The entire time I was reading this I kept thinking about all the computer games I would play in my spare time, usually Saturday mornings. The two that kept coming to mind was the Carmen Sandiago computer game and one other that I cannot remember the title for the life of me. I remember the game took you into a large house of some sort and there was a guy trying to destroy the town below and it was the gamer's job to find their way into the secret laboratory and stop him. For me, the learning video games did not necessarily teach me new information but it did hone skills that I had already learned. They were there to entertain rather than to teach. This was the main difference from the article. Doyal uses video games to get a grasp on the student's attention, keep it, then teach.
"All this goes back to the debate over what constitutes '21st-century skills.' How do schools manage to teach new media without letting go of old media? Is it possible to teach game design and still find time for 'The Catcher in the Rye'?" This is the question that all high school teachers need to ask themselves before fully engaging all games or canon curriculum. I feel like video games are great as supplemental material, and a good way introduce a new idea.
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