Nintendo Wii Teachers

interacting with the Wii and so if you can take that passion for video gaming and focus it into an educational lesson, you have struck gold.

Brantley took the scorecards generated from Wii games such as golf, baseball, and bowling, and worked the data into a lesson on data recording and charting.

Third-grade teacher Laura Smith had her students play bowling and then asked questions like, “How many pins did each bowler knock down?” and “How many more do they need to knock down to get a certain score?” The children were practicing how to add in their heads and how to estimate a final score before it is displayed on the screen.

But abstract learning is not the only method of teaching with a Nintendo Wii. Lois Haueisen, used the Wii game Big Brain Academy, which is a learning game specifically designed to improve problem solving skills like: counting, pattern recognition, and size comparisons.

Still, many older people who still hold jobs within the education establishment may not take so lightly to the Nintendo Wii being used by teachers in the classroom. As with anything revolutionary, especially in the field of education, opposition and slow turning wheels are part of the engine that drives us forward.

Is using the Nintendo Wii for learning purposes in the classroom just a fad or the start of something much bigger? Well, it’s hard to say at this point but one thing we can say, computers and gaming systems continue to gradually make inroads into the education establishment in this country. Back in the 70′s and early 80′s, no computers or gaming systems were in any classroom. You were lucky if a “cool” teacher was able to sneak a Commodore 64 in if you promised not to tell anyone. Twenty-five years later, a computer is in nearly every classroom in the country. If this trend continues, having gaming systems like the Wii in every classroom of the future does not seem out of the realm of possibilities.