Christine Quong's List: Games Based Learning

• Always begin with playing the game. Ask other teachers, staff, parents, or friends to play together with you. We strongly suggest including the administrators whenever possible. Having their support and understanding is extremely useful.
• Make sure to contact the game developers’ customer support with any type of implementation question as well. Game designers love talking about games! Especially about their own games, since they continuously iterating their products and your feedback is really what drives their design decisions.

• Games, however, can supplement time-tested pedagogical practices with new technological solutions to long-term problems. We can have the best of both the new and the old.

• The recent APA (American Psychological Association) article entitled, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games” by authors Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels surveyed the landscape of video games. They identified four types of positive impact that video games have on the kids who play them: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social.

   
• Standardized tests measure only quantifiable outcomes. Educators, however, are also responsible for the non-quantifiable well-being of our students.
• The most convincing neurological research shows that video games contribute to neural plasticity because games provide “a multitude of complex motor and cognitive demands.” In this study, players played platformers such as Super Mario Brothers for at least 30 minutes a day for 2 months. They showed “significant gray matter (GM) increase in right hippocampal formation (HC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and bilateral cerebellum.” These are the areas of the brain “crucial for spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory and motor performance.”

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