Gabe Zichermann gave a TED Talk about how games make kids smarter, as a millennial myself it didn’t entirely shock me. Gabe himself spent a lot of time playing video games growing up and he did what every parent would wish could come out of playing video games, he made a career out of it. He has a job working with video games, educating, has two books, teaches a summit, and has an organization! I think that’s really cool because you see people who love video games and assume it’s just a hobby but it’s cool to see people who have such a passion for it and pursue it. In the talk I learned that parents don’t believe when their kids are diagnosed with ADD because they see how concentrated they can be when they play video games but it turns out that is because the real world isn’t simulating enough for them and they find the simulation they need in video games. Games like WoW teach the skills of multitasking that are making kids smarter. Fluid intelligence is increasing in our generation. Fluid intelligence has five characteristics that relate entirely to the concept of video games: seek novelty, challenge yourself, think creatively, do things the hard way, and network. Video games cater to those five characteristics making it so that they’re teaching kids while kids play them!! Video games, like everything else, are continuously evolving and as that happens, the people who play them keep learning and getting smarter. While some of these points seem like opinions, something that I learned that was cool is that games were created for pleasure and when you over come challenges in games, dopamine is released which makes you want to keep playing and solving more challenges in your game. A teacher made his 3rd grade class completely video game/technology based for 18 weeks to teach and in those 18 weeks, his class went up one whole reading grade level and when asking the kids, they all agreed learning was fun! Video games are integrated in everything and large corporations use gamification, the process of using games to engage people. If you look closely at companies in your everyday life, you’ll see they incorporate games in what they do to appeal to you. My favorite thing that Gabe said is his advice to parents to play the games with their kids rather than to fight them on it. Parents usually have this attitude towards video games that we’re just rotting our brains but if they saw themselves why we like it, maybe they wouldn’t be so annoying about it. In relation to the Zucker Ed gaming reading, it talks about Developers creating education-based games which is literally just gamification. The games incorporate different education-based skills and these developers hope to make this way of teaching more popular.
