TRANSFORMING THE CLASSROOM THROUGH SPORTS VIDEO GAMES: IMPROVING NEW LITERACY SKILLS

This paper examines how sports video games can become a relevant artifact for the development and improvement of cognitive skills by teenagers. Both sport and games have an important role in the lives of children and teenagers: as active participants or spectators, the interest of both activities plays an important role in their leisure. Sport video games provide a setting that combines different aspects of game and sport as the entertainment, the physical, the psychological boost and the competition & collaboration (Wolf, 2003).

The analysis that concerns us is focused on the ethnography (Pink, 2006). We worked with a Secondary School teacher in the field of Physical Education inside the classroom developing an innovative educational setting by using video games as an educational tool. In this context, we use team-sports video games to join real and virtual sports in the classroom setting, thus contributing to the development of cognitive skills that allow teens to actively reflect on the relationship between game content and contexts of everyday activity (Gee, 2008). We will focus on two different skills defined by Jenkins (2006) as simulation and performance.

One one hand, simulation is defined as the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. Considering that simulations are dynamic, and students, as any other person, are usually governed by the intuitive application of grounding assumptions, our finding show how video games can turn into an artifact for students to discover and observe (as researchers do) the emergent properties of these virtual worlds.

On the other hand, performance is considered the ability to adopt alternative identities in a process that encourages improvisation and discovery and allows the player to develop a richer understanding both of the character and himself. We show how this projected identity allows the player to live the character and therefore have an immersion experience in the game, while using the character as a mirror to reflect their own values and choices. Then, learning with the support of video games involves taking and playing with different identities, so the learner has to make "real" choices (in the development of virtual identity), having multiple opportunities to reflect on the relationship between new and existing identities (Gee, 2003).
Thus, our findings show how, through the sports video games, teenagers develop new comprehension skills that enable them to master the different multimedia resources available in their everyday life (Jenkins, 2006).

The educational relevance of this perspective implies that students relate to and reflect on their multiple identities in real and virtual worlds. That is, learners participate fully committed (with much effort and dedication) because they feel their real identity has been extended into a virtual identity that commits them.