Enter the (Algebra) Matrix

Doh! We’ve given the seventh-graders the wrong electronic devices. They should have received videogames, not laptops.

A recent study by Dr. Daphne Bavelier, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Rochester, suggests that action video-games may in fact be the more powerful learning device. Studies have already shown greater eye-hand coordination among kids who play video games. To this the Rochester study, just published in the journal Nature, adds enhanced attention skills, the ability to follow multiple objects, and split-second tracking skills to the list of benefits experienced by video game aficionados.

There goes the authority for thousands of nagging parents trying to deter young Johnny from playing Grand Theft Auto when he should be doing his social studies homework. “But Mom, I’m developing my reflexes! That study said. …”

And teachers – don’t be so quick to confiscate those Super Mario games the boys in the back row are hiding under their textbooks. They may be having a teachable moment.

Come to think of it, how much effort could it possibly take for the makers of popular video games to abandon the Dark Side of the Force and reprogram their violent fantasy scenarios for educational purposes?

Couldn’t Spiderman be recalibrated as Grammarman to track down that evil Dr. Dangling Gerund?my split-infinitive senses are tingling! Wouldn’t our young adolescents learn physical science just as quickly (perhaps more quickly, as the study suggests) from a game such as Super Mario: The Biologist? Just turn him loose inside the semi-permeable cell membrane and watch him chase down that mitochondria! Call it “Teaching Cell Division for the MTV generation.”

And how great would my own seventh-grade math class have been if Mr. Gates had said, “Class, start your Gameboys! It’s time to play Enter the Algebra Matrix. Solve for x and learn if you’re the chosen one.” This is called expanding the brand, good for shameless commerce as well as learning.

Maybe. Dr.Bavelier’s findings are not new to teachers. I suspected for years, while teaching English during the rise of the MTV/video-game generation, that their electronic experiences outside of class were training kids to respond more rapidly than they were responding to my lessons on grammar and spelling. Children who grow up on the staccato bursts of moving images and visual mosaics?be they Pac Man games, music videos, or commercials (and many young children can’t tell the difference) are programmed to think differently.

To the extent that the future depends on speedy visual skills and electronic interactions, videogame-kids will be well prepared. They will breeze through ATM machines, program their auto piloted vehicles, and communications devices with egocentric ease?and those are just the digital appliances we know at present.

But this also sounds like a premonition of the future we watched in “The Minority Report”? Do we want to inhabit a future predicated on such skills? Are we programming ourselves for an emotionally sterile, but visual stimulating, environment? Or a society of classes based on a hierarchy of electronic programming?

Getting back to the laptops, what lessons might the new research suggest about kids and the nature of school? Unfortunately, their blazing hand-eye coordination does not benefit a person’s language development, reasoning, abstract thinking, etc.; it just changes the wiring, not the software. Kids oscillating to video game experiences have less patience for the slow, narrative style of classroom learning. For them school can be a plodding, 19th-century “random access memory” format with less and less relevance to how they learn most efficiently, and more to do with tradition and social convention. However, this is also the pace of human thinking and feeling and judgment.

To be sure, we need school to be relevant. We should also not be so enchanted with devices for learning, though studies might give us some guidance in making it work. Let’s not confuse training with learning. The medium is not the answer, just the message.

Todd R. Nelson, a former school teacher and administrator, is an associate editor of Hope magazine. He lives in Castine.