Games in Medical Education
When my daughter was 13, she became very interested in the simulation game Pharaoh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(video_game) . This game challenges you to build a civilization from the Stone Age to the point where pyramids can be constructed. As I watched her spending hours on this game, I began to understand the educational power of games. She was learning about the interconnections between food, religion, and war. She was learning about the importance of planning strategies. Her cities burned to the ground and she started over. Today as she leaves her teenage years and becomes a young adult, I’ve noticed how aware she is of interconnectivity and responsibility of choices.
Marc Prensky http://www.marcprensky.com/ talks about people under age 20 as being Digital Natives. They have grown up during a time when there have always been computers, videogames, email and the Internet available for home use. They grew up with personal digital devices such as Gameboys, music players and cell phones. He describes this group as preferring random access and branching options to the linear stories of their parents. They are comfortable with multitasking and multiple data inputs. As a result, they access information much quicker than their parents.
They complain about school being too slow paced, too obsessed with the written word and not relevant to the real world where they can find most information within a few key strokes and communicate with people anywhere, at any time.
I and most teachers who have ventured into the world of multimedia, computer-based education come to that world as Digital Immigrants. We try to make the technology fit into our old paradigms. We are early adopters of tools like PowerPoint because it allows us to tell our linear stories more effectively. We might even venture into the world of Blogs (LOL) because of our ongoing fascination with the written word.
Exploring the world of Digital Games is one way of seeing the world as the digital native sees it –non linear, multimode, fast paced, problem based. There are four ways to introduce yourself to game technology:
1. play games
2. watch young people at play
3. talk to your students about what they are learning from the games they play
4. take the Educational Support and Development workshop on Active Learning Using Games.
Comments
This comment was send to me personally but I have permission to copy it here.
My son who will turn 23 in Oct. had to have his appendix out when he was about 11. I won't bore you with the details but it burst while we were at City hospital waiting to have him moved over to University hospital. The pediatric surgeon at the time came in to talk with him and explain what he was going to do during the operation, to which my son said, that's OK. I've done it myself. First you are going to…. And proceeded to describe the entire operation correctly. It is a good thing the hospital floor was sanitary because the surgeon's jaw was on it.
You see, my son had being playing with the software computer game, Operation. After probably a hundred tries, he had managed to complete his first appendectomy without losing his patient only a couple of days before. Now I am not suggesting he could have performed the operation, but he had a textbook understanding (in his own 11 year old way) of what was about to happen. It didn't bother him a bit.
Needless to say, he was a very sick boy but came out of it none the worse for wear.
Anyway, I will never be one to downplay what can be learned from computer games.
Posted by: Deirdre Bonnycastle | June 13, 2006 09:43 AM