edit: I suppose a more clear question would be: What is it specific to homeschooling that you don't like about the XBox? Or am I reading too much into your comment?
I can understand that the balance between Halo 3 app types and Kodu app types is the wrong way around from your perspective, but the XBox does make it fairly cheap and simple to understand how the games are written and provides you with the chance to show your kids how the magic tricks are done, so to speak. I'd have thought that was a good thing :-)
Kudos on educating your kids on what you think is important though; I think it's great when people really think through education and put a lot of effort into it.
That's my question. By banning something with an iron fist, that is exactly the lesson you are teaching. You are putting video games into the same category as drain opener and power tools.
The lesson needed is that there is a time and place for everything, and that deliberate control and planning of activity is valuable. Self-control is learned by practice, not by having a helicopter parent prevent the opportunity to make the choice.
And anyway, planning and self-control are mainly driven by the maturation schedule of the brain. Before age 11 or so (in Caucasians), the frontal lobes simply are not active enough to accept much logic. After that age, the ability to plan and focus concentration develops almost automatically. (One school even did an experiment where math was not taught until that age. There did not appear to be significant bad effects.)
"These days, media is designed to be sticky and most media is driven by advertisements, ..."
You have confused cause with effect. Most content is appealing because people who make unappealing content go broke and stop making it. Survivor bias means that those who sing for their supper have a tendency to create content based on emotional appeal rather than abstract notions of value, and this is equally true for textbook authors, architects, and medieval bards.
As to me confusing cause with effect, I though of that too, and I think that the purveyors of media entertainment aren't simply providing what people want. Why do your crops die on Farmville if you don't log in for a few days? Is that what users want, for their crops to die?
On the other hand, there are some high quality documentaries and prerecorded college lecturers will not hav ethe issues you describe and as an avid (though very bad) GO player I personally feel that there is very little difference between playing on a screen and playing in front of a board.
There's no media-driven conspiracy to alter your mind. There has been an evolutionary trend to favor the animal who could quickly notice the approaching bear versus the animal too intent on its task. Conversely, human evolution has needed intense concentration to drive innovation in things like tool development, construction, and art.
There's media that caters to both. WIth action-packed movies and games thriving on quick attention-shifting, and grinding-based MMO's relying on the ability of players to do repetitive tasks for hours on end.
One could give the same attention-reducing arguments against books and for oral stories. That said, you shouldn't just make a blanket statement against all screen media. Teach your kids how to discriminate between what's good for them and what's not.
I think that's wrong. Forget whether it's a conspiracy or not; many things are effective conspiracies. These days, media is designed to be sticky and most media is driven by advertisements, the goal of which are to make you think you're not good enough unless you buy certian things.
Video is a think pipe directly into your brain, and I believe there is evidence to suggest that "screen time" does alter the way your mind functions.
Meanwhile, back in reality, my wife complains when I ask her to mute the booming commercials in the latest USA Network cop show.
Sadly, legislators are not specialized enough to grasp the notions of loudness and compression in commercials so they could be legislated out of existence.
In any case, I doubt it's so much that video games are detrimental and more that you ought to have a hobby which actively cultivates concentration.
I remember being a kid and playing games like Tomb Raider where you would have to really think and work hard to unlock puzzles. Even games that offered you the opportunity to just fly through them usually had some form of deeper gameplay. For instance, SF Rush was all about things flashing by really fast, but the real challenge was to collect all the keys in the game, which often required a lot of innovative thinking about finding things to jump off.