Gamification

27 February 2012

Clean, clean, clean. I feel like all we did today was clean. That's not entirely true though. After we had most of the cleaning out of the way we practiced skip counting by 3's. Ra has 3-30 down pretty well but seems reluctant to want to learn the rest up to 99. Eldon is hardly interested at all. I need to figure out funner ways to teach them. I have been using a video from Have Fun Teaching for the skip counting but it counts too fast and the kids loose interest because they can't keep up. We will keep working on it. I broke out in bouts of counting by threes throughout the day to try and spark the interest in it again, but each time the kids asked me to stop ofter counting to 30 for the third time.

After our initial skip counting session we watched some science videos on YouTube. They were interesting enough to keep the kids attention but because they were kind of random subjects I'm not sure it really did any good. They much prefer the hands-on science activities like we did with electricity the other day.

After the science videos we bundled up and went for a walk around the neighborhood. I reviewed with Ra that house numbers on one side of the street are even and on the other side they are odd. We looked at several house numbers along our way to see if the right side was even or odd and so on. We also had fun naming the colors of things we saw on our way in German. They are getting pretty good with their colors!

After our walk we had some hot chocolate to warm up and within the hour the hubby was home and we left to take care of some errands. While we were out our fan belt on our vehicle shredded and we had it towed in to the shop and obtained a rental car for a day or so until it is fixed. The kids where practically beside themselves with excitement at watching the tow truck load the vehicle and then being able to ride in the tow truck to get our rental. They thought nothing better could have happened to them today.

By the time we got home the kids had all fallen asleep in the car so no story time again tonight, though they did spend quite a bit of time listening to the audio version of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

After the kids were in bed I found this fun, new background for my blog for St Patrick's Day coming up then browsed around on Pinterest. I found a video about "gamification" and it's affects on kids and adults alike. It was very intriguing and though I understand what he is saying, I don't think I agree with it completely.

I don't doubt that we can learn immense amounts through video games, however, having been a gamer for nearly ten years I have experienced the effects that the studies can't possibly test. I lost myself in the games. I wanted to be there more than in my real life. The dopamine affects can be just as hazardous to our well being as any other dopamine based addiction. Games can not possibly replace the one-on-one time with your kids.

They may learn skills and information from games, but they can not learn about tact, right and wrong, love, honor, etc. Those things are taught in the home, by the parents. And the acquisition of these character traits is most important to me. I do believe my kids need to be taught as much as they can learn, but not at the expense of their moral character.