Exergames as Teaching Tools: New Forms of Human Machine Interaction

Video games are the focus of a controversial pedagogical debate. Generally we can divide the participants in this debate into two factions: on the one hand we have those who, defending the traditional teaching, reject any possible use of videogames for educational purposes, often without a thorough understanding of them, on the other hand who sees enormous potential in these new tools and promote them, sometimes uncritically. The data presented in this article show that video games have actually led to a change in the lifestyle of young, influencing their activities and habits and that they are an issue that the pedagogy and didactics can not avoid facing. The opportunity to create serius-games for educational purposes looks like a wonderful opportunity to capitalize the time that an increasing number of young people invested in this activity. Since video games are divided into sub-categories, each of which has its own rules and gameplay, its own grammar and syntax, before starting to develop serious-games for educational purpose it is necessary to analize the theoretical scenario of pedagogy to identify what type of video game can be realy usefull for educational purposes.Therefore the aim of this study is to analyze the different types of video games in order to identify which of these might be useful to develop video games in the educational environment.