Americans believe gaming should be a career and therefore taught in schools, a new survey has found. The majority of those polled in the survey felt that the earlier that kids were able to start their video game skills, the better off they were. And not only should gaming be looked at as a future career, according to Study Finds, but as an extracurricular activity with teams and leagues playing video games. Which shows just how interwoven gaming has become for so many in their daily lives.
Researchers from Wargaming enlisted the pollsters from OnePoll to find out what people thought about having gaming education in schools. And while parents consistently speak out about kids spending too much time on screens, that did not seem to apply to video games when looked at as a career or even as an after-school activity.
What researchers learned from the research was that 41 percent of respondents believed that gaming should be taught in elementary school. 42 percent felt that gaming should be taught in middle school. This is three out of five of the respondents from the poll of over 2,000, according to Newsweek. And more than half believe that in order to get kids interested in gaming as a career, they should get started in gaming leagues at even younger ages still.
College students have the same opinion about the benefits of gaming being taught in schools.
Per the publication, 40 percent of the respondents stated they were in "higher education." And not only did these folks agree that gaming should be taught in schools but if they had the opportunity, 88 percent would have chosen gaming as a college degree to pursue.
According to Study Finds, when asked what they would study if a degree was available in the gaming field, the most popular answers were content creation and streaming, gaming proficiency, graphics, technical arts, or business management.
Outside of learning about video games as a profession, video games have been found to be beneficial in everyday life for kids as well.
According to WebMD, those who play video games with any consistency have better multitasking skills, better memory, and better reaction time when off of the gaming console. This lines up with what researchers have found. And according to Newsweek, that is that gamers have better hand-eye coordination, and teamwork skills, and are better critical thinkers as a result of spending time playing video games.
Will this survey lead to further studies where elementary and middle school kids are given the opportunity to have gaming be part of the main curriculum? Time will tell. But with the future of gaming only getting more sophisticated and AI being used more often, it would not be far-fetched for this to happen.
Source: Study Finds, Newsweek, WebMD, OnePoll