Science Fair

The other day I went to my kid's science fair over at the school, and saw the usual collection of algae and mold growing, and plants that people had played rock or classical music to, and taste tests to show the difference between fat and fat-free.

You can see a lot of how awareness has changed since our day, of course, with displays where the kids matter-of-factly write, 'Because of pollution of the environment, we'll have to stop using detergent, so we better learn whether lemon or vinegar works better to get out stains." Kids see right through advertising, and write earnestly that they weren't buying that Fab or Tide or All got out stains better or left clothes downy fresh. They put it to the test.

But what have to be the most interesting displays kids are doing these days -- say, 10 or 12 years of age -- are studies of the effects that video games are having on themselves, along with their steady diet of loud music on i-Pods and Sony Walkmans (which I'm informed are utterly obsolete and ridiculous now, since everybody has an i-Pod, or at least a Mylo).

One kid with the map of Ireland written all over his face, the kind of freckled, jug-eared little kid that will probably grow up to be some kind of geeky science type or at least top insurance adjuster in his district some day, decided to test which video games would make your heart beat faster.

He reasoned quite practically that the Wii would likely come out on top, since you have to move around a lot to use it.

What he came up with next was an interesting premise: those video games that have the most intensive graphics -- "the best graphics" and were hence the most immersive would be those games that made your heart race faster (here we are right smack up Ted Castronova's reptilian brain).

So he measured various games, whether Halo, WoW, Final Fantasy, etc. and if I'm not mistaken, WoW came out on top for raising the heart rate of his peers. Certain games that he said had lousy graphics would make the heart thud more slowly.

He then wrote in his paper that perhaps he had to control for more variables (these kids are damn smart these days), by testing all sports games, or all war games, or all adventure games, because perhaps the war games would make your heart beat faster. But basically, he was learning toward his theory of "best graphics=most heart beats". I could add that perhaps it is the online or interactive quality that makes the heart race? Unfortunately, he was off at class and I couldn't ask him for his insights on this matter.

I ambled over past the sugar and silver crystals dissolving and plants wilting from their exposure to rock music and caught up with two 10 or 11 year old 5th or 6th graders who had a display up about the effect of video games on eye-hand coordination.

In their preface, they stated emphatically that parents were always complaining that video games were a waste of time and good for nothing, but here our budding junior scientists were here to prove to you that you could extract a good from all those time-sucks, and that was "better eye-hand coordination".

They tested this by having their subjects work a hand gripper and manipulate some other objects to move balls and stuff, after playing the video games 20 minutes or 40 minutes.

And here, by their own admission, they discovered something that surprised them. Although eye-hand coordination improved after 20 minutes demonstratively, after 40 minutes, it began to deteriorate. They posited that this could be due to fatigue.

I interrupted and asked about the concept of "eye-hand coordination" in general. Eye-hand coordination...for what? Playing video games? Was this the same eye-hand coordination you'd need to, say, pull a fire alarm in the dark? Repair an underwater cable in the trans-Atlantic corridor? Fix a panel on a spaceship during a space walk? Or....?

I always hear about all this eye-hand coordination, but I'm skeptical that it is a transferable skill I said, warming to my subject as the teacher appeared. "Are they just being prepared to shoot bombs better out of airplanes in Iraq?" I surmised? The teacher was non-plussed. The boys were reflective.

"No, games improve your eye-hand coordination totally," one insisted.

So the question is, why don't adults -- real scientists in universities or institutes -- do studies like this? Why aren't they curious and unbiased? Why can't they look at these issues that are affecting our youth?

To hear the Serious Gamesters rant on about this sort of thing, you would think that if we were to initiate such an inquiry, why, we'd be totalitarian horrors cracking down on their right to create games and publish them, and we would have failed politically-correct school, which drums into our heads that serious games enable Learning.

Learning is defined (I kid you not, I don't make this stuff up, it's on the Serious Games list) as "changing the way you think or do something after having mastered the material".

So, say, just learning that one plus one is two, or that nine times nine is 81, wouldn't count as "learning" (a word that is now always used with a kind of reverential drag on the first syllable, instead of other terms like "studying" or "drilling") -- because those kinds of routine information masteries wouldn't change something you do or think. Sigh.

Comments

[Calinacase Whiteberry]

good point about the emphasis on video games and repetitive motion exercises over real life living skills, such as rectifying a checkbook or writing a cover page.
Personally, I think you nailed it with the pre-military training stuff. Kids these days are learning to become cannon fodder so to speak.

[Prokofy Neva]

Or learning to make canon fodder out of other people...

[Laetizia Coronet]

Good read, Prokofy. For a moment there I was afraid you'd pull the Ireland boy's ears for being a little tekkie-wiki... but your write-up got the better of me.

These are some smart kids, and science fairs (We don't have them in Holland, I know about them from TV) are a great way to actually make kids discover how science works. I'm surprised the Born Again Christians are not against all that. Kids might try to find proof of the existence of a supreme being...

Anyway, about training them to be better cannon fodder... years ago I had a friend whose mom outlawed any and all war toys (this was in the days of 'Pong', mind you). And there was nothing he wanted more in the world than a toy gun or tank.
So the next question is - if toys make better soldiers or officers out of our kids, what does it take for our kids to not want those toys anyway?

[Prokofy Neva]

Actually, this science fair took place at a Catholic school, and I don't feel there's anything wrong with teaching children there is a Supreme Being -- seems pretty self-evident to me -- and they're welcome to throw all the experiments they want to prove or not prove the existence of this Supreme Being, including praying to pass the science quiz!

It's really so *reactionary* to hate religion and imagine that religious believers go around whacking everyone over the head with Bibles or discrediting evolution (I always thought Evolution was God's Perfect Plan har har).

I also think you cannot do a thing about teaching or not teaching kids war, that taking away war toys is just one of those addled lib ideas that go nowhere. Kids will pick up their organically fair-traded wood-carved Montessori block and knock the next kid's head in because that's how human beings *are*.

Once they reach the age of reason, you can endeavour to begin to debate with them about war, and hatred, and not being aggressive, etc. etc. It will stick or not, and I suppose you can only teach by example?

[SqueezeOne Pow the Malicious Tekkie Idiot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-eye_coordination

Eye–hand (alternatively hand–eye) coordination refers to the control of eye movement and the processing of visual input to guide bodily movement.

And actually there have been hundreds of studies by real scientists regarding the different effects that video games and simulations have on our cognitive abilities as well as how they affect people socially. This has been going on since well before Mario Brothers.

For future reference, you'd do well to at least look on yahoo or google to find info on the subject you're about to cover so you can sound more educated than a catholic school science fair kid.

Research is a lot harder to do than just saying it first!

[Prokofy Neva]

This blog is pitched pretty high over some people's heads. The questions that I feel scientists haven't really studied, as I said very clearly in this essay, is a) whether greater immersiveness (and hence a higher heart-rate) in fact harms your health, or has some kind of side effect (there isn't any study like that, please) and b) whether the eye-hand coordination skills one learns from video games *transfer to other RL stuff*. The effects are studied all over. But the larger philosophical questions, the policy questions, are not brought to the fore because the science isn't there, and there is a profound lack of curiosity -- worse, a suppression of a line of inquiry by game companies.

They don't want to know if these games have deleterious effects, they spend a great deal of time and money trying to prove that they don't. To even suggest that the question be asked is to be laughed off most "Serious Games" lists, virtual world forums, and blogs about SL.

Yet, you have to keep asking. Because the affects on people will continue to be profound.

I would expect malicious tekkie war gamers to keep on laughing in everybody's face about their, um, highly skilled ability to fire bombs at people effectively over a 20-minute period.

[Desmond Shang]

Well, this stuff *is* studied, and the knowledge leveraged, but in different ways and to different ends than you might choose.

For instance there are official video games for the US Army, because they educate, they inspire, and they back the army's mission.

Of course, perhaps some would be horrified where others would be enthused. But the effects are pretty well known. Immerse someone in a virtual training environment and yes, they will get some degree of familiarity and training.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond, please point to a published, peer-reviewed, double-bind, respectable, credible study about the affect of immersive worlds on people.

[SqueezeOne Pow the Malicious Tekkie Idiot]

Prok, use Google. We shouldn't be responsible for your ignorance.

The definition of hand-eye coordination is still lost to you. Once you understand what it actually is then your answers should come pouring in.

The fact that most higher end technological programs like NASA (for example) have been using various forms of "immersive" simulation since the Apollo missions (when you were a teenager) and have consistently documented improvement as the simulations became more advanced should show you that this is a no brainer.

You may be pitching high, but this is Bowling and you have to hit all the pins to make points. All you're doing is making holes in the floor around you.

[Term papers]

Your blog is really excellent. It inspires the readers like me..:)

[coach suitcase]

the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

[coach suitcase]

the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

[james robichaud]

you dont have good points boooo i just used your project to get an A plus boooo you suck