The Good Things About Video Games
Good-quality video games offer lots of benefits to children and teens.
Good-quality video games offer lots of benefits to children and teens.
The video game sector is the fastest growing entertainment industry and second only to music in profitability. Global sales of video game software hit almost $17 billion U.S. in 2011. [1]
Sixty-two per cent of Canadian gamers are male:[1] and in a market targeted primarily at males, games that appeal to girls can be hard to find. Generally girls aren't interested in the violent "first person shooter" games favoured by boys, and many of the girl-specific games promote stereotypical interests such as cooking and babysitting. (Industry representatives claim these topics are chosen based on their surveys of what female games want.)
Throughout the elementary years, parents are the main gatekeepers for their children. As such, they need to be actively involved in their children’s video game playing – selecting the games, managing how much time children spend playing, and talking to them about the values in the games they like.
For most teens, playing video games is just another recreational activity they enjoy with friends. The concern is when video game playing becomes an addictive or isolating activity.
Music is one of the most popular and powerful forms of media that kids and teens consume: more than half of Canadian teens say they would die without it, and nearly all consider it very important to their lives. [1]
Students will be able to use the creative process to create and respond to the arts:
Exploring and creating
Explore artistic elements, processes, materials, tools, and techniques
Create artistic works collaboratively and as an individual using ideas inspired by imagination, inquiry, experimentation, and purposeful play
Explore artistic expressions of self, community, and culture through creative processes
MediaSmarts Resources
Outcome Chart - Nova Scotia - Drama Grade 10
The Nova Scotia English arts education curriculum includes expectations that incorporate media education themes. The curriculum document Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curriculum: Arts Education (2001) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between media literacy and arts education:
There are several challenges in identifying evidence-based best practices in media education: first, because most evaluations compare media literacy interventions either to a control group or to another intervention not based on media literacy; second because, as noted above, there is often a mismatch between what a program is teaching and the results it is measuring. As a result, “empirical evidence of best pedagogical practice, as opposed to self-testimony or retrospective reporting, is scarce”[1]; in other words, while we can say generally that media literacy works, it is difficult to say precisely which elements of media literacy programs work better than others.