What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition PDF

Rating: (21 reviews) Author: James Paul Gee ISBN : 9781403984531 New from $13.86 Format: PDF

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Review

"Gee astutely points out that for video game makers, unlike schools, failing to engage children is not an option."--Terrence Hackett, TheChicago Tribune
"These games succeed because, according to Gee, they gradually present information that is actually needed to perform deeds."--Norman A. Lockman, USA Today

"James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy has been a transformative work. Gee might be described as the Johnny Appleseed of the serious games movement, planting seeds that are springing new growth everywhere we look. More than anyone else, he has forced educators, parents, policy makers, journalists, and foundations to question their assumptions and transform their practices. Gee combines the best contemporary scholarship in the learning scientists with a gamer's understanding of what is engaging about this emerging medium."--Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

About the Author

James Paul Gee has been featured in a variety of publications from Redbook, Child, Teacher, and USA Today to Education Week, The Chicago Tribune, and more. He is Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as "a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field" he has become a major expert in game studies today.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition (December 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403984530
• ISBN-13: 978-1403984531
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 6.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition PDF

In this book I was enlightened to the in-depth world of video gaming. The only video games I remember playing back the early 1980s was Asteroids, so I had no idea about the complexity of the today's "good games" and the amount of cognitive strategy that goes on within the player's mind. In each chapter Gee goes into specific detail explaining selected game scenarios which correspond to a selected set of his 36 Learning Principles. He states that these learning principles, which are evident in video games, can be transposed to classroom learning. He is critical of the current state of the classroom which, in his opinion, still maintains a lackluster skill-and-drill approach to learning which is a very different strategy presented in video games. The principles Gee has developed while observing- and playing- video games is, as he says, " a plea to build better schools on on better principles of learning."

He makes excellent points that I, and I am sure others, will relate to. Learning through hands-on experience can be so much more rewarding and long lasting, and the scenarios which video games players find themselves working within, activate situated cognition and social learning. In other words, Gee shows us how video games help players learn how to pick up on patterns, learn through the situations they engage within, and operate within a social network where they can synthesize their skills and strategies as a main character in the drama of the game. What I have learned from reading this book is how transformative video game learning can be as compared to passive or outside experience of, for example, listening to a teacher lecture, because players can actually become one of the characters and therefore activate higher levels of learning.