Reaction for: An adventure game approach to multimedia distance education by Lucas

I don't think that "games," per se, are the best use of multimedia for educational purposes. The fact is, the multimedia in games is designed to be what most educators desire their learning experiences to be: eye catching, grabbing, enthralling, and absorbing. Carswell and Benyon (the authors) seem to have identified this, but they failed to make clear to me why games themselves, as they stand, can be educational to a huge degree. Distance learning inherently alienates people, because they don't feel like they have to pay attention or keep up on their work, etc.

All in all, I don't think that I learned a whole lot from this paper, but it did give me a sudden urge to go fire up DooM and wax some demons...


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Jon:

One question: what exactly constitutes a game? Is a game something that is fun and enjoyable? Well, some people may consider doing calculus problems fun and enjoyable. Is it something that is purely fun, with no education value? Well, I don't think that's it, since different people could learn something from almost anything (even something like Doom teaches hand-eye-coordination, and perhaps strategy.) So, when you say "teach through games" or "teaching through games wouldn't work", what exactly are we talking about?


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