Tag: video games

Week 8 response - "a reason to reason"

The Steinkuehler and Duncan reading touches on something important that I think has less to do with science education than with the motivation and purpose behind reasoning and learning. Their argument is that games, and particularly MMORPGs like World of Warcraft,  might be excellent settings to foster scientific thinking. They note that in the WoW online forums,… Read more Week 8 response - "a reason to reason"

Week 7 - Thu Ngo

The Keith Devlin video gave me a totally new perspective on math and symbols. The first is that I’ve always seen math as what Devlin describes as “the representation of math”. The second is that the symbols that we use to use represent math is artificial. This second realization was huge for me. Mathematical symbols… Read more Week 7 - Thu Ngo

Week 7 Reading

As a student who loved math growing up, but gradually lost interest over time, I often wonder what changed. I found Keith Devlin’s talk on “Using Video Games to Break the Symbol Barrier” very interesting.  Devlin argues that one explanation might be found in the way math is represented, particularly in its symbolic form. He proposes… Read more Week 7 Reading

Week 7: Math

The Zhang article made me wonder how students’ interactions with online math games have changed in the age of YouTube. From Ashley’s talk last week, we learned that kids are no longer using Google to search for content. In the article, from November 2012-October 2013, 6% of traffic to coolmath-games came from social media sites including… Read more Week 7: Math

Week 5 Discussion

I’m a little late on my week 5 post, but I wanted to respond to the portion of the Granic article where growth mindset is referenced. I pasted the portion below my comment. 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… Read more Week 5 Discussion

Week 5

The reading that was most surprising to me this week was the one by Isabella Granic. I have always viewed playing video games to be an unproductive activity. It was interesting to see video-games can actually develop important skills of cognitive, social, emotional and motivation. The fMri studies that they cited such as the one… Read more Week 5

Week 5 response

I am curious about the “culture of simulation” that Squire mentions on the first page of his paper. I have read plenty of arguments that the introduction of computers has fundamentally changed our culture, but I have never encountered a critique from this approach. I wonder: What are the other significant simulations we encounter each… Read more Week 5 response

Reading Week 5

  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.… Read more Reading Week 5

Week 5

In The Benefits of Playing Video Games by Granic et al., I found the information about cognitive benefits intriguing and especially in the context of gender. Going back to our readings and classroom conversations last week about gendered toys and girls being more open and creative with toys that they viewed as being feminine, this reading left… Read more Week 5

Week 5 Discussion-Gaming and Mental Health

I found the Granic reading to be incredibly interesting. Primarily the idea that video games could be used as a platform to treat mental health problems in youth. This seems like an excellent opportunity area to utilize video games as a platform for social good. Additionally, I believe it would be incredibly interesting to utilize… Read more Week 5 Discussion-Gaming and Mental Health