Part I

By Marc Prensky

From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001)

© 2001 Marc Prensky



It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer
the people our educational system was designed to teach.


Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really
big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a
“singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is
absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid
dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.


Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital
music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the
digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of
their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention
20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and
instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.


It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from
their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most
educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different
brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As
we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains
have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how
they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with
certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how
they have changed in a minute.


What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives.Our students today are all “native
speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.


So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most
aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital
Immigrants.


The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to
their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their
"accent," that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant
accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information
second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than
assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk
were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the
process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life,
scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.


There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker”
accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to
edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people
physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just
sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of one or two examples of your
own without much effort. My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?”
phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at
ourselves and our “accent.”


But this is not just a joke. It’s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated
language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population
that speaks an entirely new language.


This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They
often can’t understand what the Immigrants are saying. What does “dial” a
number mean, anyway?


Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast.
They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before
their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext).
They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and
frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound
familiar?)


But Digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and
practice. These skills are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who
themselves learned – and so choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing
at a time, individually, and above all, seriously. “My students just don’t
_____ like they used to,” Digital Immigrant educators grouse. I can’t get them
to ____ or to ____. They have no appreciation for _____ or _____ . (Fill in the
blanks, there are a wide variety of choices.)


Digital Immigrants don’t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can’t. Of course not – they
didn’t practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years. Digital
Immigrants think learning can’t (or shouldn’t) be fun. Why should they – they
didn’t spend their formative years learning with Sesame Street.


Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV. They are used to the instantaneity
of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their
laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. They’ve been networked most or
all of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic,
and “tell-test” instruction.


Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work
for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today’s
learners are different. “Www.hungry.com” said a kindergarten student
recently at lunchtime. “Every time I go to school I have to power down,”
complains a high-school student. Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay
attention, or that they choose not to? Often from the Natives’ point of
view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying
attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame
them for not paying attention!


And, more and more, they won’t take it. “I went to a highly ranked college where all the professors came from MIT,” says a former student. “But all they did was read from their
textbooks. I quit.” In the giddy internet bubble of a only a short while ago –
when jobs were plentiful, especially in the areas where school offered little
help – this was a real possibility. But the dot-com dropouts are now returning
to school. They will have to confront once again the Immigrant/Native divide,
and have even more trouble given their recent experiences. And that will make
it even harder to teach them – and all the Digital Natives already in the
system – in the traditional fashion.


So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? Unfortunately, no matter how much
the Immigrants may wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go
backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains may already
be different. It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural
migration. Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and
forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they
don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them
learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of
their time grousing about how good things were in the “old country.”


So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives until they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront this issue. And in so doing we need to
reconsider both our methodology and our content.


First, our methodology. Today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what
is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster,
less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other
things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?” While
it’s not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out.


Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and
“Future” content.


“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum. It
is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such
as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like
Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.


“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it
also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that
go with them. This “Future” content is extremely interesting to today’s students.
But how many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it? Someone once
suggested to me that kids should only be allowed to use computers in school
that they have built themselves. It’s a brilliant idea that is very doable from
the point of view of the students’ capabilities. But who could teach it?


As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The first involves a major translation and
change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and
thinking. It’s not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning new stuff”
or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” I suspect it’s the latter.


So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully. My own preference for
teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for
the most serious content. After all, it’s an idiom with which most of them are totally
familiar.


Not long ago a group of professors showed up at my company with new computer-aided design (CAD) software they had developed for mechanical engineers. Their creation was so
much better than what people were currently using that they had assumed the
entire engineering world would quickly adopt it. But instead they encountered a
lot of resistance, due in large part to the product’s extremely steep learning
curve – the software contained hundreds of new buttons, options and approaches
to master.


Their marketers, however, had a brilliant idea. Observing that the users of CAD software were almost exclusively male engineers between 20 and 30, they said “Why not make
the learning into a video game!” So we invented and created for them a computer
game in the “first person shooter” style of the consumer games Doom and Quake,
called The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy. Its player becomes an
intergalactic secret agent who has to save a space station from an attack by
the evil Dr. Monkey Wrench. The only way to defeat him is to use the CAD
software, which the learner must employ to build tools, fix weapons, and defeat
booby traps. There is one hour of game time, plus 30 “tasks,” which can take
from 15 minutes to several hours depending on one’s experience level.


Monkey Wrench has been phenomenally successful in getting young people interested in learning the software. It is widely used by engineering students around the world, with over 1 million copies of the game
in print in several languages. But while the game was easy for my Digital
Native staff to invent, creating the content turned out to be more difficult
for the professors, who were used to teaching courses that started with “Lesson
1 – the Interface.” We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks
into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had made 5-10
minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut them to under 30
seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do all the tasks in
order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace,
we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide
this.) They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted
the traditional pedagogical language of “learning objectives,” “mastery”, etc.
(e.g. “in this exercise you will learn…”); our goal was to completely eliminate
any language that even smacked of education.


In the end the professors and their staff came through brilliantly, but because of the large mind-shift required it took them twice as long as we had expected. As they saw
the approach working, though, the new “Digital Native” methodology became their
model for more and more teaching – both in and out of games – and their
development speed increased dramatically.


Similar rethinking needs to be applied to all subjects at all levels. Although most attempts at “edutainment” to date have essentially failed from both the education and
entertainment perspective, we can – and will, I predict – do much better.


In math, for example, the debate must no longer be about whether to use calculators and computers – they are a part of the Digital Natives’ world – but rather how
to use them to instill the things that are useful to have internalized, from
key skills and concepts to the multiplication tables. We should be focusing on
“future math” – approximation, statistics, binary thinking.


In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history
and evolution can’t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of
all the 181 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented.


We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process has already begun – I know college
professors inventing games for teaching subjects ranging from math to
engineering to the Spanish Inquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing and
spreading their successes.


A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t work for ‘my subject.’” Nonsense. This is just rationalization
and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where
I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt–
on the spot – to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical
philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners
have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation
where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can
experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s
List. It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators – not to mention ineffective –
to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only
way to teach, and that the Digital Natives’ “language” is not as capable as
their own of encompassing any and every idea.


So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change. It’s high time for them to stop
their grousing, and as the Nike motto of the Digital Native generation says,
“Just do it!” They will succeed in the long run – and their successes
will come that much sooner if their administrators support them.


See also:

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2: The scientific evidence behind the Digital Native’s thinking changes, and the evidence that Digital Native-style learning works!


Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning
(McGraw-Hill, 2001), founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning
company, and founder of The Digital Multiplier, an organization dedicated to
eliminating the digital divide in learning worldwide. He is also the creator of
the sites a href="http://www.SocialImpactGames.com%3E">www.SocialImpactGames.com>;, a href="http://www.DoDGameCommunity.com%3E">www.DoDGameCommunity.com>; and a href="http://www.GamesParentsTeachers.com%3E">www.GamesParentsTeachers.com>; . Marc holds an MBA from
Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found
at a href="http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp%3E">www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>;. Contact Marc at marc@games2train.com







Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants II


Do They Really Think Differently?




Part II

By Marc Prensky

From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vo 6, December 2001)

l. 9 No.© 2001 Marc Prensky

Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures.

-Dr. Bruce D. Berry, Baylor College of Medicine



Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received;
over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV
(a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen—all before
the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of
book reading. These are today’s “Digital Native” students. 1


In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today’s
educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives’ brains are likely physically
different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I
submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital
Natives in their “native language.”


Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.


Neuroplasticity

Although the vast majority of today’s educators and teachers grew up with the understanding that the human brain doesn’t physically change based on stimulation it receives from the
outside—especially after the age of 3— it turns out that that view is, in fact,
incorrect.


Based on the latest research in neurobiology, there is no longer any question that stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think, and that these transformations go on throughout
life. The brain is, to an extent not at all understood or believed to be
when Baby Boomers were growing up, massively plastic. It can be, and is,
constantly reorganized. (Although the popular term rewired is
somewhat misleading, the overall idea is right—the brain changes and organizes
itself differently based on the inputs it receives.) The old idea that we have
a fixed number of brain cells that die off one by one has been replaced by
research showing that our supply of brain cells is replenished constantly. 2 The brain constantly reorganizes itself all our
child and adult lives, a phenomenon technically known as neuroplasticity.


One of the earliest pioneers in this field of neurological research found that rats in “enriched” environments showed brain changes compared with those in “impoverished”
environments after as little as two weeks. Sensory areas of their brains were
thicker, other layers heavier. Changes showed consistent overall growth,
leading to the conclusion that the brain maintains its plasticity for life.
3


Other experiments leading to similar conclusions include the following:


• Ferrets’ brains were physically rewired, with inputs from the eyes switched to where the hearing nerves went and vice versa. Their brains changed to accommodate the new
inputs. 4

• Imaging experiments have shown that when bind people learn Braille, “visual” areas of their brains lit up. Similarly, deaf people use their auditory cortex to read signs. 5

• Scans of brains of people who tapped their fingers in a complicated sequence that they had practiced for weeks showed a larger area of motor cortex becoming activated then when
they performed sequences they hadn’t practiced. 6

• Japanese subjects were able learn to “reprogram” their circuitry for distinguishing “ra” from “la,” a skill they “forget” soon after birth because their language doesn’t
require it. 7

• Researchers found that an additional language learned later in life goes into a different place in the brain than the language or languages learned as children. 8

• Intensive reading instruction experiments with students aged 10 and up appeared to create lasting chemical changes in key areas of the subjects’ brains. 9

• A comparison of musicians versus nonplayers brains via magnetic resonance imaging showed a 5 percent greater volume in the musicians’ cerebellums, ascribed to adaptations
in the brain’s structure resulting from intensive musical training and
practice. 10


We are only at the very beginning of understanding and applying brain plasticity research. The goal of many who are—such as the company Scientific Learning—is
“neuroscience-based education.” 11


Malleability

Social psychology also provides strong evidence that one’s thinking patterns change depending on one’s experiences. Until very recently Western philosophers and psychologists
took it for granted that the same basic processes underlie all human thought.
While cultural differences might dictate what people think about, the strategies
and processes of thought, which include logical reasoning and a
desire to understand situations and events in linear terms of cause and effect,
were assumed to be the same for everyone. However this, too, appears to be
wrong.


Research by social psychologists 12 shows that people who grow up
in different cultures do not just think about different things, they actually think
differently. The environment and culture in which people are raised affects
and even determines many of their thought processes.


“We used to think that everybody uses categories in the same way, that logic plays the same kind of role for everyone in the understanding of everyday life, that memory,
perception, rule application and so on are the same,” says one. “But we’re now
arguing that cognitive processes themselves are just far more malleable than
mainstream psychology assumed.” 13


We now know that brains that undergo different developmental experiences develop differently, and that people who undergo different inputs from the culture that surrounds
them think differently. And while we haven’t yet directly observed Digital
Natives’ brains to see whether they are physically different (such as
musicians’ appear to be) the indirect evidence for this is extremely strong.


However, brains and thinking patterns do not just change overnight. A key finding of brain plasticity research is that brains do not reorganize casually, easily,
or arbitrarily. “Brain reorganization takes place only when the animal pays
attention to the sensory input and to the task.” 14 “It requires very hard work.”15 Biofeedback requires upwards of 50 sessions to produce
results. 16 Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWard program
requires students to spend 100 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 5 to 10 weeks
to create desired changes, because “it takes sharply focused attention to
rewire a brain.” 17


Several hours a day, five days a week, sharply focused attention—does that remind you of anything? Oh, yes—video games! That is exactly what kids have been doing ever since Pong
arrived in 1974. They have been adjusting or programming their brains to
the speed, interactivity, and other factors in the games, much as boomers’
brains were programmed to accommodate television, and literate man’s brains
were reprogrammed to deal with the invention of written language and reading
(where the brain had to be retrained to deal with things in a highly linear
way.) 18 “Reading does not just happen, it is a
terrible struggle.” 19
“Reading [has] a different
neurology to it than the things that are built into our brain, like spoken
language.” 20 One of the main focuses of schools for the
hundreds of years since reading became a mass phenomenon has been retraining
our speech-oriented brains to be able to read. Again, the training involves
several hours a day, five days a week, and sharply focused attention.


Of course just when we’d figured out (more or less) how to retrain brains for reading, they were retrained again by television. And now things have changed yet again,
and our children are furiously retraining their brains in even newer ways, many
of which are antithetical to our older ways of thinking.

Children raised with the computer “think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were
parallel, not sequential.” 21 “Linear
thought processes that dominate educational systems now can actually retard
learning for brains developed through game and Web-surfing processes on the
computer.” 22


Some have surmised that teenagers use different parts of their brain and think in different ways than adults when at the computer. 23 We
now know that it goes even further—their brains are almost certainly physiologically
different. But these differences, most observers agree, are less a matter
of kind than a difference of degree. For example as a result of repeated
experiences, particular brain areas are larger and more highly developed, and
others are less so.


For example, thinking skills enhanced by repeated exposure to computer games and other digital media include reading visual images as representations of three-dimensional
space (representational competence), multidimensional visual-spatial skills,
mental maps, “mental paper folding” (i.e. picturing the results of various
origami-like folds in your mind without actually doing them), “inductive
discovery” (i.e. making observations, formulating hypotheses and figuring out
the rules governing the behavior of a dynamic representation), “attentional
deployment” (such as monitoring multiple locations simultaneously), and
responding faster to expected and unexpected stimuli. 24

While these individual cognitive skills may not be new, the particular combination and intensity is. We now have a new generation with a very different blend of
cognitive skills than its predecessors—the Digital Natives.


What About Attention Spans?

We hear teachers complain so often about the Digital Natives’ attention spans that the phrase “the attention span of a gnat” has become a cliché. But is it really true?

“Sure they have short attention spans—for the old ways of learning,” says a professor. 25 Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for anything else that actually interests them. As a result of
their experiences Digital Natives crave interactivity—an immediate
response to their each and every action. Traditional schooling provides very
little of this compared to the rest of their world (one study showed that
students in class get to ask a question every 10 hours) 26 So it generally isn’t hat Digital Natives can’t pay
attention, it’s that they choose not to.


Research done for Sesame Street reveals that children do not actually watch television continuously, but “in bursts.” They tune in just enough to get the gist and be sure it makes
sense. In one key experiment, half the children were shown the program in a room
filled with toys. As expected, the group with toys was distracted and watched
the show only about 47 percent of the time as opposed to 87 percent in the
group without toys. But when the children were tested for how much of the show
they remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. “We were led
to the conclusion that the 5-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite
strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so
that they looked at what was for them the most informative part of the program.
The strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from
increased attention.” 27


What Have We Lost?

Still, we often hear from teachers about increasing problems their students have with reading and thinking. What about this? Has anything been lost in the Digital Natives’
“reprogramming” process?


One key area that appears to have been affected is reflection. Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to generalize, as we create “mental models”
from our experience. It is, in many ways, the process of “learning from
experience.” In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and
opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of
the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives
is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical
thinking in the learning (either built into the instruction or through a
process of instructor-led debriefing) but still do it in the Digital Native
language. We can and must do more in this area.


Digital Natives accustomed to the twitch-speed, multitasking, random-access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV,
and Internet are bored by most of today’s education, well meaning as it
may be. But worse, the many skills that new technologies have actually
enhanced (e.g., parallel processing, graphics awareness, and random
access)—which have profound implications for their learning—are almost totally
ignored by educators.


The cognitive differences of the Digital Natives cry out for new approaches to education with a better “fit.” And, interestingly enough, it turns out that one
of the few structures capable of meeting the Digital Natives’ changing learning
needs and requirements is the very video and computer games they so enjoy. This
is why “Digital Game-Based Learning” is beginning to emerge and thrive.


But Does It Work?

Of course many criticize today’s learning games, and there is much to criticize. But if some of these games don’t produce learning it is not because they are games,
or because the concept of “game-based learning” is faulty. It’s because those
particular games are badly designed. There is a great deal of evidence that
children’s learning games that are well designed do produce
learning, and lots of it — by and while engaging kids.


While some educators refer to games as “sugar coating,” giving that a strongly negative connotation—and often a sneer—it is a big help to the Digital Natives. After
all, this is a medium they are very familiar with and really enjoy.


Elementary school, when you strip out the recesses and the lunch and the in-between times, actually consists of about three hours of instruction time in a typical 9 to 3
day. 28 So assuming, for example, that learning
games were only 50% educational, if you could get kids to play them for six
hours over a weekend, you’d effectively add a day a week to their schooling!
Six hours is far less than a Digital Native would typically spend over a
weekend watching TV and playing videogames. The trick, though, is to make the
learning games compelling enough to actually be used in their place. They must
be real games, not just drill with eye-candy, combined creatively with real
content.


The numbers back this up. The Lightspan Partnership, which created PlayStation games for curricular reinforcement, conducted studies in over 400 individual school
districts and a “meta-analysis” as well. Their findings were increases in vocabulary
and language arts of 24 and 25 percent respectively over the control groups,
while the math problem solving and math procedures and algorithms scores were
51 and 30 percent higher. 29


Click Health, which makes games to help kids self-manage their health issues, did clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. They found, in the case of
diabetes, that kids playing their games (as compared to a control group playing
a pinball game) showed measurable gains in self-efficacy, communication with
parents and diabetes self-care. And more importantly, urgent doctor visits for
diabetes-related problems declined 77 percent in the treatment group. 30


Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWard game-based program for retraining kids with reading problems conducted National Field Trials using 60 independent
professionals at 35 sites across the US and Canada. Using standardized tests,
each of the 35 sites reported conclusive validation of the program’s
effectiveness, with 90 percent of the children achieving significant gains in
one or more tested areas. 31


Again and again it’s the same simple story. Practice—time spent on learning—works. Kid’s don’t like to practice. Games capture their attention and make it happen. And
of course they must be practicing the right things, so design is
important.


The US military, which has a quarter of a million 18-year-olds to educate every year, is a big believer in learning games as a way to reach their Digital Natives. They know
their volunteers expect this: “If we don’t do things that way, they’re not
going to want to be in our environment.” 32


What’s more, they've observed it working operationally in the field. “We’ve seen it time and time again in flying airplanes, in our mission simulators.” Practical-minded Department
of Defense trainers are perplexed by educators who say “We don’t know that
educational technology works—we need to do some more studies.” “We KNOW the
technology works,” they retort. We just want to get on with using it.” 33

__________


So, today’s neurobiologists and social psychologists agree that brains can and do change with new input. And today’s educators with the most crucial learning
missions—teaching the handicapped and the military—are already using custom
designed computer and video games as an effective way of reaching Digital
Natives. But the bulk of today’s tradition-bound educational establishment seem
in no hurry to follow their lead.


Yet these educators know something is wrong, because they are not reaching their Digital Native students as well as they reached students in the past. So they face an
important choice.


On the one hand, they can choose to ignore their eyes, ears and intuition, pretend the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant issue does not exist, and continue to use their
suddenly-much-less-effective traditional methods until they retire and the
Digital Natives take over.

Or they can chose instead to accept the fact that they have become Immigrants into a new Digital world, and to look to their own creativity, their Digital Native
students, their sympathetic administrators and other sources to help them
communicate their still-valuable knowledge and wisdom in that world’s new
language.


The route they ultimately choose—and the education of their Digital Native students—depends very much on us.


Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning
(McGraw-Hill, 2001), founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning
company, and founder of The Digital Multiplier, an organization dedicated to
eliminating the digital divide in learning worldwide. He is also the creator of
the sites a href="http://www.SocialImpactGames.com%3E">www.SocialImpactGames.com>;, a href="http://www.DoDGameCommunity.com%3E">www.DoDGameCommunity.com>; and a href="http://www.GamesParentsTeachers.com%3E">www.GamesParentsTeachers.com>; . Marc holds an MBA from
Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found
at a href="http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp%3E">www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>;. Contact Marc at marc@games2train.com.



Notes

1. These numbers are intended purely as “order of magnitude” approximations; they obviously vary widely for individuals. They were arrived at in the following
ways ( Note: I am very interested in any additional data anyone has on this):

Videogames: Average play time: 1.5 hours/day (Source: “Interactive Videogames, Mediascope, June 1966.) It is likely to be higher five years later, so 1.8 x 365 x 15 years = 9,855 hours.

E-mails and Instant Messages: Average 40 per day x 365 x 15 years = 219, 000. This is not unrealistic even for pre-teens – in just one instant messaging connection there
may be over 100 exchanges per day – and most people do multiple connections.

TV: “Television in the Home, 1998: Third Annual Survey of Parent and Children, Annenburg Policy Center, June 22, 1998, gives the number of TV hours watched per day as 2.55. M. Chen, in the
Smart Parents Guide to Kid’s TV, (1994) gives the number as 4 hours/day.
Taking the average, 3.3 hrs/day x 365 days x 18 years = 21,681.

Commercials: There are roughly 18 30-second commercials during a TV hour. 18 commercials/hour x 3.3 hours/day x 365 days x 20 years (infants love commercials) = 433,620.

Reading: Eric Leuliette, a voracious (and meticulous) reader who has listed online every book he has ever read (www.csr.utexas.edu/personal/leuliette/fw_table_home.html), read about
1300 books through college. If we take 1300 books x 200 pages per book x 400
words per page, we get 10,400,000,000 words. Read at 400 words/that gives
260,000 minutes, or 4,333 hours. This represents a little over 3 hours/book.
Although others may read more slowly, most have read far fewer books than
Leuliette.

2. Paul Perry in American Way, May 15, 2000.

3. Renate Numella Caine and Geoffrey Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain,

Addison-Wesley, 1991, p.31.

4. Dr. Mriganka Sur, Nature, April 20, 2000.

5. Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times, April 24, 2000.

6. Leslie Ungerlieder, National Institutes of Health.

7. James McLelland, University of Pittsburgh.

8. Cited in Inferential Focus Briefing, September 30, 1997.

9. Virginia Berninger, University of Washington, American Journal of Neuroradiology, May 2000.

10. Dr. Mark Jude Tramo of Harvard. Reported in USA Today December 10, 1998.

11. Newsweek, January 1, 2000.

12. They include Alexandr Romanovich Luria (1902-1977), Soviet pioneer in neuropsychology, author of The Human Brain and Psychological Processes (1963),
and, more recently, Dr. Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan.

13. Quoted in Erica Goode, “How Culture Molds Habits of Thought,” New York Times, August 8, 2000.

14. John T. Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years, The Free Press, 1999, p. 155.

15. G. Ried Lyon, a neuropsychologist who directs reading research funded by the National Institutes of Health, quoted in Frank D. Roylance “Intensive Teaching
Changes Brain,” SunSpot, Maryland’s Online Community, May 27, 2000.

16. Alan T. Pope, research psychologist, Human Engineering Methods, NASA. Private communication.

17. Time, July 5, 1999.

18. The Economist, December 6, 1997.

19. Kathleen Baynes, neurology researcher, University of California – Davis, quoted in Robert Lee Hotz “In Art of Language, the Brain Matters “ Los Angeles
Times, October 18, 1998.

20. Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga, neuroscientist at Dartmouth College quoted in Robert Lee Hotz “In Art of Language, the Brain Matters “ Los Angeles Times,
October 18, 1998.

21. William D. Winn, Director of the Learning Center, Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington, quoted in Moore, Inferential Focus
Briefing (see 22).

22. Peter Moore, Inferential Focus Briefing, September 30, 1997.

23. Ibid.

24. Patricia Marks Greenfield, Mind and Media, The Effects of Television, Video Games and Computers, Harvard University Press, 1984.

25. Dr. Edward Westhead, professor of biochemistry (retired), University of Massachusetts.

26. Graesser, A.C., & Person, N.K. (1994) “Question asking during tutoring,”. American Educational Research Journal, 31, 104-107.

27. Elizabeth Lorch, psychologist, Amherst College, quoted in Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Little Brown
& Company, 2000, p. 101.

28. John Kernan, President, The Lightspan Partnership. Personal communication.

29. “Evaluation of Lightspan. Research Results from 403 schools and over 14,580 students,” February 2000, CD ROM.

30. Debra A. Lieberman, “Health Education Video Games for Children and Adolescents: Theory, Design and Research Findings,” paper presented at the annual meeting of
the International Communications Association, Jerusalem, 1998.

31. Scientific Learning Corporation, National Field Trial Results (pamphlet.) See also Merzenich et al., “Temporal Processing Deficits of
language-Learning Impaired Children Ameliorated by Training” and Tallal, et
al., “Language Comprehension in Language Learning Impaired Children
Improved with Acoustically Modified Speech,” in Science, Vol. 271,
January 5, 1996, pp 27-28 & 77-84.

32. Michael Parmentier, Director, Office of Readiness and Training, Department of Defense, The Pentagon. Private briefing.

33. Don Johnson, Office of Readiness and Training, Department of Defense, The Pentagon. Private briefing.