Following on from yesterday's story about fat kids in West Virginian schools being encouraged to shed the pounds by playing Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, here's another interesting new development using Dance Mat games as educational tools.
This time however, kids are not being encouraged to shed their excess burger flab, but instead are learning about the very building blocks of life itself. That’s right! It seems that budding geniuses and mini-geneticists can now learn all about DNA through the power of dance.
Now, our friend Alison who is a dance teacher has often told us about this so-called ‘power of dance’, but we never for one second thought that it might mean we could learn all about DNA strands and possibly, if we danced hard enough, learn how to clone ourselves and save humanity from certain doom, nuclear apocalypse and an impending ecological disaster.
Hang on, SPOnG just got carried away. Dance Mat games are not going to save the future of our race. However, at the Scripps Aquarium near San Diego, they are using them in a cool way to teach kids about the science of DNA.
In a wing devoted to explaining gene expression the brainboxes at Scripps had developed this Dance Mat game that taught the visiting school kids all about the building blocks of life. After learning the basics, the kids then got the chance to play a real DDR-style game where they had to step to the DNA parts as they were being shown on screen.
Apparently, the best part was when one of the 20 amino acids was built. The game would shout out its name. So the kids playing the game would jump on the letters A T T G C and so on... and then the game would shout out, "Cysteine!" As well as being a bit lost on SPOnG, this was also mostly lost on the kids at Scripps, who just wanted to play some DDR!
SPOnG thinks this is a truly awesome example of a videogame being used as an educational tool. Let us know if you have any crackpot ideas yourself for integrating games into the classroom.
This time however, kids are not being encouraged to shed their excess burger flab, but instead are learning about the very building blocks of life itself. That’s right! It seems that budding geniuses and mini-geneticists can now learn all about DNA through the power of dance.
Now, our friend Alison who is a dance teacher has often told us about this so-called ‘power of dance’, but we never for one second thought that it might mean we could learn all about DNA strands and possibly, if we danced hard enough, learn how to clone ourselves and save humanity from certain doom, nuclear apocalypse and an impending ecological disaster.
Hang on, SPOnG just got carried away. Dance Mat games are not going to save the future of our race. However, at the Scripps Aquarium near San Diego, they are using them in a cool way to teach kids about the science of DNA.
In a wing devoted to explaining gene expression the brainboxes at Scripps had developed this Dance Mat game that taught the visiting school kids all about the building blocks of life. After learning the basics, the kids then got the chance to play a real DDR-style game where they had to step to the DNA parts as they were being shown on screen.
Apparently, the best part was when one of the 20 amino acids was built. The game would shout out its name. So the kids playing the game would jump on the letters A T T G C and so on... and then the game would shout out, "Cysteine!" As well as being a bit lost on SPOnG, this was also mostly lost on the kids at Scripps, who just wanted to play some DDR!
SPOnG thinks this is a truly awesome example of a videogame being used as an educational tool. Let us know if you have any crackpot ideas yourself for integrating games into the classroom.
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