Video games and Family: Madrid’s Seventh Science Fair

Summary

At the Seventh Science Fair in Madrid we presented our latest projects involving commercial video games. In addition, we allowed participants to experience how to learn as a family from these new leisure technologies.

Objectives

With this activity we intended to give publicity to a set of research projects whose aim is focused on digital literacy and where the use of video games has significant relevance.

Implementation of the experience

Our work from the late 90s has developed along several lines of collaboration with teachers and families with the aim of jointly planning innovative educational settings. We have designed these settings by combining traditional and new technologies, in order to build bridges between formal and non-formal settings. Currently, our projects try to integrate multiple digital technologies, specially communication online using blogs and video games as innovative educational tools.

The setting related to the non-formal education was generated at Madrid’s Seventh Science Fair (2007). During four days we presented our project together with another three groups from the University of Alcala within our own space. In this space, we gave families the opportunity of playing together with one of the video games we proposed with a specific task. The use of these video games and the activities designed for them had been the result of our prior work in Primary Education classes. Tracking this page you’ll find many of the comments from the participants in the fair’s “stand”.

Conclusions

Our aim with this experience was to show those families that visited our stand keys to look at video games not just as leisure tools but also to discover that, through shared playing, video games can become a tool to build ideas on the world, debate values and explore social rules. We made it possible for video game users, boys and girls, to have an experience that would contribute to their digital literacy, which means not just playing but also controlling its discourse, knowing the rules from which it has been built, or immersing themselves in the virtual world with which they are presented, and all of it from a conscious stance and, therefore, in a critical way.