Ever since I was a young child, I have enjoyed playing games.  As a child, I enjoyed playing board games, card games, and a variety of sports. As an adult I continued my interest in board and card games. Eventually computer-based games came along, and they have consumed many hundreds of hours (would I admit to thousands of hours?) of my leisure time. I have even managed to tie some of what I learned by game playing into my professional work. See the References section of this IAE Blog entry.

There is a steadily growing research literature on use of games in education. The following article is about James Gee, one of the researchers.

Larmer, John (3/21/2012). James Gee: What do video games have to do with Project-Based learning? edutopia. Retrieved 4/2/2012 from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/james-gee-video-game-project-based-learning.

Over the years I have read many articles written by Larry Cuban. I have often disagreed with his point of view regarding computers in education. In essence, I was in favor of use of computers and he was suspicious of or against use of computers. However, I fully agree with the following article:

Cuban, Larry (11/29/2011). Challenging Reformers’ Conventional Wisdom about Structures and Classroom Practice. Retrieved 2/4/2012 from http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/challenging-reformers-conventional-wisdom-about-structures-and-classroom-practice/.

Quoting from the article:

Ray Kurzweil is one of my favorite authors. For some details about his work, see http://iae-pedia.org/Ray_Kurzweil. His vision of the future includes having computes that are a lot smarter than people. He uses the term “Singularity” to describe the transition period from when computers are not as smart at people to when they are a lot smarter.

I recently read the following article:

Click here to learn about and download Dave Moursund's free book on science and technology education for teaches and parents of K-8 children.

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Recently I have been reading the following book:

For most of my professional career I have been advocating major changes in the school math curriculum to better reflect the changes being brought about by computers. In brief summary, much of our school math curriculum content focuses on helping students learn to do computations and symbol manipulations that computers can do much rapidly and accurately.

The following video provides a really neat summary of my thoughts:

Wolfram, Conrad (July 2010). Teaching kids real math with computers. TED Talks. Retrieved 11/18/2010 from http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html. Learn more about Conrad Wolfram at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Wolfram.

Click here to learn about Dave Moursund's free book on science and technology education for teaches and parents of K-8 children.

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My wife is currently in a rehabilitation care facility recovering from hip replacement surgery done last week. She is often visited by Trevor, one of her grandchildren (one of my step grandchildren) who just started kindergarten this year.