Educational Games: Moving from Theory to Practice

Games In Education

Perhaps most prominent among educational theorists currently working on the educative possibilities of digital play is Jim Gee, whose approach is most fully available in his 2003 book, What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning (Gee, 2003). Gee cites the great divide between the slow, painful, fragmented, decontextualized, and often unsuccessful, approaches to teaching reading and comprehension which define daily life in far too many schools and classrooms, and the pleasure-filled, engaged, and astonishingly sophisticated reading and comprehension of complex information which characterizes children’s participation with videogames. Gee isn’t asking how we can get games into classrooms, but rather what kinds of pedagogy can we extrapolate from studies of how videogames teach and players learn.