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Games Make the World a Better Place

I am one of those people that are not real sure about bringing the gaming aspect into the classroom, so at the beginning of Jane McGonigal's TED Talk, I doubted her theory.  As I watched it, it made more and more sense, and I began to agree with her.  My students love, love, love to play video games every waking hour that they are home, so why not incorporate gaming into our lessons at school?!  I believe if we could turn some of lessons and tests into games the results would be mind blowing!  One of the previous quests, the Socrative app, could help bring this idea to reality. Our students use gaming to escape the "real-world," but if we as educators could incorporate gaming into our classrooms, they wouldn't have to escape the real world.  Our students would not only be doing what they love, but they would be learning at the same time. 

McGonigal discussed how gaming can help gamers feel like they are doing something that matters. When people are playing games, they are willing to collaborate with one another and help one another.  They believe that they can achieve more in the online world than they can in reality.  Games also give constant and consistent feedback that people love to have.  Often in the classroom, we do not give our students the "little wins" that they achieve because of class size and/or time, whereas gaming does.  This helps build self-confidence.

In the Ted Talk, McGonigal also discussed four things that games do to make us "virtuosos":  urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity, and epic meaning.  These four things not only make a person a successful individual in the gaming world, but also the "real-world."  According to McGonigal, when a student has urgent optimism, they have a desire to act immediately with the belief there is hope for success; social fabric, meaning people build relationships as they build trust (gaming does this), blissful productivity; people are happier when they are working hard playing a game, and last epic meaning; an example of this would be Wikipedia, where it is a collection of information that grows over time.  

After watching McGonigal's TED Talk, I agree that we should incorporate gaming into our classroom.  Students feel successful when they complete a level on a game, so why not include gaming in the classroom and give them that satisfaction each day?!  

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