Way back in early 2012, I bought my son a little mouse for his fourth birthday. He had played a few very simple computer games at preschool and at the library, and of course he loved the Xbox 360 and his iPad, but he hadn’t shown any real interest in our computers. The computers at the library had kid-sized peripherals, so I thought the gift of the mouse might be the key that would unlock his interest in the computer.
It wasn’t. He never used it.
Sure, we hooked it up a few times, and tried some simple games and apps, but we just couldn’t hold his interest; computer attempts were undertaken very much under duress, so I stopped trying and instead just let him know the little mouse was available if he wanted it. This hands-off approach has helped with many other things — I don’t force him to eat well, but simply encourage; same with reading and exercise and any number of things, and this has resulted in a healthy eater and a good reader with fantastic penmanship for his age. (Reading was hard, though; imagine, the English teacher mom with a kid who only recently discovered reading was fun. Horror.) Now, at last, it’s worked for the computer… because he wants to make his own Minecraft videos. And so, over the past few days, my husband has been teaching kiddo how to manipulate the mouse, how to use the keyboard, and where to find all the cool stuff he didn’t have in the Xbox version.
Once released, kiddo will play until his time limit is up, and with no real problems (once he accidentally exited the game completely, for instance, and didn’t know how to access it again). He understands how Minecraft works (does he ever; my Xbox 360 harddrive is littered with worlds packed with elaborate constructions), and as a longtime gamer, now that he’s older and more sure of himself, another new interface is a small challenge, just a quick obstacle to navigate so he can get to what he wants. But it’s fascinating to watch this child develop his skills over the years, and to see how those skills have transferred to other parts of his life.
I started him early — I put an Xbox controller in his hands when he was six months old, just to let him feel the buttons and play with the shinies, by but the time he could sit still long enough, we were practicing with real games. We played some Braid; he sat in my lap and jumped at need while I played World of Warcraft. Before his fourth birthday, he was playing games most days, if only for a little while, and his skill has grown dramatically over the years. He gets frustrated easily and he can be a bit of a button masher, but in the past year in particular, he’s become more interested in strategy and planning, and he’s become more patient. Improving his reading skills, too, has helped, and even that can be chalked up to games.
A couple of years ago, we bought a 3DS and got the kiddo a copy of Scribblenauts, which he loved, but found immediately frustrating because it required spelling. My husband (ever the more patient one, and more artistic, too) drew a guide for him, with some 20-30 pictures and the associated words, so kiddo could put cars and shields and zombies and sharks into his world. Still, it was limiting, and he found Pokémon difficult because he wanted to know what the words were on the screen. Not long after, he became more interested in his books, and upset that he wasn’t reading better. The final straw with reading came when he found a stash of old Magic cards. He had fun making up his own stories and ideas, but he begged us to teach him how to play the real game. “When you can read,” we said, and half a year later, we’re beginning (simple) chapter books.
The kid is stubborn; he wants what he wants, and for a long time, what he wanted was to be read to. There’s no potential for failure in listening. It’s passive, and usually comes with snuggles, so that was easier. But once there was something he wanted from it, some measurable end, he immediately sought to improve himself. It’s no accident, I think, that that thing was gaming, because from gaming, too, he had learned again and again about failure, about practice, about picking himself up and brushing off to start again.
Now, as I watch him learn to use a computer, I see more directly how gaming is specifically supplying skills he might not otherwise get for some time. After all, you can argue that other factors contributed to reading skill, but here is something direct; he wants to play and record Minecraft, and this is how he will do it, so he has to learn the mouse. What’s more, he’s learning quickly. It’s not a surprise; of course engaged students learn better and more effectively, but here I am, observing the phenomenon directly, and not in a classroom or an experiment, but in my son’s bedroom, watching as he discovers the joy of saddlebags for his horse. And every time someone tries to tell me that we don’t learn anything from games, it’s him I think of, how he’s grown and developed, and how much of that has come from simply playing how he wants to play.
