"Are you just going to sit there all day in front of that computer?"
"That game's going to rot your brain."
These are statements heard almost daily across the country. Games and education, for many, seem to be at opposite ends of the motivational spectrum. While some people may spend dozens upon dozens of hours a week in the virtual world of Azeroth playing World of Warcraft, you typically don't hear of too many kids spending the weekend laboring over their algebra homework.
But what if we could do something to combine games with learning. What if we could make solving a huge algebra problem just as fun and rewarding as slaying a dragon in World of Warcraft?
Then maybe, just maybe you might hear one of these statements...
"I know it's dinner time but I'd really like to go over my multiplication tables a few more times."
"Maybe I can finish up this English paper on Sunday. I really like how it's coming together."
"A pop quiz. YES!!!"
I mean, are games and schoolwork all that different? Each has activities that you are required to learn before advancing forward. Both have a scoring system. Both have 'levels' through which you advance through. Both even have small repetitive tasks that you perform again and again and again before you can attempt a larger challenge.
It seems games and schoolwork actually have quite a bit in common.
Lets also examine for a moment what skills are required to create a computer game. There's the obvious computer skills like programming which carries a heavy amount of math and mathematical formulas. Then there's the art, sound effects and music. The writing. The research. In many games there is a fair amount of physics, geometry and trigonometry. And given the right subject matter for the game it may contain, history, government, biology, astronomy or even psychology.
I don't know about you, but that list starts to sound an awful lot like my middle school and high school days.
In fact, I would go as far to say, given the right game theme, you could learn any subject matter found in our modern middle school or high schools.
Why then are these two things, that have so many similarities, so far apart in the minds of kids today? Why isn't schoolwork fun?
Maybe the better question is, "Why can't school be more like a game?"
That's the driving question behind the Academy of Games.
My name is Todd Cowden and I have nearly a decade of experience in the gaming industry as a creative, as a game designer and as a developer. I've helped build games for companies such as Universal Pictures, LEGO, Microsoft, Post Cereal, Lucasfilm and many others. Creating those games was fun, but the thing I'm proudest of in my life is my two kids Katie and Connor.
Katie and Connor are both big gamers. They've both been playing games pretty much since they could touch a mouse. And both have learned a lot from playing games. Katie was reading at at least a 2nd grade level when she started kindergarden, mainly from playing Disney's Toon Town massively multiplayer online game. Connor has a better understanding of World History at age 8, than most high school students I know in no small part because of games like Civilization and other real-time-strategy games.
I can, without any hesitation what-so-ever, say that games have helped them with school. But that still doesn't quite make school 'fun' for them. We still have to get onto Connor when it's time to do homework, especially when a controller is in his hands.
The Academy of Games is a program to make school more like a game. It's handled mainly in the presentation. It rides on top of the existing education system instead of reinventing the entire system.
As of last week I've rolled out version 1.0 of the Academy's program to both Katie and Connor.
This blog will follow their progress through the rest of the school year as we apply the Academy's scoring system, advancement system and reward system to Katie and Connor's schoolwork.
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