In general, I think the authors’ connection of all these habits to “scientific thinking,” insofar as they related it to the sort of science taught in science class, is a little too specific. This sort of reasoning is important to hard sciences, but it’s also important to all sorts of academic fields and everyday activities, such as politics, economics, and simple decision-making. What they observed is important to far more than just science.

What I think Steinkuehler and Duncan saw, rather than “scientific” thinking, is simply what people do when they care about a topic or earnestly want to solve a problem. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to make someone learn something, or do something, is to incentivize that something such that they really want to do it or need the target skills. Video games like WoW are mostly played for leisure. Hardly anyone playing is disinterested in the game, I expect, or they’d quit. Anyone interested enough in WoW to post on the forums is probably deeply engaged with the game and wants to improve at it. The reasoning and discovery in the forums is based in this motivation.

I’ve thought about this before in relation to video games, and active leisure activities in general. I’ve played plenty of games and at one point asked myself why I enjoyed them when, essentially, they’re quite similar to work. They’re mostly on screen, they present me with problems, they entail resource management, etc. Why put effort into them when effort in other, more important tasks, tires me out? The answer, I think, is interest. I think people are generally capable of evidenced-based thinking and rational problem solving, and that they’ll gladly do those things when motivated by interest or incentive. This is why kids who hate math class can become obsessed with sports statistics.

When Steinkuehler and Duncan report that many students don’t have requisite scientific inquiry skills (p. 530), I wonder if that study was done only in the context of science class, or if the students were only asked abstract philosophical questions. My hunch is that the students would demonstrate decent reasoning skills if the researchers had observed them doing things that matter to their real lives (there is analogous issue in math reasoning, about the difference in ability that students show between everyday “street math” and academic “school math”).

I agree with the authors that video games (or any other active leisure activity) can be a great setting to view reasoning in action. People will reason about causes and topics they earnestly care about, when they have a “reason to reason.” I would urge caution about their claim that MMOs and other games can boost informal scientific literacy (540). As a video gamer, my hunch is that these games are demonstrating extant reasoning skills by leveraging genuine interest, not by teaching new reasoning skills. These skills may not translate to topics where the interest is not genuine.

Devlin proposes that we utilize video games to do so, which I believe is a great step. However, I wonder…in what way can we utilize technology (in the broader sense) to create a new way of representing math? Symbols seem to be a way that we’ve optimized the representation of math for paper. What new medium in the future will be utilized?

I found Devlin’s video-game representation of math extremely interesting from an accessibility perspective. Previously, I never considered the problem of accessibility from an interest perspective. Could this same model make other subjects (STEM or even reading) more accessible to populations who are not largely represented?

I downloaded the YouTube Kids app and searched for “Cool Math Games.” Unsurprisingly, most of the content that came back were videos of kids playing the games on the Cool Math Games website. This peculiar “watching” phenomenon is so huge, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some way to leverage watching videos of gameplay into a learning experience.

Based on the data from Zhang’s research, the kids that are searching for this content are among the lowest performing. Is there a way to connect them with the help they need? Perhaps a new study (based on the data that YouTube has on its users) could link those interested in coolmath-games with a program to encourage families working together on math problems at home, the very beneficial practice discussed in the Berkowitz et al. article, and could compare the achievement of those with and without this intervention.

I wondered about these different domains of cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social development that they were observing regarding playing video games. It seemed like some variable that could lead in gains in one domain could lead to a deficit in another domain. In regards to where the ideas of entity vs. incremental theories of intelligence or cognitive development were presented, it seemed like they could actually work against a child’s emotional development in the sense that the mindset of constant incremental gains could keep a child always exerting effort to prove themselves. That feeling in and of itself could be emotionally exhaustive. I don’t know much about the growth mindset, so I may have misinterpreted it here.

Excerpt from Granic:

Children who are praised for their traits rather than their efforts (e.g., “Wow, you’re such a smart boy”) develop an entity theory of intelligence, which maintains that intelligence is an innate trait, something that is fixed and cannot be im- proved. In contrast, children who are praised for their effort (e.g., “You worked so hard on that puzzle!”) develop an incremental theory of intelligence; they believe intelligence is malleable, something that can be cultivated through effort and time. We propose that video games are an ideal training ground for acquiring an incremental theory of intelligence because they provide players concrete, immediate feedback regarding specific efforts players have made.

Further, research has shown that the extent to which individuals endorse an incremental versus entity theory of intelligence reliably predicts whether individuals in challenging circumstances will persist or give up, respectively (Dweck & Molden, 2005). Thus, these implicit theories of intelligence have implications for how failure is processed and dealt with. If one believes that intelligence or ability is fixed, failure induces feelings of worthlessness. But if intelligence or ability is presumed to be a mark of effortful engagement, failure signals the need to remain engaged and bolster one’s efforts. In turn, this positive attitude toward failure predicts better academic performance (e.g., Black- well, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007).

1. What are the other significant simulations we encounter each day? And how does Squire define “simulation?”
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages to such a culture? Are we learning things better? Are we out of touch with reality? Both?
3. How deeply has this culture really reached into the larger society? I think there are plenty of people (older people come to mind) who are fairly cut off from many simulation-based forms of culture.

Something related to simulation that wasn’t covered in these readings: Where does the literature currently stand about our ability to separate fantasy from reality, or the impact on children of subjecting them to ever-more-realistic fantasy worlds? Does it matter that so much time is being spent in computer simulations? We read last week about the potential social impacts of robots; couldn’t computer simulations affect our perceptions of the real world in the same way?

Response:

The Williams et. al. reading really got me thinking about the video games I played when I was little. It notes how characters in video games are predominantly male and white. I personally never saw representation as a problem until I got to Stanford. A lot of the problems, I’ve learned, affect children. The reading specifically discusses how underrepresented children can be disenchanted and “may have less interest in technology and its opportunities for class advancement.” This caused me to explore why I, although being a minority, was not affected by this since I am still exploring a career in technology. One of my theories was that I played a lot of video games where the main characters were aliens and creatures that weren’t real. Another theory was that my family had a large influence in my affinity for technology. Overall, this reading made me appreciate the potential of video games more. They’re a fun activity, that if utilized correctly, can be really beneficial for underrepresented children.

Furthermore, this made me think about how video games could be used in other ways to promote social good. I am particularly interested in brainstorming ways that video games could be used to instill positive values in youth. I think we often associate video games with violence but I wonder if there are ways to use video games in order to promote positive values instead.