Source: Video Games in School
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“Ali Carr-Chellman spells out three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.”
The 3 Reasons boys are tuning out:
Zero Tolerance – school culture is out of since with boy culture because schools restrict anything that can be perceived to be violent like: toy guns, pen knives, rough housing, writing games, wars, fighting or anything else that hints at violence.
Fewer Male Teachers – 93% of elementary school teachers are female which means our young boys are not getting enough positive male influence in their school days.
Kindergarten is the Old Second Grade – boys mature slower than girls and the compressed curriculum and demands that young boys are expected to sit down, be quite, follow the instructions and do what you are told when they are not ready to do so.
Ali Carr-Chellman suggests we need to meet boys where they are at and accept them for who they are. We can specifically do this by;
Designing Better Games – Educational games are fancy flash cards and don’t the depth and rich narrative or popular games.
Talk to teachers, parents, school boards members and politicians – to find ways to change the culture to decompress the curriculum and make the learning space more acceptable of boys.
Find more money for game design – it cost money to create good games
Change teachers attitudes – need to help teacher become more open and accepting of boy culture in their classrooms.
The goal is to have the boys leaving elementary school thinking they are smart. Unfortunately, most boys are not currently feeling this way.
The protein causing AIDS in rhesus monkeys that hadn’t been solved for 15 years was finally solved by Foldit players and confirmed by x-ray crystallography. Foldit is a multiplayer online game that challenges players from across the world to solve difficult protein-structure prediction problems.
In the Nature Structural & Molecular Biology article Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players Firas Khatib, Frank DiMaio, et al, were able to substantiate the claim that:
Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.
The Nature report details how Foldit player were able to solve a real-world modeling problem that lead to the solution of a long-standing protein crystal structure problem that may lead to a cure of AIDS. The concluding sentence of this article reminds us that:
These results indicate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.
Khatib, F., DiMaio, F., Cooper, S., Kazmierczyk, M., Gilski, M., Krzywda, S., Zabranska, H., et al. (2011). Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nat Struct Mol Biol, advance online publication. doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119
