Educative videogames – between limits and compromises
By: Lia Contesso
Submitted: 2010-04-13 02:53:33 | Word Count: 503
Thinking about the scholar activities, but also the extra-scholastic ones, like sports and music activities, it is easy to notice how the relation between age and games is naturally very connected: the youngest the children, the more the games used for a didactical purpose.
Game, in fact, is an interesting activity for children, and they apply themselves more than in other didactical activities; hence, the role of the educator is finding a way to interest the children and, at the same time, to give them the educative concepts they need.
Keeping in mind that, educative or not, a videogame appears in the monitors of the computers in the whole world, if the message it carries is educative at least it will be a help to reach its educative purpose: in fact there are also videogames that simulating the management of a restaurant, of a hotel, give an idea of life in those situations, though virtually, revealing themselves useful for adults as well.
Anyway, we are always talking about games: their main purpose is that of amusing, so that you’ll easily find flight games, the simulate airplane, helicopter, or maybe even hang-glider flights, to feel the sensation of flying without moving from home. Or the role games, to immerge in a virtual reality of which you’ll have to learn places, habits and rules; to remain in a verisimilar reality, though virtual, there are the racing games, to give expression to your desire of driving. For the lovers of the situations in which you need to calculate and prevent every move of the adversary there are the strategy games, and for those who are simply curious to have a look around there are many sites that will be able to satisfy their curiosity with every kind of game.
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As far the educative games as concerned, many of them can help to stimulate the logical skills and help to widen vocabulary and general culture, like the free crosswords you can find in many sites online, or other games that stimulate reflexes, like pinball: the resources of the internet are almost infinite – one more reason to check that it is used in a proper way, to avoid negative results.
For the children education, but not only, it’s important to limit the use of any videogame and online game, and the time allowed in front of the monitor: other than the various possible kinds of physical disturbs like headache and reddened eyes, there may be even some psychological that can be identified in a kind of videogame addiction, that brings to an alienation from real society and a life more and more connected to the virtual world of videogames. Here, though, we are talking about extreme situations: to avoid this kind of situations some control by the parent will be enough, dictated, as always, by common sense.
