Summer school? Reading books? Camp? Computer games might be a better choice

My daughter will be studying world history next year. While she has traveled widely for a child of her age and she is smart, her knowledge of ancient world culture is limited. I would like her to enter next year with a working framework of historical events so she has a better context for learning her history lessons.

Should I buy her a world history textbook to read over the summer, talk to her about ancient world events, or should I buy her the computer game Civilization?

According to a growing body of research, the computer game has become the best choice.

Like most American kids, my daughter has started her summer break. Just like any parent I want my child to get away from the school grind and grow as a young adult in different ways, either through camps, travel, or using her own sense of imagination to create her own worlds, but I am also wary of my daughter “wasting” her summer, and I want her to be prepared when school starts again in a few months. While enrichment programs have been popular over the last decade, the economic downturn has made many people re-examine their expenses, meaning more kids will be forced to spend the summer veg’ing out at home. While I don’t think children have to be shuttled from one camp to another, I also don’t believe sitting around staring at television re-runs or humped over the computer texting with friends is the best use of the summer months. There needs to be balance: there should be a good dose of hang-out time combined with adventure and learning. While video games are seen by many parents–and even President Obama–as unhealthy timewasters, they can actually play a significant role in educational development. I have followed the gaming industry and been to E3, and I am always amazed at the amount of schlock in the game world. While it is easy to stereotype gamers as anti-social pre-pubescents, and write-off all of the games as misogynistic and violent, it is not a fair characterization of the entire industry. In reality there is tremendous creativity in many game designs (Spore is a good example), and some games bend reality in fascinating, and sometimes educational, ways.

John Black, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Telecommunications and Education at Teachers College, told me that certain computer games can greatly help a student (“I would recommend a child playing Civilization the summer before taking world history”), multiplayer games develop team-work, and that social networking sites develop better writing. One of the major weaknesses in K-12 writing is being insensitive to the audience, which is difficult to define when writing on paper, but it is made concrete when writing in a social networking environment. Writing on social networking sites also helps children practice in developing multimedia presentations, which are viewed and critiqued by their friends. My daughter makes design collages on a site called Polyvore and her friends vote on their favorites.

While I tend to believe sitting around reading a novel is a good way to wile away the days of summer, even novelists are into games. As Nathan Englander, the gifted novelist, told the New Yorker about the game Gears of War: “In literary terms, it’s a close-second-person shooter. It’s Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You’re both totally involved and totally watching.” Englander described the blown away world of Gears in literary terms: “There’s the hospital from ‘Blindness’ and the house from ‘The Ghost Writer,’ and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those.”

Still doubtful about the power of games?

Everyone knows that game-playing surgeons complete laparoscopic surgeries 27 percent faster than their non-game-playing peers, and with 37 percent fewer errors.

But just playing any game doesn’t create the world’s next Ivy Leaguer. It is complicated, and not all of the games are so great. Games are certainly not a total substitute for a summertime of books, travel, sports, swimming, hanging out with friends, or climbing a sycamore tree, but they can be a part of a summer that leads children into other worlds, and improve the understanding of different concepts. Professor Black recommends Civilization for history, Spore in preparation for biology, DimensionM for pre-algebra. Black also likes other problems solving games like DinerDash, and Mario Brothers and Zoombinis games for younger kids.

Instead of considering games as an activity for anti-social cretins, good games– played on a limited basis–have tremendous learning merit, put the user into a world akin to a novel, and they can make kids smarter intellectually and socially.