Instructional video games (IVG):
A game that provides educational value to the player is called an educational video game. Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment. Educational games are games that are designed to teach people about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play.
Software of this kind is not structured towards school curricula, does not normally involve educational advisors, and does not focus on core skills such as literacy and numeracy.
Factors that make a game instructional, educational and the individuals creative:
New information –
This is the educational information provided. It may be text or graphics, and is normally unknown by the age group or skill level for which the game is made. The information provided starts stimulating the brain to create new divergent incidents and ideas through their innate and inborn potential skills.
Memorization – this is the part of the
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In Sicart, virtue ethics is player-centric and players should learn as active recipients of game content. In an older study, Sicart argues that “Playing is an act of judgment of the rule systems and the fictional world the player is presented with (2005, p. 16).” Therefore, game play assists with being able to judge systems. Kolson went further to state that the game SimCity “teaches” the learner that politics, ethnicity, and race are not major variables that impact urban planning. Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Newell, and Squire, (in preparation) argued in their SimCity 2000 at Boys and Girls Clubs study that students learn supply and demand relationships and taxation and its association to population growth by simply playing the
Imagine for a moment, a world of death. For 200 years your family has been sealed away with a thousand other people, to protect you from the dangers outside. Now your father has disappeared, and it’s up to you to find him. After a harrowing escape from your subterranean home, you walk through a tunnel to the outside world, past dead bodies, stretched out in front of the door, as if to say “don’t leave us out here to die!” As you walk through the gate to the outside, and as your eyes slowly adjust to the sun you have never seen, a wasteland emerges before you. The world is devastated, destroyed and annihilated. Broken twisted hunks of metal lie next to a sign on the side of the mountain saying “scenic overlook” on your right, the broken remains of the interstate bridge stand as a monument to a destroyed culture. Petrified trees are all that remains of the local fauna. Off in the distance, all that remains is destruction. While you may think of this stunning visualization of a wonderful novel, this is actually one of the opening scenes from Todd Howard and Bethesda Game Studios’ “Fallout 3.”
While many teenagers argue that games also teach them life lessons, they fail to allow the player to “climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (p35) Harper Lee’s book, “To Kill a Mockingbird” (published in the 1960s), is a classic novel that contains many universal themes that is still evident today. While it teaches many themes, the novel also displays admirable characters who are also considered
Wright’s topic is video games, an area he knows well in, and in his article, “dream Machines”, he explains how video games has helped today’s youth b creative and imaginative. He says games help the youth develop more, for as children we would have our own games and set rules and goals. But technology such as “computers have been understood as an extension of the human brain” (Wright, 4). And so imagine what video games, a more complex device then computers, can do when people are given the chance to decide their own. For video games were once simple when they first started out but as time and technology advances, so did the video games. Thy have become more elaborate, more graphic causing the player to think outside of the box to try to achieve new ways to let out their imagination roam free and help them in the process of playing. While many adults have a negative view of video games, and is they have, they have played it and gotten angry at it for they did not understand the concept of the controls of the game. Which what makes the youth of today much more open in playing for they don’t need to understand or read the manual to play, its trial and error to them. They learn and understand as the play along. They know that can try again. They understand that it may be difficult but they still try and they keep their mind open for new outcomes. Thiers minds are open and accepting to new information and ways of thinking. Which is what makes the youth of today different from past generations who were taught one way of thinking and being
...s. One strong example is flappy bid! Remember how happy you were when you passed the first stupid pole thing! That sense of achievement! Now let us talk about the recreation theory. You ever think in life, you know what would be cool is if I got married today? What if I did this in real life where would I be? Well that’s what recreation is for. You play games like Sims. You play a life of a in game person and do what you want to do in your life. You basically redo your life or “recreate” it and make this in game person’s life awesome! Well you see people in this game feel happy doing something they might not be ever able to do. Like being able to be a thief in a game because you know in real life you would never do such a thing. Have you ever wanted to be a really fit person? Well in the game you can, so why not? See this is how recreation games appeal to people!
“Can you Make Yourself Smarter” is an essay written by Dan Hurley. In the essay, Dan Hurley explores the rise use of video games in classrooms. He starts out by talking about his visit to a third grade classroom in Chicago Heights. During his visit, he met a group of third graders and noticed that they were sitting down in front of apple computers and were told by an instructor to explain how to get points. He says that the game included a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. Dan Hurley mentions that a black cat would appear every few seconds in one of the house’s five windows. The cat would also vanish. This exercise was divided into levels. On the first level, the kids had to remember which window the cat appeared in. Hurley says “But the game is progressive; the cats keep coming and the kids have to keep watching and remembering.” (Hurley 316) This exercise is proof that many video games can make you smarter. In today’s society, there are many educational video games
An example of this that was mentioned in the article was the Caesar series by Sierra Games. This game allowed players to build an ancient day Roman metropolis through managing resources and balancing the cultural growth of their cities and citizens. This kind of game is very educational because through it, players could learn to understand the concepts of urban planning that applied to ancient times and let them see how these concepts have evolved to apply to modern times. In a way, it teaches how concepts of urban planning developed through time and the reasons why these happened. It shows why some concepts and ideas which worked before disappeared and why new concepts were invented as the needs of people changed with the innovations in technology and changing
... games can also be used in education purpose. A FPS game called Re-mission was developed to help young cancer patients to understand and fight against the disease.
Whether they be first-person shooters like Call of Duty, sports games like Madden or Fifa, racing games like Forza or Mariokart, or even games and apps on your phones, there are quite a bit of gamers in here. According to the Entertainment Software Association, about 59% of American play some sort of video game, so gaming isn’t all that uncommon (Entertainment Software Association, 2014). As such, there must be some sort of effect on the audience of this growing form of entertainment.
In society’s current era of technological advancement, video games have gone a long way since they were first created. Video games in the twenty-first century are no longer just toys or junk in the lifestyles of the youth. They have become innovative inventions that not only entertain its users, but also help aid the people in both the academic field and in jobs. The influences that video games bring about in the culture of the youth today are, in fact, not the negative influences that most people think. Video games are actually this generation’s new medium for educating the youth. The information they learn are also mostly positive and useful things that they may apply in their future lives (Prensky 4). In a generation that revolves around technology and connectivity, developers and educators have already been able to produce fun and interesting games that can teach and train people. Video game developers and educators should continue to collaborate in order to create more positive, educational, and appealing games.
...the ideas that are taught in schools. Games also need to intermix instruction with demonstration. This is a big difference from the basic way of learning in school, which is memorize and regurgitate. Demonstrating shows the student what it looks like and they retain the content longer.
Video games are no longer the uprising form of media that ill informed parents and scientists used to fear; video games are now an established form of entertainment that is just as universally accepted as film or literature. The difference between videogames and mediums like film and literature is that they do not have the higher value that books have in exercising the mind and communicating information, nor do they have the value that films have to intellectually challenge an audience and to make people think. This is the general argument that can be heard voiced by leading intellectuals in various field as well as parents who are rising young children; both claim that videogames
Many people believe that video games change people and mislead them to do bad things, such as drugs and alcohol, but it is the opposite. Gaming prevents people from such acts and actually helps to keep them away from the substances. Lots of people, mainly parents, believe that video games harm people so they try to keep their children away from them. In reality, video games make your life better. Video games can provide many benefits to your lifestyle as “numerous academic studies indicate that playing video games has many psychological and even physical benefits” (Guarini). Gaming helps stimulate the brain and advances your problem solving abilities. There are disadvantages to gaming, which is true, but the amount of benefits outweigh them by far.
There are several negative stereotypes associated with video games and those who play them; some of these may often hold true. However, there are plenty of learning opportunities in video games. While the direct purpose of some games is to educate or train, other games that do not directly have this purpose can still become a learning experience for the player. As Ntiedo Etuk, president of the educational video game company Tabula Digital said, “The traditional view of video games has been that they are distractions from the task of learning” (Electronic Education Report 1). Video games are an effective tool for learning and retaining skills both inside and outside the classroom environment. The basic cycle of game play--the introduction to the game, game play, collaboration, improvement of these between each round, and evaluation at the end of the game (Klievink and Janssen 159)--are nearly parallel to the traditional classroom learning cycle of reading a textbook or listening to a lecture, taking a quiz, studying, focusing on items missed on the quiz, and taking a test or exam. Within this cycle, there are many opportunities to develop and perfect both educational, life, and occupational skills.
The concept of “edutainment”- the hybrid of education and entertainment has existed almost as long as video games have. Evidence of this is The Oregon Trail, a game about the colo...
Majority of games are not designed for educational purposes. However, there are some games that are made for educational to teach ethical/political issues to teenagers through a familiar medium. Teenagers also have to know when to play game and when to stop. It is a wrong time to play games if a teenager hasn’t done his/her homework. And this will result in parents asking their son/daughter to study. There’s no problem of talking about the game with friends. However, there are some people who cannot come out from the “game world” because they are not attached to the real world and ending up killing two policeman in the real world like the incident in Alabama, US in 2003.