Reflection on Meeting:

Date: Sunday 14^th October, 2012

Venue: W104

 

Time: 11:20 to 11:45

 

Chairman: Abdullah Ali

 

Secretary: Hasan Mubarak

 

Participant: Hamdan Mohamed, Abdullkareem

A meeting took place on Sunday the 14^th of October 2012 at conference room W104.  This meeting was called by and chaired by Abdullah Ali to discuss the bad influence of video games on students in stages of their childhood, teenager and adulthood time.  The chairman started the meeting with the problem statement “Video Games Influence” and directed the participants Hamdan and Abdulkareem to run the meeting in a way that we end up proposing some solutions and have a successful meeting.  Hassan was responsible of writing the minutes of meeting.

The agenda proposed by Abdullah was to discuss specific areas that we thought its common in the young generation in our current society.  We decided to discuss the behavior disorder symptoms, study performance, social problems and violent games influences.  We started defining the behavior disorder as a condition/s that are related to mental health problems that lead to disruptive behavior, emotional and social problems to generations in different stages.  AbdulKareem added that it’s important to observe the symptoms of such a problem as it differs from one person to another.  Some lie, others skip school, getting violent and aggressive and so on.  For that, medical care for the kids is an important first step in the treatment of disorders and the need of professional people to evaluate and put a treatment plan in terms of skill development for both the child and parents as well. 

Next point that has been discussed is how the video games affect the students’ performance; Hamdan raised a very good point that a continuous follow-up from parents is a must to discover such deterioration in the student performance and what is the reason behind it. So instead of the student’s playing with video games every day, parents should allow their kids to play those video games only as a reward for their good marks.  And not only that, Abdulkareem stated that the type of video games should be the parents responsibility and PG rated.

We them moved to the next agenda item, Social Problems,  AbdulKareem stated that this is a common problem in kids and teenagers.  Food disorders, smoking, drugs, etc are all example of social problems that teenagers go through in their teenage stage.  AbdulKareems also added that the lack of after school programs cause this problem and that parents must put the future of their children than their personal success in their career.  In short, parents role is very important in overcoming this issue.

At last, the effect of violent games on teenagers was discussed and we came to a conclusion that again parents and school has the biggest role in making student understand that its only a game and it does not reflect the real world, most of violent video games are nothing but stuffing teenagers minds to look up at bad science fiction as icons and this must be stopped.

The topics that have been discussed were very interesting and participants were very energetic as they went through that period or they saw someone close do and that’s why it was such an interesting discussion and all participants were very effective and added great values.  As this was my first meeting/discussion, I enjoyed the way meeting was ran by Abdullah as he gave all the members the opportunity to participate and give their opinion and input.  And on top of this, I was happy that we proposed solution and not only discuss the problems, that way, the meeting was almost perfect.  I look forward to such meetings in future.