Why My Professor like playing ‘Call of Duty’?

My Professor who teaches me financial management is funs of ‘Call of Duty’ series. ‘Call of Duty’ is a famous FPS game. I am wonder that why professional person will like playing game. Not only FM professor, but also my secondary school math teacher is in fever of game. One reasonable answer is playing game for relaxing. It is true but I want to explain this situation in a new view. In following, I will talk about Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive domain and SimCity.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives within education. The taxonomy was first presented in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom. I prefer the revision to original one. The Bloom's Revised Taxonomy is easier to understand.

Mainly, the categories can divide to 2 parts.
The low level: Remember, Understand, Apply
The high level: Analyze, Evaluate, Create

The most important is keeping in a high level cognitive. In this stage, human can continue create new knowledge or add value to the original knowledge. It is meaningful to human being evolution. If we want a better result or performance, we need to keep in high level.

SimCity

SimCity is a city-building simulation game, fist released in 1989. The latest vision is SimCity Societies. It is a well-known game in PC. Honestly, I don’t like this game; it takes long-long-long time to play. However, this game is perfect match what I want to explain.

In the first time playing, the game will provide you a tutorial mission. In the mission, you can learn the basic rule of how to build up a city step by step. Road, house, police station, fire bureau, power-station and a lot of elements will adopt as a city plan. This mission match the low level: you remember the rule, understand the rule, and use it try to build your own city.

After the tutorial mission, it changes to formal mission. The formal mission will set a goal for you to achieve like 100,000,000 populations, but no more hints to you. You need to do it by yourself. During DIY, you will analyze the map for information, evaluate the location for correction, and create a new city. It matches the high level. 

My summary: playing game is good for keeping in a high level cognitive of learning by practice.

More interesting evidences
I often saw elderly person play game in game station. Their performance is cheerful; their reaction even faster than teenagers did. Talking with these elder, you can feel that they are similar to youngster. According to some researches, playing mahjong game 1 hour per day can prevent Alzheimer disease.

G~

Reviewing Kolb model

After talking about VAK model, I want to take a look at Kolb model.

When studying Kolb model, I found it is a quite different guide of people’s learning behavior than VAK model. It summarized that people develop through acquisition, specialization and integration stages in order, like a lifelong process of personal development, while VAK model hadn’t talked about that.

In VAK model, Visual, auditory and kinesthetic style can be dominant way to learn at the same time, but in Kolb, learning styles are mutually exclusive, either do or watch, and either think or feel. 

So as we have learned, Kolb learning model have four-type learning styles.

   1. Diverging – watching and feeling

   2. Assimilating - watching and thinking

   3. Converging - doing and thinking

   4. Accommodating - doing and feeling

Now I want to make a try to apply it.

Before doing so, what products do Nintendo(任天堂) has? You may think of video game console ‘’Wii’’ at first as there are many ads about it. For me, I will immediately connect its classical game ‘‘ Super Mario Bros. ’’ (孖寶兄弟) in mind since I always played it when I was very small. I think most of you may have played it before, and I use it as my example to apply Kolb model. 

Diverging: I played the game in turn, with my brothers or friends (lose then pass others), so when I always lost I usually sat behind them, watching my brothers or friends playing. Also, I imagined different situations of different stages in mind, how I avoid being hit, to take less damage from enemies so that I can play better and therefore play longer. I developed the ways to play in mind based on imagination.

Assimilating: Sometimes I found some excellent players to watch how they can get high score and the way they use to pass stages. When watching them, I will think of the skills they use such as why they use this ways to go rather than another ways or the sequence of getting coins, brick and mushroom etc. Then I developing the strategies based on thinking. 

Converging: I enquired good players for some tips, for examples in one stage, where super mushrooms are (used to grow the role’s size (Mario)), where I can get more coins and bricks etc. And I would try the good tips.

Accommodating: I also use experiential approach such as the skill of jumping on top of enemies, jumping over obstacles and places. After playing for many times, and trying, experiencing and solving the challenges by my own, it is easier to play better gradually.

Do it bring back lots of good childhood memories?

You can find more information about Super Mario Bros. in Wikipedia

 Feel free to share your opinions

Frederick