I think my 10 yr old son has learned a lot playing video games. He has probably played over 100 different games if you count all the free online games he manages to find. Many of them were educational in some way. He loves games like Puzzle Quest and role playing games like World of Warcraft. We just got Rock Band 2 and he is learning words to songs from the 60's through the 90's. We are studying 20th century history and he wanted to learn about the popular music from each decade so this is a fun way to do it. Two of my son's friends came over yesterday to play Rock Band with him and they looked like they had a lot of fun. I like the fact that each person can choose their own level of difficulty for their guitar or drums or whatever they are playing.
My son also likes playing Crosswords on his Nintendo DS and I like this because it won't accept the letters he writes if they are not legible. He used to play games like Brain Age. He likes working on My SAT Coach and it actually has bubbles that have to be filled in so he gets the practice with coloring in the lines that he missed in public school.
If my twice exceptional son were in our public school he would not be learning as much as he is learning at home and homework would take him twice as long as other kids because his dyspraxia/hypotonia slow him down physically when it comes to writing anything. After doing homework, I doubt that he would have any time for learning and playing video games.
He says the next game he would like to get is Buzz Quiz TV for his PS3 because he really enjoys trivia questions. I wish he could participate in Quiz Bowl with other kids like his public schooled gifted friends, but we'll just have to do our own homeschool family version of Quiz Bowl.
He also says his dream job would be to design video games.
