I've lately come across a few items about how video/computer games can help youngsters learn. I remember explaining the benefits of hand-eye coordination to my mother when I was a kid, but research today has gone well beyond that.
On June 23 the KidScreen newsletter reported on a new study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center that basically uncovered new and unexpected ways in which games can be beneficial. Here's that summary, by Emily Claire Afan. The actual report, of course, is available for download at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center publications webpage. (Those who want to scroll down on that page will also find a lot of other great studies--I'll have to find time to read all of these soon.)
There's a lot of other material out there about this. Just browsing around I came across this two-year-old article on the subject. It lists a lot of game names, which are now obviously two years old, but it's still a good guide for seeing the kinds of things that are out there, especially for a fellow like me who hasn't really played games since the original NES (i.e. there's more to educational gaming than squashing walking mushrooms).
Along those lines and perhaps most exciting of all is the creation by the National Geographic Society of a video game unit, National Geographic Games. Here's the press release from last November. What's particularly cool about this, for me, is the apparent range of what they're going to undertake, particularly that they're going to make games for preschoolers and for older kids and even grown-ups too. In the former category we have National Geographic: Panda, seen below, in which kids can care for a panda like a pet, learning about its habitat, etc., and hopefully really coming to care about the real animals. Here's a review from Tech Talk for Families.
In the grown-up category the press release describes NGG's first release, Herod's Lost Tomb, which is history, archaeology, and heaven knows what else all wrapped up in one.
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