Digital Games

The age of technology is affecting the way teachers and administrators view education, however, there is a hesitation in the amount of funding that is being allocated to provide the tools and technology for classrooms throughout the United States. Digital games are an excellent tool for literacy development to acquire real life skills. To observe the benefits of video games I asked my 15-year-old son to play Sims 2 with me and recorded the outcome.

Tonight is the first night that I am going to try and play a video game with my son. I have not played video games in over 20 years. Nevertheless, I overcame my apprehension and decided that I will sit down for 30 minutes to see how I could actually implement video games as a learning tool in the age of technology since taking this course. The game actually turned into 1 hour and 45 minutes. First, my son had to explain the concept of the game, which was to create a family. Then he had to explain how to use the controller and I kept forgetting the instructions. I kept mixing up the arrow keys. Then there was the actually creation of my avatar. I had to get a job, sleep, eat, cook, shower, have a form of recreation and make friends. After my son helped me through the basic concept and ideas, I had enough for the evening and stopped playing. He said that I was thinking too much about the game and I was missing the idea. I just kept thinking that this was too complicated and there were too many screens to read, but my son was able to navigate without any difficulty, which confirmed the importance of technology in the classroom.

What I learned from this interaction was that the game provided real life application skills, which is what students need in order to understand the realities of what life will resemble once students graduate from high school or complete college. Additionally, I learned that when playing video games there is an extensive amount of reading and, as a teacher there could be a writing assessment to determine how much the student has learned from reading the screen. My final assessment from playing Sims 2 is that older teachers much embrace technology as a tool for teaching students who may otherwise become disengaged in their learning and embrace technology.