yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Why Geeking Out on Games is Good for Kids | Big Think


2m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Schools can be kind of Cromwellian places. They can be puritanical. They can be places where it's reading, writing, and arithmetic, and nothing else. And games are actually quite educational if they're educational. When you say, "Okay, we're going to play Monopoly," the first half an hour is taken up by which rules we're playing by. And there's just ridiculous disagreements.

And the same is true for physical games. I don't know if you're familiar with foursquare, but it's one of my favorite recess games. What rules are we playing with? The kids could use up all of their recess time just negotiating the rules. And it sort of seems a little bit silly, but it's actually very healthy for children to know how to negotiate and navigate.

If you think about an adult workplace and all the internal politics of who's going to lead the meeting, who gets to speak at the meeting, whose word is worth more? I mean, office politics actually is the same thing as what's going on in foursquare as they're negotiating the rules. And so having those social and emotional skills and giving kids the space and the time for that is actually very important to learning and development.

My eldest son is a special needs child and was very delayed in his language. He was three, which is very unusual, and really didn't speak very much. He kind of became more verbal after the age of three, which is very late in development. And I took him to all sorts of specialists trying to figure out what was wrong, and I got all sorts of very frightening diagnoses.

But my husband started playing chess with my son, and it was a huge sigh of relief because I could tell that there was a lot going on here, even though he had very limited verbal ability. And one of the beautiful things—there are many beautiful things about chess—but one of the beautiful things about chess is that it's non-verbal.

And in schools, teachers tend to valorize verbal agility. So I did very well as a child because I chat a lot. You could be highly, highly intelligent but not have that level of verbal agility. And so one of the things we have to do in schools is give different types of children with different strengths and growth areas opportunities to learn and be confident and excel.

And so what I love about chess is not only is it just a beautiful game and as important as mathematical thinking and strategic thinking, but it puts language aside. And so it gives children who are less verbal an opportunity to shine and be confident and have a level of mastery. And so much of school is about reading and verbal agility.

And so you create this kind of sacred space where a different kind of intelligence can kind of bubble to the top.

More Articles

View All
Capital by Thomas Piketty | Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has been getting a lot of attention lately because it’s addressing an issue that matters a lot to a lot of folks: the issue of income inequality and wealth inequality. My goal here isn’t to have a view on the b…
Example of derivative as limit of average rate of change
Stacy wants to find the derivative of f of x = x² + 1 at the point x = 2. Her table below shows the average rate of change of f over the intervals from x to 2 or from 2 to x, and these are closed intervals for x values. They get increasingly closer to two…
How To Make $1000 Per Day Cleaning Windows
I had noticed that this guy Oliver and Josh Lesser were going door to door. They were making like a grand, two grand a day. I saw that was interesting, so I started going door to door. I made 700 bucks in a single day, and from there, I was hooked. How d…
Examples writing decimals and fractions greater than 1 shown on grids
We’re told each big square below represents one whole. Express the shaded area as both a mixed number and a decimal. So pause this video and see if you can do that. What would this be as a mixed number, and then what would it be as a decimal? All right, …
Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic
[Music] We hear it so much that it feels like a buzzword, but it is far from it. Climate change is a real and serious issue. But isn’t the climate always changing? What exactly is climate changing? Why should we care? Well, the Earth’s climate has change…
How a Fish Might Grow Your Next Salad | Decoder
This is a seed. It doesn’t look like much right now, but if you … put it in the ground, give it some water, fight off invaders, and wait a little while… After a few weeks with a little luck, you might end up with a head of lettuce. That’s a lot of work fo…