I don't normally find anything good in the magazine section of the local grocery store and so I'll rate this as an anomoly. A couple weeks ago I found Discover presents The Brain. One of the sections is titled Your Brain on: Sex, Fear, Video games. Sure, you might think it was the sex that pulled me in, but alas, I must admit I was more excited about the video games.
James Gee's work is the primary topic of discussion but there is a lot of research covered in this article subtitled Gaming isn't for slackers: It sharpens thinking, hones social skills, and fine-tunes perception.
In October 2006 the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) endorsed video games as a potential means for teaching "higher-order thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change"...Team games, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, develop cooperation and communication skills that the FAS says are useful in business settings.If the FAS endorses it, doesn't that mean school's, especially PUBLIC schools, have to implement it? Yea...sorry...I don't know what I was thinking there for a minute. It should be about 2025 before that happens.
If you can't find the mag you can go to www.discovermagazine.com and check out the section on the Brain that has a subsection titled Learning. I haven't been able to find the article from the magazine on the web site but my guess is that they will be there soon.
I'll keep an eye out. But first, I need to do a little questing and leveling up...no! wait!...I mean improve my higher-order thinking skills. Yeah, that's it.
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