A blog turning into a game

I read an article recently on the growing use of computer and video game entertainment as a form of therapy. This school of thought argues that there are a handful of non-entertainment benefits to consuming certain types of games:

Exercise: not your fingers from pressing up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start (think Konami code back in the days of Contra), but real exercise through devices like the Wii, which encourage rapid cardio through cleverly designed fitness games. The product is especially popular with therapists and children.

Health: Quit smoking-expert Alan Carr is launching a series of games on the Nintendo DS this fall called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” 10M smokers have already used his products to quit smoking.

Education: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently announced her involvement in Our Courts, a project to teach kids about civics. There also been a growing brain fitness movement, with games like Brain Age. Brain Age and its sister titles have sold over 10M copies worldwide, indicating a huge demand for education-focused gaming.

Philanthropy: FreeRice enables individuals to contribute to ending world hunger by playing simple word games on its site, which is in partnership with the UN World Food Program.

When learning about the state of the education system from some of my classmates in business school who were former teachers, I was briefed on, among other things, No Child Left Behind. Briefly, the act has placed a strong emphasis on creating and meeting academic standards at the state-level in math and reading. Schools are judged based on how well their students are doing relative to those standards.

As a result, the education community has been monitoring how schools have adjusted their curriculum to mold to this new policy. Someone recently pointed me to a report released a few months ago by the Center on Education Policy (CEP). The main conclusion of the report was that schools generally are shifting their attention to math and reading, at the expense of other areas, including social studies and the arts. Specifically,

“In its earlier report, CEP found that a majority of school districts—62 percent— had increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02. Meanwhile, 44 percent had increased time for ELA and/or math at the elementary level, while simultaneously cutting time from one or more areas including science, social studies, art and music, physical education, recess, and lunch.”

In many cases, the report concludes, school districts have increased the amount of instruction time devoted to language arts and math by more than 75 minutes a week.

If the CEP’s conclusions are accurate, and at a first-order they appear to be true and validated by other similar reports, a major question is how students will learn the material that is being less emphasized in schools.