10 Skills You Practice By Playing Video Games

Anna

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“Schrater said while people can learn in boring ways, it could take them thousands of times to show a significant improvement in whatever they are learning. When people do things they find fun, like video games, the process is sped up.” – MNDaily.com

Video games have gotten a bad reputation. It can be easy to see why: some gamers play 40+ hours a week. Some addictions are so strong that people lose their jobs, their spouses, and even their homes. It’s not a pretty story.

However, that’s just one side of it. Games aren’t all bad.

I play a lot of video games, and I know a lot of gamers. Personal experience has proven to me that gaming isn’t what debaters like Bill O’Reilly make it out to be.

To put it simply, I see video games as more than just fun. The benefits can be put into three sections:

Your Brain Works Better

Today’s games are full of fast-paced, visual action that challenges our minds. Studies find that gamers succeed in detail-oriented careers in fast paced environments. They make better surgeons, drivers, and soldiers – and anything else you could think to add to the list. Games improve your brain in all sorts of ways:

Mar

Self-Ed 101: 5 Reasons Why You Should Unschool

Anna

Basics

101, 5, beginner, five, how to start, reasons, self-ed 101, self-education, should I unschool, starting out, unschooling, why, why unschool

It’s hard to say when exactly I chose unschooling. Looking back, it seems like unschooling always was my choice. I just didn’t know it. Most of my learning happened outside of school. Even when I was in elementary school I understood that. After a few years I started to question why I even needed to be in school at all.

Like a lot of families, I came to choose unschooling through a gradual process. In my first years at school, I enjoyed it. I loved the opportunity to learn. When the system started working against me, I started to question it. Why couldn’t I learn something the higher grades were learning? Why didn’t we read more than one chapter, if everyone was interested and concentrated on it? I didn’t know the world arbitrary then, but that’s what it felt like: a bunch of rules and regulations with no real connection to learning.

Then I discovered homeschooling. That made more sense to me. I already learned more at home than I did at school. A few years after my discovery of homeschooling, I discovered unschooling. That’s when I realized unschooling was what I had wanted all along.

So here I am.

There are a huge number of reasons to unschool. It’s likely there are as many reasons as there are unschoolers. My biggest reasons were not wanting to be stuck with my grade level subject matter. I wanted more.

Among everyone’s reasons to unschool, there are a few things we all agree on: read more