As parents, we’ve been concerned about the impact of video games for a long time. Various “experts” fill the airwaves with all kinds of horrifying possibilities about video games damaging kids’ brains, causing ADHD, contributing to obesity, promoting violence, or interfering with learning academic skills.
I’m here to offer you a different perspective on video games – one that rarely gets any attention. I’m here to shed light on why our kids become so addicted to playing video games in the first place. I’m also here to suggest that the way kids master video games says a lot about the failures of our educational system.
Video game designers understand the science behind how learning works.
Video game designers aren’t required to operate according to the beliefs, traditions, and myths of the educational establishment. They’re free to design their games in a way that ensures kids learn how to play them, and more important, get good at playing them.
Kids become addicted to video games because they are designed in such a way that enables kids to master them.
- They must master lower levels of the game first before advancing to higher levels.
- Mastery of each level requires the achievement of fluency – indicated by the repeated achievement of a certain score within a certain amount of time.
- Mastery of each subsequent level produces access to a more advanced level.
- Playing the game involves other kinds of reinforcers too like earning points or access to new characters, tools, or weapons.
- There are many reinforcers built in for improvements in performance such that the necessary component skills are selected and strengthened to fluency.
What I just described about how video games are designed has absolutely no relation to what occurs in schools. On the contrary, kids are pushed ahead from skill to skill based on arbitrary timelines set by the school district. Teachers are required to expose kids to a lesson, test them on that lesson, and move on to a new lesson – regardless of test performance. Practice is not built into the school day and even homework doesn’t provide the amount of practice kids need to master skills. Kids advance to the next grade based on their age – not based on mastery of the prerequisite skills required for higher-level content. When kids fail, which a majority do, schools attribute this failure to learning disabilities, personality characteristics, low IQ, or laziness. And the cycle repeats itself: year after year and student after student.
So, rather than worrying about how much our kids are playing video games maybe we should ask, “Why aren’t schools producing this same kind of fluency in academic skills?” With behavior science, teaching practices can be designed in such a way that kids become addicted to academic skills in the same way they become addicted to video games. Kids become addicted to things they are good at and getting good at something requires repeated reinforced practice of skills to fluency.
That’s why kids enrolled with Fit Learning Online become experts in reading, math, thinking, and writing. They engage in repeated, reinforced practice of component skills until those skills are fluent. The result? Kids who pick up a book, work out some math problems or write an essay as eagerly as they play their video games.