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Kimberly Hayes GLS 502-800 Ashley Hudson April 23, 2013 Video Games: An Innovative Approach to Education Ten years ago, I’d have scoffed if I heard video games and education used in the same sentence, and I know a lot of other parents who would still have a similar reaction. In more recent years, however, I’ve been forced to change my opinion, and the person who influenced the change the most is, of all people, my children’s pediatrician, Dr. Jim Poole, the founder of Growing Child Pediatrics in Wake Forest, N.C. Having two children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) isn’t easy in the educational environment present in schools today, and through Dr. Poole’s work with my children, I have come to understand that the reason for the difficulty is that traditional curriculums that teachers have to work with aren’t flexible enough to allow them to tailor to children with learning differences. So what does this have to do with video games? A LOT. Video games have the potential to break down educational barriers that exist in the traditional classroom by providing alternative learning approaches that cater to kids with ADHD and other learning differences, and by building cognitive skills that can help all children succeed in the classroom. When I first discovered that my oldest child might have ADHD from his eighth grade teachers, they all told me that he needed medication before entering high school. I didn’t like the idea of medicating my child, so I began searching for alternatives to medication and discovered neurofeedback therapy. U.S News and World Report published an article about this treatment in
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September 2009 called “Neurofeedback: An ADHD Treatment That Retrains the Brain?” and in it, author Megan Johnson describes a “typical 45 minute session” where “a child is seated in front of a computer” with