Keeping with last weeks' theme:
Brian Kotts Tweeted a Tweet that shows a connection between videogames and civic engagement. Turns out, there's research that shows videogames lead students to look out and examine their society. Kurt Squire is a videogame designer and Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He breaks it down for us:
Videogames are immersive. They build skills of pattern recognition and problem-solving. They also allow participants to shape your own social future; how often do we invite our students to do this? They integrate generations, interests, and abilities so participation allows for and creates opportunities for considering multiple perspectives. Shouldn't all of these things be in education? The importance of multiculturalism is certainly a part of our global society, as well as shaping one's social future.
The civic engagement piece is illustrated with one of their games, called Citizen Science. The game leads students through the real scenario that the lakes in Madison are in danger of becoming eutrophic in a few years. Students navigate through the discovery of information about the condition of the lakes and then how to affect change and, if you play the game right, you fix the lakes and change the future. Then what happens is students finish that and then look out and say, "ok, how can we do this for real?" And then you've got them hooked to do some serious world-changing. Awesome.
Find the video of Kurt Squire here.
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