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Students entering high school and college today grew up playing digital games. It is part of their culture and they are comfortable with the media. Like it or not, the games have changed the way current students learn. Unfortunately, teachers are often reluctant to change the way they teach or to incorporate games into their pedagogy. This article describes the different game genres available, examines reasons why teachers may or may not want to include digital games as pedagogy, and explains how students who grew up playing games are different from non-gamers. Also addressed are the characteristics of a "good" game and the important role game developers play in the creation of games, which are suitable for educational purposes.
Digital games have been around for over 25 years (Bryce & Rutter, 2003) so today's college students grew up playing digital games as part of their culture. The amount of time children spend playing digital games varies with age and gender. On average, the children between 2 and 18 years of age spend 20-33 minutes a day playing digital games. Boys between the age of 8 and 13 spend the most time playing digital games with an average of 47 minutes per day. In fact, statistics indicate that boys play substantially more than girls in all age groups (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002). Although these reports don't discern what type of digital games kids are playing, chances are good that they are playing some of the more popular games such as Grand Theft Auto III© and not edutainment type software. Edutainment is a hybrid game genre that relies heavily on visuals and narratives or game formats but also incorporates some type of learning objective (Okan, 2003). The main purpose of edutainment is to promote student learning through exploration, interactivity, trial and error, and repetition in such a way that students get so lost in the fun, that they don't realize they are learning at the same time. Government institutions, such the military, are using digital games for training to simulate real situations. Medical and dental schools often use digital game-type software to teach medical procedures. Unfortunately, most commercial edutainment software is inferior to the popular games. Are digital games even appropriate for use in school...