At the nation's first Apple computer store, everything seems just as the creators of the digital universe intended. Black-clad salesman talk soothingly about titanium-coated Powerbooks, while children sit on futuristic ball-shaped chairs and learn mathematics from translucent i-Macs.
But spend a few minutes talking to parents in line outside the store just after opening -- yes, there is a lengthy queue just to shop -- and it becomes clear that the big question isn't whether to go Mac or Windows. It is whether the nation's success in creating a computer-literate generation is helping or harming millions of young people hooked on everything from Gameboy to the G-4 machines on sale at the Tyson's Corner mall.
Ronald Coleman, his three young boys in tow, speaks for parents across the nation when he bemoans how his children became hooked on video games. After he banned the games from Monday to Wednesday, he says, "my children's concentration increased on homework." Another customer, Peggy Frydenlun, lamented the isolation the games can foster; "I saw a child alone at a birthday party playing a Gameboy," she recalled.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
But if you worry that video games and Gameboy are already taking over children's lives, wait until summer.
On June 11 will come the new Gameboy, "Advance," with near-television quality graphics; manufacturer Nintendo is already predicting 24 million in sales the first year. Then, the theaters will be filled with movies based on computer games such as "Final Fantasy" and "Tomb Raider." That will be followed by a retail war as Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all try to sell you a home video game system.
The efforts of companies such as Apple to focus on education, which drew many of the parents to the store here last week, pale by comparison.
Marketing figures tell the story. Sales of educational software, once the driving force behind a family's computer purchase, lag far behind other products. For example, of the top 100 selling software titles last year, only five were educational titles, down from 14 the year before. Overall, sales of educational software are down 23 percent from two years ago, according to the software tracking firm NPD Intelect (a company that purposefully misspells the word "intellect.")
And what has taken the place of educational titles are games. Games in every conceivable form, but especially the Gameboy and home video systems.
"It's almost as if the Gameboy has become an electronic pacifier," said Steven Koenig, who analyzes software sales for NPD. "You toss it in the back seat to keep the kid quiet." Koenig wonders if software developers have missed an opportunity to develop educational titles for the game systems.
This is occurring at a time when the creation of a computer-literate generation is one of the country's great success stories. But is this the result that was intended? Are children learning anything from these devices and games, or are they harming a generation's development?
The answer is mixed. Many children do improve certain academic skills if they use products that are clearly educational, such as the Math Blaster series of computer games. But for the millions who mostly chat online, play shoot-'em-up games or thumb-peck on their hand-helds, the benefits are far less clear, and the social risks significant. Far too many kids spend hours in isolation, reacting to a computer or game device rather than inventing their own form of play or learning to interact with others.
At Nintendo of America, the US arm of the Japanese company, officials are sensitive to the question of whether products are mesmerizing a generation of children without much educational benefit.
"There is some strategic thinking," Nintendo spokeswoman Beth Llewelyn said. "It is much more than pushing buttons."
Still, Llewelyn said later that one of the great things about Gameboy is that "you don't have to think. You just escape for an hour." And this can be a boon to harried parents on a car trip -- or, as Llewelyn fairly points out, to seriously ill children awaiting chemotherapy.
But Llewelyn acknowledges that even many parents who work at the Nintendo headquarters in Redmond, Washington, try to ensure that their kids aren't glued to their Gameboys. "Obviously our big push is always on parental control," she said.
Indeed, the Gameboy Advance manual comes with this advice, which may come as a shock to many purchasers: "Parents should watch when their children play video games. Stop playing and consult a doctor if you or your child have any of the following symptoms: Convulsions, altered vision, eye or muscle twitching, involuntary movements, loss of awareness, disorientation." The manual says that one in 4,000 people "may have seizures or blackouts" and that players could suffer from repetitive motion injuries.
It is not just Game Boys, of course. Similar concerns are raised about home video systems, computer games and Internet use.
William L. Rukeyser, a former top California education official, is convinced that the "pie in the sky" predictions once made for computer use by students were greatly exaggerated. Rukeyser, who runs an organization called Learning in the Real World (www.realworld.org) cited the claim the computers in the schools would enable students to use computers at work. "You don't need 13 years of education to learn how to use Microsoft Word," he said. "The whole point is that computers are getting more and more intuitive."
Rukeyser stressed that he doesn't disparage all computer use but instead believes there should be much more research on the educational value for children. "If you were rolling out a new medicine or developing a new weapons system, you would automatically be spending 5 or 10 percent on research to see whether it actually worked," he said.
Many colleges across the countries are understandably proud that they have so quickly made computers a core part of their curriculum, often providing high-speed connections in dorm rooms. But some college officials have noticed that the use of computers has gotten out of hand, especially when students who used music-sharing programs such as Napster slowed down the on-line system for others doing research.
Perhaps nowhere has the reaction to computer been more creative than at Missouri's William Woods University.
Last year, school officials became alarmed that so many students spent countless hours at their computers in their dorm room. So few students were attending concerts or lectures that some of the events were canceled. So, under a plan devised partly by Provost Lance Kramer, the school offered a US$5,000 annual rebate on the US$13,500 annual tuition to students who logged off and attended a certain number of extra-curricular activities. (The money was made available by combining or eliminating myriad other scholarships.)
"The freshmen we are getting today are those that by and large grew up with Game Boys," Kramer said. "We were creating a generation of electronic cave persons."
After nearly a full year, the program has proven highly successful, Kramer said. Nearly all of the 185 incoming freshmen participated in it. Of those, about 15 wound up on academic probation -- and almost all of those are the students who failed in "log off" program. For the vast majority of students who successfully logged off and attended extra-curricular activities, grades have improved.
Troy Boulware, a 19-year-old who just finished his freshman year at the university in Fulton, Missouri, said having used Game Boy and home video game systems as a kid, he was drawn to computers on campus. But he found that when he went to the computer lab, "I used up all my time without getting anything accomplished."
Under the school program, Boulware said, he began getting credit for going to everything form a poetry reading to an opera. "I was kind of tricked into doing it and yet I enjoyed it and I was rewarded for it. I never thought I would go to an opera, no way, but it was pretty cool." While he still uses computers, he believes the "log off" program broadened his education far more than web browsing and wound up helping his grades.
Kramer, the provost, is the first person to say that computers have their place on campus. "It would be pretty difficult to survive without them," he said, stressing that students are encouraged to use them for research and other legitimate purposes -- although not for on-line music file swapping.
But for all the hype about the wired generation and the electronic campus, Kramer believes that it is now time to strike a balance, to crack the door on that electronic cave and exposing the Game Boy generation to a world that many had been missing.
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