Video Games Effects On Education

Video games have primarily been viewed as an outlet for entertainment; in fact, many educators believe the entertaining powers of video games can be used as an overlap to improve American educational systems. In part, due to recent technological advances, the entertaining power of video games has expanded to new heights and opportunities for any user to play video games any place in the world. Recently, American educators have struggled with generating more entertainment and interest within K-12 education resulting in students becoming unmotivated and disinterested in schools, leading to little or no increase in overall educational efficiency. Nelson Fabian, former Executive director of the National Environmental Health Association, …show more content…
He notes that students “play on average about 10,000 hours of video games by the time they are graduating high school,” bringing up an opportunity for educators to blend the entertainment of video games into K-12 curriculum (Starkey). As a result, multiple research projects, including projects from Massachusetts Institution of Technology and the University of Carolina, have been developed to discover how video game usage can further academic achievement. The projects concluded that educational video games in the classroom increase academic understanding and overall student interest in educational systems. In order for the United States to keep pace with other educational systems worldwide, American K-12 schools need to revolutionize their academic curriculum including incorporating educational video games into K-12 …show more content…
As a result, Judy Perry and Eric Klopfer, head researchers of the Teacher Education Program at Massachusetts Institution of Technology, embarked on an academic research project examining the effects educational video games have on high school students. The researchers noted a 2012 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonpartisan fact tank examining issues pertaining to American attitudes and trends, stating thirty-one percent of American teenagers own smartphones, a mobile device with the technological capacity to process high functioning mobile video games. The researchers noticed the growing trend of mobile devices including their associated mobile games and began to explore the idea of incorporating these mobile attributes into increasing educational understanding in high school students. To examine this possible correlation, Perry and Klopfer introduced the mobile video game series, UbiqBio, a series of four games, see figure 2, designed to educate students on the basics of Biology. The objective of the UbiqBio games revolved around students incorporating their knowledge on Biology to manage different biological situations and environments. A major