Commercial Video Games in Educational and Multimedia Contexts

One of the challenges that face us when we try to bring into the classroom commercial materials such as videogames that can be used as educational tools, is to identify appropriate strategies of collaboration with teachers, families and even whole industries. This paper explores how multimedia contexts can be created, in which children turn into active participants in a digital universe in which multiple technologies are present, with the result that videogames are just one of several digital tools. But much more than just the technology needs to be taken into account; we also need to consider the specific content and information embedded in new digital media. This is where the concepts of digital literacies and situated cognition turn out to be particularly interesting, especially when we consider how schools have traditionally worked according to an established curriculum that is very detached from everyday life. The study is based on a qualitative analytical perspective based on narrative and ethnographic approaches. We carried out our research in the course of eleven two-hour sessions of a multimedia workshop in a Spanish public school in which the teacher, children and researchers participated. We worked once a week for eight sessions for about two hours/session. There were 16 boys and girls between seven and eight years of age. Two main results need to be considered. The first tells us that introducing commercial videogames into the classroom was a complex task, and that four different dimensions influence the use of videogames as semiotic and educational instruments in the classroom: a) The educational strategies used by the teacher; b) how videogames can be combined with other new and old technologies; c) the use of PIayStation 2 in the classroom as a well-known motivational tool for the children but unknown and new to the teacher; d) the relationships that children established between real and virtual basketball games. The second result enables us to define several levels of complexity of children's descriptions of their own activities in relation with the game; references to the game's dynamics, considering both material aspects of the console and specific rules of the digital game,are displayed by expert gamers. Our main goal at present is to design digital materials capable of supporting teachers' and families' use of games, and in particular, to reveal the rules that organize their structure, codes and symbolic universe.