outcome as they progress. Wonderful - absolutely wonderful.