Video Games and the Classroom: A Learning Connection

Abstract

Today, many adolescents invest significant amounts of time and energy playing video games, even when games are difficult, tedious, and complex. This phenomenon has led educators to wonder: What import if any do video games hold for learning and instructional design in classrooms, grade 9-12? Two scholarly works in particular explore this topic, including What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy (Gee, 2007) and “Cracking the Code of Electronic Games: Some Lessons for Educators” (Alexander et al., 2010). This paper explores the learning principles behind games as noted by these two scholarly works and how these principles can be used in the secondary English classroom to foster motivation, engagement, and successful learning among adolescents.