Video Games in the class room

The most interesting thing I found from the Baek's article, "What Hinders Teachers in Using Computer and Video Games in the Classroom? Exploring Factors Inhibiting the Uptake of Computer and Video Games", was the divide he observes between experienced and inexperienced teachers.

The article claims that experienced teachers think curriculum inflexibility and negative effects of gaming are bigger problems than then inexperienced teachers. This seems to make sense. Teachers with more experience are most likely older and therefore have less experience with video games; video games haven't been around that long. Curriculum inflexibility and negative effects are both reactions I would expect from people with less experience with video games.

I feel as though (I'm just going with personal experience here, and I'm a pretty heavy gamer) people who play more video games see less negative effects of them. They don't accept the media's stereotype of video games as starting points for violence or a home to mindless zombies.

Curriculum inflexibility is probably a reaction caused by a lack of knowledge of the wide array and depth of the video game world. Somebody who didn't spend a lot of time gaming probably doesn't see how flexible today's games are. As games are becoming more and more powerful they provide more and more opportunity to fit niches that inflexible curriculums offer. In the early stages of the gaming timeline games were made with only sparse environments and even sparser methods of interactions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game)). I can see how it might be difficult to find methods of using these old games to match very specific mandated lesson plans. However, I feel that new games offer a much wider range of possible lessons that can easily be adapted to fit the strictest of curriculum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life).

So now that we've got the more experienced teachers with less video game experience figured out we can move on to the opposing side. The article claims that less experienced teachers claim lack of supporting materials and fixed class schedules as the culprit behind the integration challenge. Going along with the idea that less experienced teachers have more video game expertise these claims also are reasonable.

More experienced gamers see the power that new video games can offer. They understand that the games of today can be creatively molded to fit the everyday curricula. The problems they offer up are that there should be more time to work with these programs and better machines to run them. Video games of today require the latest in hardware support as hardware is always on the catch up to software. Not only do they need the latest hardware, they need more time to utilize all the power that this hardware has to offer. Games of today are complex, intricate, and absorbing. Students would need more time to interact and explore all that the games offer.

So if people with more gaming experience are the ones putting these issues at the top, then it may be surprising to see that women share this same view more than men. In the article it states that lack of supporting materials, fixed class schedules, and limited budgets are all seen as bigger problems to women than men. . It seems unlikely that women would be the more experienced gender when it comes to video games. As it turns out (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4634519.stm) woman make up the majority of the gamers in South Korea (a mind blowing 69%) which is where the study was taken.

Interestingly enough, with my arguments now made, the article says nothing about age or video game experience correlations. The article makes no mention about these two background categories in the discussion. This is strange to me as they seem so trivially vital to the understanding of this problem. The only reason I can see for why the author would leave this information out is that no statistically significant conclusions could be made from the perspective of these categories. If this is the case, I'm afraid my above arguments are bust as they require a correlation between teaching experience and age/video game experience. Either way I'd like to end by giving my resound approval for seeing video games in class rooms.