Honestly, who would not choose to play a game to learn? At the end of my first year of teaching this past spring, I handed out an evaluation in which I asked the students which lessons or days did they feel like they were learning the most and which lessons did they find most memorable. Almost all of the students responded, "the days we played jeopardy." As a teacher I thought this was kind of sad because jeopardy was so easy to plan compared to all of the other lessons I spent hours coming up with. But after reading this chapter and listening to Prensky, I can appreciate the impact and engagement of games in the classroom on student learning.

The chapters we read in this class as well as in others are proving more and more to repeat the same notions about student learning. And that is that the human mind doesn't think in a linear fashion, that students today are in fact more critical thinkers because of the amount of information they have access to, and that teachers and education are falling behind. That resonated no more than when Prensky mentioned the T-shirt he saw on the street in New York. Most students learn how to "play" school and the others are so bored out of their mind that they don't even try. In classes from the school where I am observing to the school I taught in last year there was often a huge divide in grades. Half the class was usually doing very well while the rest were failing. It's not that they are not smart enough, it is that they are more engaged and interested in other things. I agree with what Prensky said about how students are labeled as ADD or ADHD. Last year, I noticed that several of my students were identified or claimed they were ADD. When I asked them about it they acknowledged it as the defining "deficiency" of their generation. (Though perhaps not as eloquently--"Yeah, we are all ADD" was more like what they said.)

The most remarkable way I find I am realizing the validity in the chapters and the supplementary materials we are reading is simply this: When I read about defining a "fun factor" to decide which car to buy, playing video games to solve problems like keeping the lemmings from dying, or even solving a mystery through using primary documents; my first thought is either--"oh, I want to go home and do that," or "I wish I had that in school." Even when I recall my elementary school days, a blazing image of "Oregon Trail Fridays" pops up in my head. If even I am immediately more attracted to the games over the more traditional methods, then wouldn't the students be more interested in them as well?

Furthermore, problem-centered and anchor-based learning with emphasis on discovering the processes used to solve problems teaches life-long skills to students. If handled correctly, devising strategies to solve game problems is something that will last for students and in fact is something good students have always done. We learned in psychology of various methods students use to come up with right answers on tests based simply on the elimination method and test-taking skills. Some of us even aced tests in high school for which we barely studied simply because we knew how to play the game. Why aren't we embracing and teaching process rather than product to students? If we don't start soon, students are going to increasingly find that school has no relevance. I found the chapter and Prensky to be quite convincing.