Classes should be designed to be more like video games. Why not?
Children are being introduced to the world of videogames at an earlier age than ever. Tablets now offer games designed to educate even infants. Adults are now a large population of the world’s gamers as well. Everybody loves games. Everywhere you go these days, you can see that every young person’s gaze is locked on a screen, weather they’re sitting at a coffee shop, waiting for a movie to start, on a dinner date, or even walking across the street. If they’re not texting or social networking, they’re likely playing some sort of videogame. Surely every teacher has at some point had to interrupt class to instruct a student to put their phone away and pay attention. What if the classroom has a fighting chance of winning the battle for every game-distracted student’s attention?
One instructor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Zek Valkyrie, has already been introducing gamification to his classes, and is leading training to hopefully spread this learning strategy through the school.
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Psychologists understand and promote the importance of play to develop creativity and keep the mind engaged while learning. Educational games are being created for every platform and in every subject. The current most widely used class format of a period of reading and absorbing lectures is outdated. Our system has long been overdue for an overhaul. Not only is a videogame style more interesting, but we can tap into technological tools to take advantage of the way the human brain learns. For example, a game can do a good job of adjusting the frequency with which new information appears, optimizing the encoding of that