Nintendo Wii Teachers

The Nintendo Wii continues to be the hottest gaming console on the market. According to Nintendo, more than twenty-five million Nintendo Wii consoles have sold world-wide. This figure easily trumps the PlayStation 2 and XBox game consoles.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve already heard about the Wii being used in senior citizen centers across the country. You may have even heard about medical centers using the Wii to help in the rehab of patients but here’s one you probably haven’t heard about yet. The Wii is being used in an elementary school classroom in Indiana.

Several teachers at Cumberland Elementary School (http://wl.k12.in.us/cumberland/index.htm), in West Lafayette, Indiana, have begun using the Nintendo Wii in the classroom.

First-grade teacher David Brantley used a parent donation to buy three Nintendo Wii consoles for his classroom.

Ok, in case you’ve made a home under that proverbial rock, you already know that the Wii has motion-sensitive controllers that sense a player’s movements and translates that into whatever game you are playing. The Wii also includes Internet access and channels like news and weather.

David Brantley took some of the Wii’s games and online channels and made them into lessons on weather and geography. The result: “A great virtual map and globe activity,” he says.

Educational researchers like myself have long known that people learn more quickly and easily by interacting with computers or video games. That is one of the reasons why ACE the CSET software and online courses have such a good reputation within the education establishment. Although I must admit a failure of mine, I took this concept to the extreme when I developed an interactive CBEST adventure video game for Windows 98 back in the 90’s. Not only did the idea of playing a video game not mesh well with adults studying for the CSET, some of my joker competitors began running ads that said, “Passing the CBEST is no game.” Ouch!

However, what may not work for adults studying for the CSET, does not necessarily hold true with children who are the main consumers of Wii games around the world. Children love