Written by I was watching Jane McGonigal’s TED talk and her logic of gaming being a parallel learning track for this generation’s youth is pretty convincing.
For example, a researcher at CMU through a survey has found that by the age of 21, a youngster has put in almost 10,000 hours of online gaming.
Add to it Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour rule of success, and you have a whole generation of teens who are virtuoso’s in gaming.
Compare this to the 10,080 hours of education that you attend in your secondary school (i.e. if you dont miss a single day of school), and you have an alternative track/medium where an individual is deeply engaged. I had earlier blogged about how games can be used to engage people at work. Well, the same holds true for education, and the platform is almost set. Now it’s for game designers to design games like Superstruct and Evoke, so that modern day games (where the world spends 3 billion hours of online playing every week!!) can be harnessed to educate, collaborate and design new-age solutions for the world.
Jane further goes on to say how games can be used to solve world problems – you can watch the rest of her talk here
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