Clearing out my stared items, I caught this story from Wired – How Video Games Blinded Us With Science – that talks about Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan’s work (Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds) that examined the discussions of WOW players and found that 86% of the conversation was targeted at at figuring out the ruleset of a game, using scientific methods to “cheat”.
Looking at this work in addition to the field trip experience of last week, I think that it is the lack of experience or discovery based learning that is killing off interest in Science in K-12 – especially in K-6. I think too many teachers have found themselves in a rut of explaining Science as a static set of rules without showing in any real world context.
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