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Classcraft is unlike any other educational computer game on the market today. It’s subject agnostic and can be played at any level, in any classroom. Classcraft offers real incentives, not just badges and rewards. It also has real-life impact for students. For example, students earn experience points by being positive and hard-working or answering a question correctly in class. Conversely, they lose points for showing up late to class, disrupting the class, or turning in incomplete homework assignments.

Many classroom games require educators to build their teaching plan around them, but Classcraft enables teachers to implement it without changing their lesson plan in any significant manner. It’s augmented reality, so the computer platform adds a layer of game on top of normal teaching. Classcraft goes beyond the four walls of the classroom. Students earn and lose experience points for performance inside and outside the classroom and interact with each other online.

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Classcraft is an online educational role-playing game that teachers and students play together in the classroom. It is not meant to replace the existing school curriculum but rather supplement classroom learning by encouraging teamwork and increasing student motivation and discipline.

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more websites that say video games can be good in the class room

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more websites that say video games can be good in the class room

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And because video games combine every kind of digital content-text, image, video, music, and software-they can also be used to teach many valuable lessons about copyright. The members of the ©Team-Rick the Writer, Alan the Artist, and Patty the Programmer-each contribute toward creating the digital content in video games.

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secret powers!!!!!!!

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http://www.classcraft.com/overview/

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Part 2 of 2: Video Games-Good or Bad?

Last week: The Violent Side of Video Games

Here's some news for you to share with your parents and teachers: Video games might actually be good for you.

Whenever a wave of teenage violence strikes, movies, TV, or video games often take the heat. Some adults assume that movies, TV, and video games are a bad influence on kids, and they blame these media for causing various problems. A variety of studies appear to support the link between media violence and bad behavior among kids (See The Violent Side of Video Games).

Video games can help focus attention.

But media don't necessarily cause violence, says James Gee. Gee is an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "You get a group of teenage boys who shoot up a school-of course they've played video games," Gee says. "Everyone does. It's like blaming food because we have obese people."

Video games are innocent of most of the charges against them, Gee says. The games might actually do a lot of good. Gee has written a book titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

A growing number of researchers agree with Gee. If used in the right way, video and computer games have the potential to inspire learning. And they can help players improve coordination and visual skills.

Attention-getting games

A good video game is challenging, entertaining, and complicated, Gee says. It usually takes 50 to 60 hours of intense concentration to finish one. Even kids who can't sit still in school can spend hours trying to solve a video or computer game.

"Kids diagnosed with ADHD because they can't pay attention will play games for 9 straight hours on the computer," Gee says. "The game focuses attention in a way that school doesn't."

The captivating power of video games might lie in their interactive nature. Players don't just sit and watch. They get to participate in the action and solve problems. Some games even allow players to make changes in the game, allowing new possibilities.

And kids who play computer games often end up knowing more about computers than their parents do. "Kids today are natives in a culture in which their parents are immigrants," Gee says.

In his 2 to 3 years of studying the social influences of video games, Gee has seen a number of young gamers become computer science majors in college. One kid even ended up as a teaching assistant during his freshman year because the school's computer courses were too easy for him.

Screen reading

Video games can enhance reading skills, too. In the game Animal Crossing, for instance, players become characters who live in a town full of animals. Over the course of the game, you can buy a house, travel from town to town, go to museums, and do other ordinary things. All the while, you're writing notes to other players and talking to the animals. Because kids are interested in the game, they often end up reading at a level well above their grade, even if they say they don't like to read.

Now being developed, the educational computer game "Revolution" brings kids to colonial America. Players become characters in a small Virginia town in 1773.

Education Arcade

Games can inspire new interests. After playing a game called Age of Mythology, Gee says, kids (like his 8-year-old son) often start checking out mythology books from the library or join Internet chat groups about mythological characters. History can come alive to a player participating in the game.

Even violent games have a positive side, Gee says. " Grand Theft Auto 3 does not exist to get off on shooting people," he says. When the game begins, your character has just been released from jail. You need to figure out how to make a living, but the only people you know are criminals. Along the way, you might end up fighting or killing people, but you don't have to.

"The game offers you a palette of choices," Gee says. Players must confront moral dilemmas, develop social relationships, and solve challenging problems that might apply to real life, he says. "How compelling would a game be if you only had good choices?"

Improved skills

Video games might also help improve visual skills. That was what researchers from the University of Rochester in New York recently found.

In the study, frequent game players between the ages of 18 and 23 were better at monitoring what was happening around them than those who didn't play as often or didn't play at all. They could keep track of more objects at a time. And they were faster at picking out objects from a cluttered environment.

"Above and beyond the fact that action video games can be beneficial," says Rochester neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, "our findings are surprising because they show that the learning induced by video game playing occurs quite fast and generalizes outside the gaming experience."

The research might lead to better ways to train soldiers or treat people with attention problems, the researchers say, though they caution against taking that point too far.

Says Bavelier, "We certainly don't mean to convey the message that kids can play video games instead of doing their homework!"

In the educational video game "Supercharged," players can use magnetic fields to navigate mazes. Players also see electric field lines, which can help guide them through the course.

Education Arcade

If Gee gets his way, though, teachers might some day start incorporating computer games into their assignments. Already, scientists and the military use computer games to help simulate certain situations for research or training, he says. Why shouldn't schools do the same thing?

"Kids are beginning to see school as really out of step with culture," Gee says. Making computer technology part of the learning experience could change all that.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have started a project they describe as the "Education Arcade." The project brings together researchers, scholars, game designers and others interested in developing and using computer games in the classroom.

Some kids already go to educational Web sites where they can interact with other kids and help solve problems. At Whyville ( www.whyville.net/), for example, kids from all over the world can chat, build an online identity, and learn math and science as they roam a virtual world.

Looking at the bright side of video and computer games could also help bring kids and adults closer together. Playing games can be a social activity, during which kids and adults learn from each other. By opening up lines of communication and understanding, maybe one day we'll praise video games for saving society, not blame them for destroying it.

On the one hand, there's still a lot more to learn about how video games really affect us. On the other hand, there's also a lot to learn about how to harness them for our benefit.

Part 1 of 2: The Violent Side of Video Games

Word Find: Video Games and Learning

Additional Information

Questions about the Article

Comments:

It is true that I learn easier when I can actually do something with what I learn-like figuring a math problem to unlock a door or to execute an attack!- Zachary, 13
Going Deeper:

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Part 2 of 2: Video Games-Good or Bad? Last week: The Violent Side of Video Games Here's some news for you to share with your parents and teachers: Video games might actually be good for you. Whenever a wave of teenage violence strikes, movies, TV, or video games often take the heat.

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works on all devices

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you can upgrade your avatar

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three different classes healer mage and warrior

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avatars to create to make the game funner

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there are achievements to say you done something god

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please click view original and then click CONTIUE TO SITE

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Around a billion and a half people all play video games of some sort. That's more than 20% of the world's population. Video games have become a part of life. They are now more than just leisure and entertainment. They are mainstream media, an everyday method of storytelling and representation. Games have become a common form of rhetoric for the 21 st century.

Therefore, it is not surprising that educators, policy makers, investors, and developers are trying to build games for schools. However, the real reason game-based learning is so popular is not only because video games are extremely effective teaching tools; they are also relatively inexpensive to build and to distribute. In other words, they're scalable, and replicable, and extensible, and all those other buzzwords that philanthropists, and venture capitalists, and policy makers like to hear. Video games have a lot going for them in a world that loves digital technologies and worships the concept of innovation.

Luckily, it is not all about semantics. Using video games as classroom tools that help teachers do their jobs with more impact is also good pedagogy. Video games can be exceptional teaching tools. To understand why, you don't need any fancy education or psychology terms. All have to do is think about the avatar...the game character. In video games there are almost always two "I"s. There's the "I" who holds the controller and the "I" that's within the bezel of the monitor. Gamers are distanced from their avatar and are accustomed to thinking about their actions like an outsider looking in.

The fancy way to say that is: there is a metacognitive distance built right in. The term metacognition is a key term in educational psychology. It describes the ability to think about your own thinking. Strong metacognitive functions give students an awareness, or an understanding, of their own thought processes. Metacognitive functions provide one with autonomy or control of one's own intellectual capacity. This matters in education because strong metacognitive functions lead to good academic skills. Through metacognitive functions, learners recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and adapt or iterate their performance accordingly.

In other words, academia can be understood like a video game: something students play again and again, practicing and improving with each new attempt. But what about the digital divide? If video games are so great, doesn't that mean equal access to educational technologies is even more important? Certainly. But in an imperfect world, it is also important to remember that you don't need fancy laptops or tablets to implement game-based learning. It is really just about imaginative play.

In his excellent soon to be released book (April 21), "The Game Believes In You: How Games Can Make Our Kids Smarter," Greg Toppo writes: "Kids make mud pies and paper airplanes, they climb trees and play the piano. The entire time they're exploring and learning about the world."

This is why folks have been using play therapy with children for more than a century. Both the Kleinians and the Jungians fill their consultation rooms with toy menageries and mandalas and sandboxes. They've always known that games and play strengthen metacognitive functions. They've always known that along with the guidance of a mentor--a great teacher--games and play can help individuals learn to recognize their own context. Play helps one recognize the structures, the systems, and the economies in which one participates.

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How Video Games In The Classroom Will Make Students Smarter

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VideoAround a billion and a half people all play video games of some sort. That's more than 20% of the world's population. Video games have become a part of life. They are now more than just leisure and entertainment. They are mainstream media, an everyday method of storytelling and representation.

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hey I jest had a conversation on the web site you gave me they are pretty cool there are 3500 people playing

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Improve Class Behavior Incentivise students with real in-class risks and rewards and watch them become better students as they progress in the game. Give Lessons Superpowers With Classcraft’s gamified LMS, teach your existing curriculumn and award points when students help each other out, hand in homework and finish self-correcting quizzes. Teach 21st Century Skills Develop meaningful collaboration between students with rich, cooperative gameplay. Knowledge Is Power Use Boss Battles to create new and interactive ways of performing assessment. Automate Your Classes Upgrade your class with integrated tools, from behavior tracking and a gamified LMS to analytics and messaging for students and parents. Collaborate With Parents Expand the game to parents and give them the power to award points at home, manage homework and see their child's analytics. Stay in touch with in-app messaging! After Sampling 100’s Of Teachers Using Classcraft Last Year: 98% reported playing increased student engagement 99% said it had a positive impact on the classroom behavior 88% reported an increase in academic performance 89% reported an increase in overall efficiency in the classroom