LudoScience

Serious Games

Author(s) : Pilar Lacasa
Editor : Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date : 09-19-2013
Language : english

This book highlights the potential of video games for education purposes. Over 250 pages, 10 chapters are dealing with a different topic each. For example, one chapter relies on the Final Fantasy series to demonstrate the artistic potential of video games, while another chapter presents a classroom experiment conducted over the Harry Potter games and movies to make the students work on storytelling. While the book subject is very interesting, the quality of its chapters varies heavily. The best chapters are the ones where the author presents actual classroom experiments she conducted (with the games Harry Potter, Boom Blox and New Super Mario Bros. Wii). The others chapters remains purely theoretical. However, this book seems to target a "teacher who doesn't know anything about video games" audience, as show by the first chapter trying to summarize the history of video games in a few pages. Unfortunately, this chapter is very hard to read due to a messy outline, and it's also filled with several shortcoming and inaccuracies. It's also unfortunate that the author always quotes Wikipedia to presents the games she refers to, when a personal presentation would have been more suited to the reader. This flaws on the "video games" side are offset by the excellent work of the author on the "teaching and learning" side: the scientific references are many and solid, and they are presented in a intelligible way to the reader. Overall, this book offers interesting theoretical thoughts for teachers who doesn't know anything about video games, but you'll have to read additional books or articles if you want to put games in practice in your classroom.