Learning by Playing

September 23


After reading this article in the NY Times that was published Sept. 15, 2010, I have begun to form some hypotheses about video games and learning:

Corbett, S. "Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19video-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The highlights in the article for me were the following two statements:

"One way to ['make school more relevant and engaging'] would be to stop looking so critically at the way children use media and to start exploring how that energy might best be harnessed to help drive them academically" (4).

"Salen and Torres are at the forefront of a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists who believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well fun" (2).

Salen and Torres are the two people who have started a school for 6th and 7th graders (which they hope to expand to the high school years) which has incorporated games into its everyday learning environment. They have incorporated the 'radical' idea of having students creating, designing, and playing video games into the more traditional sense of an educational environment. This idea is an alternative one towards video games as opposed to the other notions I have encountered that have a negative opinion of games. This negative opinion seems to separate learning and video games as two separate ideas all together. Video games, in the opposing viewpoint, are a distraction from learning, which is also a viable case, as the article brings up research "showing that the more time children spend playing video games, the less time they spend on homework" (4).

With these two viewpoints in mind, my question is whether or not public libraries should be providing video games to their users? In particular should the public library I work in be thinking about providing video games for users? Should games be offered? What about the consoles? What about events sponsored by the library involving video games? Who is the user/market?