Can playing games transform them into real entrepreneurs?

By Captain Hoff at LavaMind

More and more schools, colleges and youth organizations across the country believe playing the right games can help.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (http://www.kff.org/)

 In 2010, 60% of children 8 – 18 reported that they play digital games every day, spending an average of two hours  each day.

 The percentage of youth playing digital games has increased by more than 50 percent in the last 10 years, and the amount of time they spend has almost doubled.

LavaMind believes it can help students understand what it is to be an entrepreneur with its popular business simulation games: Gazillionaire (http://www.gazillionaire.com) and Zapitalism (http://www.zapitalism.com).

 

“Our games put students in charge of running their own company,” says Captain Hoff (Steve Hoffman), the cofounder of LavaMind.   “For the hundreds of schools that are using them as part of their curriculum, it gives students a chance to make business decisions and see the results.”

Amy Jacobson Kurokawa, a veteran interactive media producer and math teacher, says, “With students spending more and more time playing games and interacting online, it’s only natural that you’d expect this to be a very real part of their learning experience. Textbooks are still important, but they’re becoming only a piece of an evolving set of tools educators can use to reach students and accelerate their learning.”   

   

According to Project Tomorrow’s Survey ()http://www.tomorrow.org:

More than half of students in grades 3 through 12 believe educational gaming would help them learn.

However, only 16% of teachers and 19% of parents are on board today.

LavaMind just launched Zapitalism Online, a unique game that gives students the chance to manage their own business and deal with complex concepts like overhead, profit margins, market share, and debt financing.

“We make abstract, yawn-inducing business concepts real for students,” says Captain Hoff,  “It’s one thing to tell students about estimated net profit, and another to have them compete with their classmates to see who can become a gazillionaire first.”  LavaMind’s simulations are designed to help students understand the fundamental principles of running a business by translating abstract concepts into concrete examples, such as paying interest on a loan or investing in advertising.

This is directly relevant to students today.  A study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended that educators take steps to “make school more relevant and engaging.”

“Seeing the results of what you do is so much more tangible than reading about it in a book,” says Gnome Burger (Naomi Kokubo), the cofounder of LavaMind.   “Our goal is to get students excited  about the idea of learning.  We don’t expect them to walk away from a game with a memorized set of theorems or formulas. Instead, we want them to have a feeling for what those ideas mean by playing with the concepts in the game environment. That way when the students read their textbooks, they will absorb the material much faster because they already have a true sense of what it means.”

With Silicon Valley on everyone’s mind and technology in their hands, what students experience in the classroom is more important then ever.   In a NY Times article, James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its “internal design grammar” and that this is a form of critical thinking.  In other words, a game is nothing but a set of problems to solve, where its design pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize.

So will your children turn out to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg?  Even if they don’t get there in the real world, they can always be a virtual tycoon in a game, where they are in control, can make the decisions, and see the results.   Have fun playing!

For more Information: You may visit LavaMind at http://www.lavamind.com

Free version of Gazillionaire: http://www.gazillionaire.com

Free version of Zapitalism: http://www.zapitalism.com

 

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