Are Video Games the New Textbooks?
Digital Literacy Skills

Parenthood seems scary enough—“How do I take care of this kid??!!”—without having to worry about all the things that those pesky “They People” warn about.  You know:  They say babies shouldn’t wear shoes.  They say naps must be 3 hours long.   And of course, a biggie:  They say screen time fries the brain.

Just as we all probably worried that our eyes really would stick that way if we crossed them, I was certainly concerned with ensuring that my first-born didn’t stare at any kind of program on an electronic screen.  That precious, developing brain—I couldn’t let it fry!   When my second child came along 3 years later, however, not only was her older brother watching the occasional video, but it was now 2011 and we had even more screens competing for attention:  multiple computers, an iPad, and iPhones. Technology had come a long way in our house, and it was here to stay.

It’s not just our house.  The Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a digital media innovation lab based at Sesame (as in Street) Workshop, recently postulated that “foundational literacy skills like reading combined with new digital literacy skills that evolve from interactive play must now drive educational change.”  Apparently now there are even entire schools created around game design principals, and they offer students (or, perhaps more appropriately, “users”) the opportunity to build their own academic environment.  An interactive, choose-your-own learning construct, if you will.

We may not be quite ready to send our children to a game-based school, but there’s no denying that, as Mr. Levine said, video games “are ubiquitous in children’s lives and, as such, deserve a new start in the eyes of policymakers and teachers as a potential boon, not a burden, to learning and healthy development.” 

 Guess what?  Ooka Island is already there!

Ooka Island’s creators understand the critical importance of using technology to develop early literacy.  The interactive Ooka Island game sends children on an exciting hero mission, in 3D no less, while building phonological and linguistic skills along the way.  These skills allow kids to make connections between the spoken word and the written word in an entertaining and engaging way that a print program would struggle to match while also laying the foundation for technological understanding in this rapidly increasing world of digital communication. These are skills that are useful in today’s academic and personal life. “Put down our pencils and play”?? We’re already doing that on Ooka Island—and becoming fluent readers, as well!!

- Mommy, PhD (Pre-School, Home-School, and Developing Readers)