Beyond Nintendo: Design and Assessment of Educational Video Games for First and Second Grade Students Summarized by Daniel Quintana EME 2040 – Fall 2008

Introduction Playing games helps children practice basic cognitive operations such as: Conservation, Classification, and Reversibility Games are actually great cognitive learning tools for children since games are natural Resistance against video games from teachers is high due to: –Lack of knowledge, believing it is only entertaining, and insufficient development for educational gaming

Introduction (Continued) Gaming must be relevant and interesting towards the students Computer games as instructional tools motivate, strengthen, and support the student in school Then there are negative reactions: –Aggression, gender bias, and immersion effect

Introduction (Continued) The student is able to enter a “world of his own” and learn information The game itself will also bring about incidental and intentional learning for the student

Purpose of the Study Using students to use a portable video game system very similar to the Nintendo Gameboy to study the effects of learning Children’s focus was on playing rather then learning to make learning incidental

Purpose of Study (Continued) A picture of the portable video game system used:

Purpose of Study (continued) The video games covered the first and second grade school curriculum for reading and mathematics Improve the quality of education in schools with the lowest national academic achievement

Methods The sample was made up of 1274 students attending first and second grade, their 30 school teachers and directors of six schools in Santiago de Chile The games used were: –Magalu, Hermes, Tiki-Tiki, Roli, and Hangman

Methods (Continued) A picture of a game that was used during the study called Magalu:

Methods (Continued) Testing the students on reading and mathematics was used to determine if gaming was working The data showed that the gaming helped in the students learning and motivation Teachers were also happy about the gaming and wanted longer game play

Methods (Continued) A graph displaying the what students prefered to do:

Findings Students performed better and were more motivated when using the video games In the classroom, the students actually paid more attention with the experimental tool

Findings After experiment, teachers actually implemented similar games with the stories from the video games due to the success Overall, the video games brought a higher understanding to the subject matter for students

Discussion of Findings To the knowledge there have been no other findings with video games in schools There was a high success with motivation and technological transfer There was higher tendency to pay attention with video game then without it

Discussion of Findings (Continued) Within a short time, the teachers began to implement the video games into the classrooms

Limitation of the Study They did not use adults such as college students to see what effect would occur They only used students in schools from Chile that were low in achievement level

Suggestion for Further Research I would suggest using a more advanced gaming system Bring out more styles of games that would interest a large majority of students Use this experiment on students in the United States

Conclusion Overall, the use of video games as an educational tool in schools are more positive then negative Teacher even changed their thoughts on video games and began using them as tools for students

Citation Ricardo Rosas, Miguel Nussbaum, Patricio Cumsille, Vladimir Marianov, Mónica Correa, Patricia Flores, Valeska Grau, Francisca Lagos, Ximena López, Verónica López, Patricio Rodriguez and Marcela Salinas Beyond Nintendo: design and assessment of educational video games for first and second grade students. Science Direct, Volume 40 (Issue 1), pp

What Questions Do You Have? ?