Group items tagged

Game-based learning scholar Kurt Squire explores how leveraging young people's interest in gaming could encourage greater youth community involvement and deeper connections to civic and political life.

"In this chapter, we (Steinkuehler and Squire) review studies of videogames and learning, organized in terms of the functional roles in which videogames are typically positioned: (2.1) as content providers, (2.2) as bait for other forms of valuable intellectual activity, (2.3) as vehicles for assessment, or (2.4) as architectures for engagement whose design characteristics can be applied to other content and/or activity domains. We close with a discussion of the recent debate on evidence and the current challenges and trends in the area." (Steinkuehler & Squire, 2013)

Abstract: New information technologies make information available just-in-time and on demand and are reshaping how we interact with information. Meanwhile, schools remain in a print-based culture and a growing number of students are disaffiliating from traditional school. Video games are emblematic of this paradigm shift toward a digital culture and may have potential as a medium for instruction. This case study investigates one enactment of a video game-based curriculum and explores the nature of learning within game-based environments. Specifically, it describes how fictional elements situated the learning experience and induced academic practices, the nature of student-created inscriptions influenced emergent understandings, and the game-based curriculum's game design features pushed students' conceptual understandings, and how learning through a technology-enhanced curriculum triggered students' identities as independent problem solvers. The implications for librarians in a world where teachers and students are designers and creators of information are discussed.

Most educators are dismissive of video games. But corporations, the government, and the military have already recognized and harnessed their tremendous educative power. Schools have to catch up, the authors argue. Shaffer, D. W., Squire, K. R., Halverson, R., & Gee, J. P. (2005). WCER Working Paper No. 2005-4.

This playlist put together by Diedre W. puts all 13 of James Gee's Principles of Game Based Learning together in order. These videos were presented in the Coursera Video Games and Learning MOOC from Wisconsin State facilitated by Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler.

Abstract: Interactive immersive entertainment, or videogame playing, has emerged as a major entertainment and educational medium. As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a designed experience. Players' understandings are developed through cycles of performance within the gameworlds, which instantiate particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). Players develop new identities both through game play and through the gaming communities in which these identities are enacted. Thus research that examines game-based learning needs to account for both kinds of interactions within the game-world and in broader social contexts. Examples from curriculum developed for Civilization III and Supercharged! show how games can communicate powerful ideas and open new identity trajectories for learners.