Game consoles remain classroom rarity

When David Brantley's first-grade students walked into their classroom this month, many felt right at home. Their teacher is a rare one who believes video games feed young minds, not rot them away. So these Indiana kids will throw virtual bowling balls down alleys on a projector screen and tally scores for math lessons.

"The tradition is to despise games as a brain-drain type of thing," Brantley says. He believes otherwise and that's why he brought a Wii game system into Cumberland Elementary in West Lafayette to supplement his teaching. He and some other teachers are discovering that game devices with Internet connections are both an inexpensive route to the Web and a priceless approach to engaging their students.

The wildly popular Wii game system and others, including the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP handheld systems, are welcome in a very few schools — less than 1 percent in this country, estimates Marc Prensky, the author of "Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning." He’s also the founder of Games2Train, whose mission is to combine the enjoyment of game playing with serious learning "to make the boring fun."

"Our teachers were taught, and still are taught, to lecture to cover the material," says Prensky. "Instead of mutual respect, teachers dis the kids, saying games contribute to a short attention span, that they're a waste of time. That's not true.''

Prensky says the kids know it's not true. They know how hard they concentrate, how many decisions they have to make to get through a game.

"Their attitude toward teachers is 'Why should I learn from you?' It's an atmosphere of mutual disrespect."

He sees it as a struggle between those he calls "digital natives," to whom the technology is second nature, and "digital immigrants," the teachers and parents who are skeptical of "toys" in the classroom and reluctant to abandon the traditional approach to teaching.

That's changing in some schools. Ben Daley, chief academic officer at San Diego's High Tech High, which is actually three high schools, two middle schools and one elementary school, says his teachers have the attitude that learning, especially via technology, is a shared experience.

"This is a very clear example of kids knowing more than teachers," he says. The idea that a child is "an empty vessel that needs to be filled" is a philosophy that doesn't work in the classrooms of the nationally recognized program.

The philosophy at High Tech High schools is that teachers and students can learn from each other. Daley says there are no game systems in use there yet, but he's open to exploring the idea.

Medium is not the message
Educational psychologist Jane M. Healy, author of "Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect our Children's Minds and What We Can Do About It," urges educators to do so carefully.

"The main question is whether the activity, whatever it is, is educationally valid and contributes significantly to whatever is being studied," she says.

"The point is not whether kids are 'playing' with learning, or what medium they are playing in — a ball field or a Wii setup or a physics lab or art studio — but rather why they are doing it."

She adds: "Just because it is electronic does not make it any better, and it may turn out not to be as valuable."

Daley agrees.

"Technology is a tool," he says. "We're not trying to get kids to consume more technology. We're trying to get them producing new technology and, with technology, producing new knowledge."

He's not optimistic that other schools will rush to embrace games.

"Education has been remarkably resistant to change for 100 years," he says. But he has noticed, mostly in the last decade, that when it comes to technology in the classroom, "it's now more of 'This is a good idea, how do we do it?' instead of 'Why would we do it?' "

That's the attitude among the teachers in one middle school in Japan who took the leap in a pilot program and allowed students learning English to do some of their work last year on Nintendo DS handhelds.

Teachers observed the students more easily mastering English vocabulary, writing and speaking skills.

In Birmingham England, the students at Holyhead Secondary School used the Sony PSP, courtesy of Sony, to study French, geography and history — working in groups or, when necessary, refining individual skills.