What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy Book Report

To be quite honest with you all, I am not sure where to begin. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee thoroughly trumped my expectations. I am not exactly sure what I thought I was going to get out of the book beside a general argument for why video games aren’t a waste of time (and I doubted highly that I would even get that). But, I got so much more out of it. I learned a great deal and have managed to “transfer” all my new knowledge to multiple classes and arguments. This book really solidified ideas of why video games are so much more effective for children to learn than the structured “skill-and-drill” means of education in schools today.

            I especially liked how James Paul Gee talked about learning in science classrooms. I realize that he was applying this knowledge to all different kinds of classroom learning, but his examples of the science classroom really struck a soft spot for me because science was never something that I “got”; science was always and still is a great struggle of mine. A lot of the time I felt like the “bad” student because I was never good at spitting out facts about things that seemed so abstract and so irrelevant to my life—two key components, Gee argues, that should not be missing in a learning environment. I never found solid “situated meanings” for words with “images, actions, experiences or dialogue in the real world.” Gee says, “This is way so many school children, even the ones who are good at school can pass tests bust still cannot apply their knowledge to real problem solving.” (pg. 105) He says, “It’s all ‘just words,’ words that the good students can repeat on tests and the ‘bad’ one’s can’t. (Pg. 97).

I really liked Gee’s notion that a “one-size fits all” does not apply to learning. He says, “A good video game adapts to the level of the player, rewards different players differently (but rewards them all) and often stays at the edge of the player’s regime of competence.” (Pg. 122). I liked this because, often times, there are usually a handful of kids (usually the ones who keep quiet) who learn a little slower than the rest. That doesn’t mean that they are dumb or can’t learn the material, it means that they just need a little extra explanation for what is going on. When material is sped through at a pace that “normal” kids learn, the kids who learn a bit slower are going to be left in the dust and incapable of learning future problems, as problems tend to build on prior learned knowledge. Rather than penalizing students who cannot keep up, I feel as though the instructor should work toward a more positive approach in the classroom, rather than the reprimanding, red-pen means that is often used. Gee argues that that is one of the key elements as to why video games are such powerful means of teaching/learning. He says, “A good video game adapts to the level of the player, rewards different players differently (but rewards them all) and often stays at the edge of the player’s regime of competence.” (Pg. 122). It does a student more harm than good when an instructor reprimands the student for a bad grade. There is nothing like discouragement to get a kid not to try. Gee says, “In video games, losing isn’t losing, and the point is not winning easy and judging yourself a failure. In video games, hard is not bad and easy is not good.” (Pg. 175).

Another element of the book that had me quite interested was how video games allow the player to become the scientist by “encourage learning, hypothesize testing, risk taking persistence past failure, and seeing ‘mistakes’ as new opportunities for progress and learning.” (Pg. 37). Gee talks about how video games lower the consequences of failure, ultimately encouraging the player to “take risks, explore, and try new things.” So, instead of tossing a ton of irrelevant facts and intangible ideas at kids, the way to encourage learning for kids is to A) make the material relevant to their lives and B) let them discover answers for themselves. Of course, it would be pointless to allow children to run around rampant in a classroom and have them try to discover answers unguided (because that would be completely unproductive and waste everyone’s time), but with a guided hand. Gee argues that children are more capable of learning and retaining information if they discover answers on their own.

With that said, I was thrilled to learn about Brown and Campione’s Jigsaw Method of teaching/learning. As soon as I read about this method I instantly thought back to those science classes in middle school and high school and thought about how this method would have helped me so much. Basically, in the jigsaw method, the class is split into small groups where these groups study very in depth about their given topic, and once these small groups have mastered their topic, they disperse into different groups with other kids who have also mastered their topic. Within this module, these kids are able to teach each other the knowledge that they mastered. My mind was blown when I read about this. I couldn’t believe I had never before heard of or seen something that seemed so simple and so effective enacted in a classroom before. And as I read on, Gee talked about why they don’t use this method anymore, and it basically boils down to the economy and money. He said that it was used initially because it was the model in Japanese schools in the 1980’s when the Japanese’s economy was doing really well. However, when the Japanese economy fell and the American economy rose, they quite implementing this method because “the new global high-tech economy called for lots of service workers in addition to lots of knowledge workers.” (Pg. 207). Knowledge workers, Gee says, are the ones with the more specialist and technical knowledge, and the service workers are one who do the manual and industrial work. Which makes me really sad.

            I’ll end this long post with one of my favorite quotes from the book: “The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning only what is simple and easy.” (Pg. 3). Gee mentioned in the end of the book that his purpose for writing this book was not to convince school systems to use video games as their lesson plans, but rather, his purpose in writing this was to display his observations of video games and how, in his opinion, are “well supported by research in the learning sciences.” (Pg. 218).  How we will find the answer to making “hard things” appear more appealing, I do not know. But I think that video games provide an answer that sets us on the right path for the future of learning.