Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Can "Serious Games" Improve Your Mind?, 11/28/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/games_11-28.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What kinds of video or Internet games do you play? Why do you play them?

2. What skills can you learn from video questions?

3. Do you think video games could be used in school? How?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What trend in video games does the article explain?

Long criticized for distracting students from their homework and fostering violence, some video game designers are now developing games that help students deal with real-world situations such as managing the International Space Station or negotiating peace in the Middle East.

2. How do video games engage players?

The basic concept behind all video games is to allow the player to control the events of a particular character and force him or her to connect and manipulate information to move on to the next level. Each level is designed to be hard enough to be just doable, creating simultaneous feelings of pleasure and frustration that draw people in.

3. How are entertainment games different from serious games?

In entertainment games, this could mean learning how to stay alive in the drug underworld or save a far away planet from an army of aliens.

Serious games take the same concept a step further by allowing players to act as problem solvers, political leaders or humanitarian workers while learning information that might otherwise come from a textbook or lecture.

4. What kind of game is PeaceMaker? What is the goal of the game?

Burak is part of a team working on Peacemaker, a game that seeks to teach high school and college students about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of conquest and destruction, players try to achieve peace and cohabitation -- an arguably much harder goal.

5. According to the article what kind of learning is achieved with gaming?

"Gaming is the most insidious type of learning that there can possibly be," said Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming Magazine at a Serious Games workshop two years ago. "It's unexpected learning, it's learning you get as a byproduct of the experience."

6. What are 3 examples of serious games?

Food Force is a game designed by the United Nations World Food Program to teach children ages 8-13 about world hunger. The game simulates a country threatened by a hunger crisis. Acting as a humanitarian aid worker, the player must complete a series of missions to plan and complete a successful emergency response.

Another example is SpaceStationSim, a game developed with the National Aeronautic Space Administration, or NASA, that conveys the challenges of managing astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

MTV recently announced a contest that challenges students to combine technology and activism to teach about the crisis in Sudan. The Darfur Digital Activist Contest will award $50,000 to an individual or group of college students that designs interactive media project or game to educate about the genocide in Darfur.

7. What is the biggest challenge for serious games?

They will need to make a profit to keep creating new games and attract talented designers. "It's all about money," said Burak.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Would you play a serious game? Which one? In school or at home?

2. What elements does a game need to be successful?

3. How do people become game developers? Is it a job you'd want?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.