Digital Play Enhances Learning

Policy Brief: Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children's Learning and Health

Children as young as four are immersed in a new gaming culture, but many parents, educators and health professionals, concerned over violence, sexual content, and reports of addiction, do not consider games to be a positive force in children's lives. Game Changer addressed this critique, offering a new framework to use games to help children learn healthy behaviors, traditional skills like reading and math, and 21st-century strengths such as critical thinking, global learning, and programming design. It specifies how increased national investment in research-based digital games might play a cost-effective and transformative role and provides comprehensive actions steps for media industry, government, philanthropy, and academia to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning. The report was co-authored by Ann My Thai, David Lowenstein, and Dixie Ching, as well as David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; support was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio.

• Download the executive summary
• Download the report

The Clooney Center has a deep commitment towards dissemination of useful and timely research and policy reports. Working closely with Cooney Center Fellows, national advisors, media scholars and practitioners, the Center will be publishing a regular series of papers examining key issues in the field of digital media and learning.

Teaching the MEdia Generation

As teachers enter classrooms, many of their neomillennial students consider electronic communication and search tools a natural extension of their appendages. Brain research states that the neural development of youth today is observably different from earlier generations. Neomillenials live media-based life styles. Research on Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE) and augmented reality learning experiences such as second life simulations supports neomillineal learning styles (NLS) i.e.

1. Fluency in multiple media for communication and personal expression
2. Learning based on collective seeking sieving and synthesizing experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from a single best source
3. Active learning based on both real and simulated experiences that include frequent opportunities for reflection

This resource page is designed to provide an interactive information site for teachers who want to consider issues related to developing a digital aged classroom to meet the needs of digital aged students. Digital age students learn in new ways with tools that were not even imagined when most teachers finished their teacher preparation. Continuous learning related to the changing demographics of learners and the pedagogy necessary to support their development should be as ubiquitous as the placement of computers in the 21st century classroom.