Go to them

Mobilizing the groundswell means you must go to them, wherever and everywhere they are, you cannot expect them to come to you. For students, mobile phones can be one of the ways to be where they are. Another potential tool is video games.

Video games are increasingly being accepted as useful tools to engage students, after having broken out of the idea that it disengaged children's minds, and increased their violent activities.

It is now being acknowledged as a helpful learning tool and used more and more. For one reason, it teaches "21st century skills" in a way that the normal classroom exercises (memorize and spit back out on exams) can't do. Video games have "problem-based learning environments, case based reasoning, learning through participation in communities of practice, or inquiry-based learning that place learners in active roles, pursuing goals meaningful to them" (Education Arcade). And games teach skills for 21st century employees: analytical thinking, team building, multitasking, and problem solving under duress. (Eschoolnews)

The creation of video games can also be a useful exercise for students. They can be creative in an aesthetic and artistic way, but also create and understand goals and structures, the way that a level should move forward, and understand how to create patterns, challenges, and solutions.

Some video games being used now in education, include:
1) Education Arcade's Labyrinth: An online puzzle adventure game, designed to promote math and literacy learning, and is targeted at middle-school students.

2) Quest to Learn School in New York City: The Institute of Play. From their site: "Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core."

3) Games that teach skills by doing that you can't actually do in the real world:
-Training for army, navy, etc. has been using these types of simulations for years
-Civilization video game teaches middle and high school kids in urban America how to study social studies better
-Simearth video game where students can change global oxygen levels and study the effects (allows people to experiment on unexperimentable things)

So video games can provide:
-21 century analytical and professional skills practice
-Cognitive research - intermix instruction and demonstration

-Active rather than passive engagement by students
-Game creation for structural and aesthetic design practice
-Global reach - for example: practice foreign language skills by going to different cities and speaking with real people in the game Second Life
-Learn by doing- development of skills that can only be done in practice

and
-Group collaboration - increases everyone's skills through collaborative problem solving

Sounds fun to me.