RIB 7 & 8

I felt the section “Quest to Learn – And Why Our Schools Should Work More Like a Game” on a personal level. I never noticed it until now, but the comparison made that the reason that school, primarily high school, was so damn boring was because the virtual world engaged me, and gave me freedom of thought that I (along with basically every other person my age) desired. Whenever I failed in a video game, I’d learn from it with (usually) no lasting consequences. However, in school when I slipped up I’d become stressed to counteract it because it was permanent. As said in the book, “School today for the most part is just one long series of necessary obstacles that produce negative stress.,” which is a straight fact. In all of my classes, it was just “listen to the teacher”, “complete this”, “study that”. We were all just enslaved to the fact that we had no say, and if we just couldn’t understand the concept, well, tough luck. This brings me back to my original thought. I now realize that I was always so excited to get home to my gaming devices back home, which has progressed from a GameBoy to an XboxOne, was because I could finally escape to a world where I could do as I please and learn along the way, whilst still having fun. I remember once reading about a school using Minecraft to help engage kids in class (I don’t remember the details just the video game part). The school system failed to adapt to our generation. But if it can do so for the next one, then maybe school won’t be seen as just a “necessary obstacle”. I do feel like UR is doing a good job of this, in a sense that in all of my classes my professors engage the students in discussions by asking a question and then listening to us. This may seem like mini rant (and maybe it is) but I like I said, I really felt attached to this specific section of the book. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Posted on by Carson Clark
Categories: Uncategorized

5 Responses

  1. Micaela Willoughby says:
    September 22, 2018 at 2:41 pm

    I was able to relate to this chapter as well. It was more so in middle school when I would be bouncing my leg in anticipation for the bell to ring at 2:45 so I could rush home and play videogames. They were an escape, I could play for hours (until my mom would mention homework and a lightbulb would go off in my head like “oh yeah, that’s a thing.”) There’s a plethora of reasons why I was unhappy at my middle school, but I later came to realize that one of the main reasons was exactly what McGonigal said: I wasn’t stimulated. I did well in my classes, and that was exciting for maybe the first semester. Then it just was about not dropping below that threshold, which was stressful concept. I didn’t want to lose anything, but there was no need to aim higher. It was just maintaining, no reason to grow. I feel that in a school with ‘levelling up’ as a concept, that fear of falling down would be less encompassing or, better yet, nonexistent. And without a crippling fear of failure, they would be less afraid to try new things and aim higher.

  2. James Bachmann says:
    September 22, 2018 at 5:44 pm

    I feel like I am going to sound like a scratched record, but I too agree that there are a lot of problems when it comes to education systems. Schools today are designed to try and get kids through the program as quick as problem and as cheaply as possible. So, the quickest and cheapest way is to give a bunch of kids a bunch of stuff they have to memorize and call it “learning”. Schools do need to be revamped in order to best teach the new generations, but a lot more is going to have to change first before we can truly fix the school system.

  3. Rachel Helbling says:
    September 23, 2018 at 10:22 pm

    I think the points you bring up are very relatable for most kids of our generation. The education system could be much better and relatable for kids. Even when kids are “learning” they are normally just memorizing the bare minimum and forgetting it less than a week after the exam. I would be very interested to see more stats about the Quest to Learn high school. I wonder how their retention of what the learn is and how they are able to transition to later stages of life. For example I would also like to see how they preform in college where everything is no longer in a game style.

  4. Ahsan Ahmad says:
    September 24, 2018 at 1:35 pm

    The fact that everyone is able to relate to this section of the chapter is further testament to how true it is. I feel like we can all agree with McGonigal by now when she says that the entertainment technology has by far out-progessed our education system and that does not go well with students nowadays at all. They have to tolerate an archaic system at school for hours before they can go home and be in the 21st century with their gaming consoles again. This is undoubtedly frustrating, if not infuriating. I would agree that some sort of improvements to the education model, even if not drastic, would greatly boost student productivity across the charts.

  5. Shanay Amin says:
    September 24, 2018 at 2:51 pm

    I definitely think you aren’t the only one who feels attached to this part of the book, I was. Like I said in one of my prior comments the world is much less forgiving then any game, and I think thats because games are a small section of the real world, not actually the real world. Even if the world is like a game, the highs and low that you do get in life won’t be as good as they are in life. With that said everyone enjoys the highs in life but the lows are hated.