Weekend Writing #3

Prompt #6

Our school gives each of the students a laptop. It is quite ridiculous to think that there are only a few students who abuse this privilege. During the day, we usually have at least one class where we have to use our computers for work. About half the kids will get their work done and the other half will be playing games. It is arguable that getting work done in the classroom is the best thing to do because you can ask the teacher about anything that you don’t understand. Sure there is edmodo, but there is not a guarantee that you would get a reply in time. There is also the fact that by playing the games, you may not hear the instructions properly and do bad on your assignment. That and teachers might find it offensive for the students to not be paying attention before they took and learning what they are teaching. I did a science fair project on a very similar topic to this to see if just playing video games can make one more resistant to pain. Those tested place their feet into a pan filled with ice water and I would record how long they could last. There was a 3 minute max for safety reasons. The next day, I repeated the test with the testers playing a racing game on an iPad. Each person tested lasted the whole 3 minutes, while before, some only lasted a little over one minute. Since video games draw our attention to them, we can lose our sense of awareness. I am also pretty sure that pain is much more noticeable than a lecture during class, because one can simply space out during class, but any physical disturbance can snap you pack into consciousness. On another note, teachers do not take not of the multiple tabs that are on the student’s screen at the time. They just look at the current page and pay no attention to the tab or window of games in the background. If the teachers are aware of this and start checking for it, it could help to discourage students from playing in the first place, solving the main problem we are faced with.

#Technology #WeekendWriting