NYCC 2011: National Gaming Day

Like talking to teenagers about sex, not enough serious conversation happens between elementary/middle school students and their adult counterparts (teachers and parents) about playing video games. And if the kids do ask the questions are asked the responses are finite “Nos.” (I don’t think I need to tell you how well abstinence works as birth control.)

I used to get annoyed with the kids at my local library. On any given afternoon (mornings on the weekends), they will stand three or four deep, peering over each others shoulders, watching a peer shoot an “enemy combatant” or fight their way through a labyrinth of booby traps and mythological creatures . Their peer has reserved time on library computers to do exactly what they do on their DSs.

I was annoyed because I felt they weren’t using the library computers “properly” — in terms I understood: searching the web for links to information and informational sources, composing papers, building tables, etc. But once I realized my terms of “proper use” were based on the limitations of the library computers of my generation: a frantic, blinking rectangle; crude, blocky text in white or green; clicks, whirs, and beeps heralding the dawn of the Information Age.

I was looking forward to the New York Comic Con (NYCC) panel on National Gaming Day. And was disappointed when I missed it. I think even in the age of “blackening in the Bubble” and the determination of a “good teacher” is how well he or she teaches to the test, it is still easy to argue successfully for the inclusion of games and play in the classroom. Playing games in the classroom have a positive, quantifiable effects on learning and student achievement. In 2007, Robert S. Siegler and Geetha B. Ramani published a study on the benefits board games had on math learning among Pre-K and elementary school students.

“Young people learn a great deal about the world through play, and games are one source of play,” said Mr. Siegler, a professor of cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And when it comes to learning math, he added, “the games that build understanding of numerical magnitudes are crucial.”

In 2011, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop hosted a National STEM Video Game Challenge. Students in grades 5 – 8 competed to develop educational video games with special emphasis on STEM learning.

As far back as 1948 (when the term “edutainment” was coined), educators were aware of the benefits of pop culture media like TV and games on student engagement and achievement. Students may not place value in a traditional algebra lesson. However, when that lesson is presented as a part of a strategy for winning a game, its value increases.

I think teachers agree that games are an effective way to introduce students to and maintain their interest in traditionally unattractive lessons in math and English. I also think where teachers will disagree is on the length and depth of play. Where does the application of academic skills meet the testing? How is the academic skill building isolated and brought out so students can identify the skills practice with the appropriate bubble on standardized tests?

National Gaming Day @ your library is an initiative of the American Library Association to reconnect communities through their libraries around the educational, recreational, and social value of all types of games.

Currently, National Gaming Day is a community building initiative aimed at presenting your local library as a hub of community social activity and information. I believe a “National School Gaming Day” would be a great opportunity to engage students to skills practice through gaming and to help them connect those skills to strategies for succeeding on standardized tests.

National Gaming Day is November 12. Check their website to see if your local library is participating.

Tchotchkes of Progress

It’s at 2:46 where the message hits home.

One day I will find the time and the means to attend a TED or TEDx conference. I relish the exposure to insightful commentary and interesting ideas — especially about education.

Maybe it’s because I’m a parent of two school age kids now and maybe it’s because I see their mother assert the same pressures on them that eventually turned me off to school  and maybe it’s because I was brought up in a culture that respects standardized testing as a viable measure of intelligence and success, that I am so determined to give my children the education I was denied.

One of the first things they teach you at “teaching school” is that learning is a process. What they don’t emphasize enough is the time required for the effects of that process to materialize. What’s also neglected sometimes are the strategies for satiating a product-based society with little tokens – tchotchkes – that show learning is occurring and progress is being made.

My child’s first grade teacher did a really smart thing. Each month since September she had the children in her class draw self portraits. By January, her students were writing captions to describe the pictures they had drawn or about an accomplishment they were proud of.

In my eldest child’s classroom they do “weekend news” – short journal entries about what they did over the weekend. Growth was evident despite the length of a piece (Some weekends are just better than others). But growth wasn’t the only thing these weekend news reports tracked. My eldest’s teachers were also able to diagnosis slippage in performance and address it.

Dr. Tae assesses his progress by videotaping and saving recordings of his various attempts to successfully complete a particular skateboarding trick. In his TEDx presentation at Eastside Prep, there is a still shot of him skateboarding in front of an elementary school.

He observes:

There’s a touch of irony in this image which is if you go back to October 31, 1991 [when the picture was taken], whatever conditions I had at the time in skateboarding allowed me to work without much progress for years on something and I wasn’t even sure if I ever was going to get it. The funny thing is I don’t think we do the same thing inside that building in the background [the elementary school]. It’s strange to me…

He makes a comment on the differences between the learning experience in skateboarding and the learning experience in schools. About three and a half minutes into his presentation he shows a video of his attempts to learn a new skateboarding trick. It is a series of failures. Though there are moments when he almost gets it, the attempt immediately after fails (meaning he takes a step backwards in his progress). In the end, however, he gets the trick and has gone on to demonstrate mastery through successfully completing more complex tricks.

“Failure is Normal,” he states. And it makes sense. How often have you attempted something for the first time and got it right? Or maybe you got it right the first time, but how did it go the second time? The third?

So why do we stigmatize our failing students? Sometimes it feels like a competition to see who’s better at emotionally scarring our students when they fail – parents, teachers, principals, or the general public?

When we read about poor test scores or even when our own children perform below our expectations, we immediately condemn and assign blame. It’s hysteria! It’s thoughtless! And damaging! It serves no educational purpose. What it does do is satiate our own egotistical needs and ambitions. 

We need to tell our students it is OK to fail. We need to tell our students they can try again and again and again until they’ve gotten it. Dr. Tae states it succinctly:  “No one knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.”

He also says: “Work your ass off until you figure it out.”

This is where we, in our hysteria, do the most damage. In our demoralization of our failing students, we inadvertently devalue what they are learning. They “work their ass off until they figure it out” because they see value in what they learning. Once that is taken away, so is their desire to succeed at it.

Dr. Tae’s presentation at Eastside Prep is my second favorite Dr. Tae video. His ability to make common sense connections between a hobby he is passionate about and the learning process is an engaging reminder of what trained educators sometimes forget when they get too tangled in the politics and the catchwords of education.