Profile

Outgoing geek and video game enthusiast. Having grown up playing video games I am aware of the skills I have learned and how it has positively impacted my development. Now I am looking to understand the positive skills that playing games can teach us and develop games to help children’s development of emotional and social skills. Such as confidence, communication and empathy. However, to be objective I am also looking at the evidence that says video games increase violent behaviour in people.

Taking this week as an example.

Monday – Spend morning in school as a mentor, supporting students in deciding what they want to do after leaving school. Afternoon is spent between reading in a cafe and attending a lecture on cyber-psychology.

Tuesday – Reading through scientific studies that demonstrated a link between violent games and violent behaviour in young children. Write up notes made and start to write out a review of the research I’ve covered.

Wednesday – Meeting with my supervisor. He’s a professor who make sure my work is on track. We discuss the quality of the studies I have looked at so far. He make suggestions for further reading. He also uses a lot of big words; so a lot of the time I just nod along. Spend the afternoon in a seminar on different approaches to research.

Thursday – Travel to a school in Christchurch. Spend the day with kids making robots from lego. Give the children tasks that their robot must complete. Use this as a way to introduce children about programming.

Friday – Read through research and books that supervisor recommended. Make notes and send emails to other academics and companies asking them questions to form part of my research.

Saturday – Found a 300 page report from a European research institute on digital games. Read through the entire thing. (May be interesting but its not always exciting!)