The Doubloon

     Unlike most of the technology we have dealt with in this class for the past couple of weeks (wikis, twitter, hootsuite, blogs, etc.), I have a familiarity with video games. I have played many sports games as well as games like Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and others. However, I have never played World of Warcraft or other games mentioned in these articles. Therefore, I'm not sure my comments on Video Games are relevant because the gaming industry has greatly changed in the last 22 years. When I was a kid, duck hunt was the game. The graphics were terrible, the ducks predictable, and the gun was orange and grey. Now, some of these first person shooters are so realistic when I see a bullet coming to the screen I duck for cover!
     Maybe even more important than this change over time in games is the reaction of different players to games. For me, GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 was the greatest game ever, but some players disagree. I believed it was the greatest game ever because of the problem solving, style of shooting, and access to Oddjob in multiple player mode. Other people from my generation argue for other guys because of their enhanced graphics, player accessibility, or story plot. What I think we begin to see here is the different personalities of people of different interests. Like literature, different people connect with different games. This seems redundant, but, if we look at the popularity of video games compared to the popularity of school, there is a great divide between which is more popular (I'll let you guess). Why is this? I speculate this is because video game designers research their consumers, have their consumers test their games, and adequately serve their intended audience. Education doesn't.
     That is a strong claim to make about education, but when we look at the numbers is hard to deny? An estimate 22% of students from public schools need remedial courses when they arrive on college campuses, and another 13% of students need remedial courses (http://www3.northern.edu/rc/pages/Reading_Clinic/highschool_graduation.pdf). If students are able to do the remedial work and succeed in college than clearly we are not talking about student's cognitive abilities. Instead, as teachers we need to place the focus on ourselves: how do we interest students in their education like video games interest them in a virtual world? For one, I think we need to develop lessons aimed at individual lessons. No class should be wasted as a whole, and no single student should feel the time in their classroom is wasted. Obviously this puts enormous pressure on teachers to satisfy the needs of 25 or more students in a given class, but, as workers for the public good, should that really concern us?
     Like a Spanish Doubloon, education should mean something different to everyone else. For some, it may the bridge to better economic status. For others, it may be the acquisition of skills to perform their life's dream. Whatever the reason, students come to school, and, if as teachers we can provide exiciting, individualized lessons, our students may see an exponential growth paralleled to the problem solving growth offered by video games. Hey, maybe the Pequod won't sink. Maybe we could catch the white whale?