This article “Our Princess Is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education” by Michael F. Young, Stephen Slota, Andrew B. Cutter, Gerard Jalette, Greg Mullin, Benedict Lai, Zeus Simeoni, Mathew Tran, Mariya Yukhymenka sought to find out if the higher use of video games would mean that students K-12 would benefit scholastically. The article seeks to see if video games effect the students, such as their level of achievement and interest in subjects like masth, science, language, history, and physical education.

The topic of this piece was to find the “connection between video game and classroom achievement and to establish the unique affordances and benefits video games may have for school learning.” Their research question was to “determine whether or not the overarching technology has reached enough of a ‘tipping point’ in the past 30 years to support the claim that video games can enhance classroom learning.” The type of data this article needed was reports of acts, behavior, or event. To do this the authors used meta-analysis collecting, at first, academic journals as well as dissertations, thesis papers, and research reports but they found they had to expand their “scope” so they also collected quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods designs, case studies and conceptual articles.

As I read the article I found that, although I believe youths K-12 have an addiction to their technology, I saw the merit in this research. The evidence shows that video games may in fact have a positive effect on students in the classroom. It shows signs of higher motivation, a better grasp on a subject, better test scores, an increase in achievement; however, these findings are by no means found across the board. I did think it very interesting, though, that some students who just observed video games grasped information on a subject better than the actual players, something I would not have guessed.

Each subject had studies that showed positives and negatives and so the question is still only a maybe but it does show the possibilities of what could happen if video games were properly introduced into the academic curriculum.