WSJ: Teachers Encourage Computer Games in Class – Angry Bird teaches physics
Ok, I’m ready to go back to school! Woohooo! Learn to calculate Acceleration – by studying the flight an Angry Bird..
WSJ: Games like “Angry Birds” and “Guild Wars 2” teach physics, writing and more.
At a private school in Houston, eighth-graders slingshot angry red birds across a video screen for a lesson on Newton’s law of motion. High-school students in Los Angeles create the “Zombie Apocalypse” computer game to master character development. And elementary students in Hampstead, N.C., build a virtual city to understand spatial reasoning.
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Unleashing Innovation: Education
These seemingly playful adventures represent a new frontier in education: videogames as teaching tools. Though it’s still a budding movement, scores of teachers nationwide are using games such as “Angry Birds,” “Minecraft,” “SimCity” and “World of Warcraft” to teach math, science, writing, teamwork and even compassion. In Chicago and New York, entire schools have been created that use the principles of game design in curriculum development.
The movement is driven by a generation of young teachers who grew up with computer games, a national push for innovative teaching methods in K-12 classrooms and a need to reach children whose obsession with videogames sometimes desensitizes them to the traditional, slower-paced classroom lectures.
Chez Froggie 