Sesame Workshop Study Finds Video Games Can Be Good For Your Kids

It's no surprise to many of us who grew up playing the things that the whole claim our parents and other authority figures during our youth used to make about video games rotting our brains has turned out to be pretty much an easily debunked myth. However, for hose holdouts - and grandparents - who don't understand that some of the brightest and most technologically innovative minds today likely "wasted" uncounted hours and quarters playing Missile Command and Zaxxon in their youth, just hit them with this factoid: the Joan Gantz Cooney Center, a Sesame Workshop run thinktank, has just published a study on this exact argument and found that, with proper parental guidance and involvement, video games can be ::gasp:: beneficial to childrens' learning process.

The intro to the study's Executive Summary is below, and the full summary and report can be read online here.

Children are choosing to play digital games for hours during their leisure time. On an average day, children as young as eight spend as many hours engaged in media activity as they spend in school; three-quarters of American children play computer and video games.

Despite their reputation as promoters of violence and mayhem, digital games have in fact been shown to help children gain content and vital foundational and 21st-century skills. From digital games children can learn:

- Content (from rich vocabulary to science to history)
- Skills (from literacy to math to complex problem-solving)
- Creation of artifacts (from videos to software code)
- Systems thinking (how changing one element affects relationships as a whole)

Digital games can also be effective in improving children's health -- from physical fitness and health promotion to disease management.

Digital games offer a promising and untapped opportunity to leverage children's enthusiasm and to help transform learning in America. The analysis offered here results from reviewing the literature and interviewing experts in the nascent field of digital learning.