Video Games

Video games seem to have a lot to teach us about the way children are learning. Day in and day out we see children growing bored with school and eventually giving it up all together. However, we are bombarded continually with new and improved video games and souped up supreme high def. consoles. We watch as children (and adults) buy them by the truckload. However their is a disproportionate amount of "fun" learning and "academic" learning. What Gee wants to teach us is how to take the learning acquired by video gaming and use it to learn/teach in the classroom.

Within the semiotic domain described by Gee it seems like children are passively learning in school while actively learning playing vg's. The question here, now, is how can we, as (future) teachers, captivate what drives the child to play the game, even as it grows more difficult in strategy and skill level, and recreate it in our teaching.

Our world is so based on multimodal representations of everything that we become forced to look into our classrooms and notice what is missing. Drab text books don't suck kids in like the explosions, rewards, challenges, music, motifs, and colors represented in video games.

We also must consider the zone of proximal development (a theory) and the physical surrounding we offer children in which to learn. Gee offers us a written visual experience of a six year old boy playing a video game. The colors, themes, skills, enemies, etc all intrigue the young child's mind while stimulating his brain, thus, further encouraging commitment to the game.

We need to upgrade our classrooms rather than fighting this rabidly growing technological era. Technology is not going to go away just because schools prefer dry and un-entertaining text books over visual, mental, and emotionally stimulated learning. We need to created a new generation of learning that is in sync with our fast paced culture/lives.