Scratch Fever!

One of our tasks for this week was to play a video game, and make a case for whether or not games are useful resources for teachers, or more generally, if students learn anything from playing games. We've all heard that children who play violent video games are generally more violent. Children who play video games in general waste hours on hours playing mindless games, rather than being productive individuals. Now, I'm not arguing that some do spend countless hours playing video games, and I do not necessarily condone it excessively, especially when it comes to the point that a student's social skills are lacking because they interact with others primarily via video games (my brother is a perfect example) and online. However, I do certainly think that there are merits to video games, and that integrating video games into the classroom can be a useful way to differentiate instruction and engage students.

I played the game Scratch, which is an animation creation game. You start out doing a tutorial where your first character is a cat. You learn that you can make the cat do certain things by dragging a motion, under a motion tab, to the blank script area. You then learn that you can add a sound, you can change the scene, you can change your character, you can make your character change colors by adding an event like "when the down arrow is pressed, the character's color will change," and you can repeat the sequence. The tutorial teaches you that if you have your cat take 10 steps forward, 10 steps back, add a drum beat before, in between and after the steps, and drag a repeat sign around the whole thing, the cat will dance. There are so many ways to combine these motions, sounds, events, etc. into the script to make an animation. The task is to decide how you want your animation to look, and then to create the perfect combination to accomplish your goal. I was hooked, and played the game much longer than I intended to. I was trying to make a dinosaur character dance, while changing color, and to the strumming of a guitar. I had a really hard time getting the sequence right so that the guitar would be playing while the dinosaur was dancing.

In my endeavor with Scratch, I could see many of the ideas presented in Gee's "Good Video Games and Good Learning" playing out. For instance, Gee states, "Players are producers, not just consumers; they are “writers” not just “readers”. Even at the simplest level, players co-design games by the actions they take and the decisions they make." This is true for sequential video games, which is what I think Gee is directly speaking to here, but with Scratch the player is most definitely the producer and a writer rather than simply a reader. The game provides the framework, but the player makes all of the decisions as to how the animation will play out. Gee then makes a suggestion that, beyond gaming, in classrooms students like to have autonomy, such as having a hand in writing their own curriculum, creating and establishing classroom norms, and generally having their opinions be heard and valued. The suggestion here is that, we know that many students enjoy video games, so what is it about video games that engages students? One point Gee is making is that having control/autonomy is important to a video game, and so why not make a classroom more like a video game?

Additionally, gaming provides a safe domain for students to take risks and fail. The Scratch game for me was a trial-and-error process, and I had to problem solve to reach my goal. I believe that if students are provided with a domain in which learning through trial-and-error, or learning from failure, is welcomed and encouraged, then the disposition that "it's okay to fail, just try again," will translate into their daily lives as well. If students are provided with a safe classroom environment that encourages risk-taking, they will be less likely to back down after failure. I think that integrating good video games into the classroom can be an excellent resource for teachers, but even if some teachers are hesitant, not using video games directly, but learning from them and developing an understanding of how students like to think and learn is also very useful.