Group items tagged

Games are social...

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

Shares 28 case studies of innovative tech-based education initiatives supported by EETT.

Here's a fun infographic that overviews gamified learning and provides a timeline that features some games we've studied for this course.

Also as a follow-up to our conversation on Monday. Although more women are in STEM careers, there is still a lag in those considered "hard sciences." Most people look at mathematics as the core difference, these authors look at creativity. "For instance, three factors that are widely accepted as being positively correlated with creativity are playfulness, curiosity, and willingness to take risks. Studies have found that boys and men are generally more playful than girls and women, and are more curious and more willing to take risks, which could help explain why men are more creatively productive than women in general, and in particular, in the hard sciences."

The article pointed out that the concept that the Internet would drive a singular global culture is false. In order to engage people in different countries or cultures with social networks, brands and content producers will need ever more localised strategies.

"In his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee derives a set of learning principles from his study of the complex, self-directed learning each game player undertakes as s/he encounters and masters a new game. He suggests that adherence to these principles could transform learning in schools, colleges and universities, both for teachers and faculty and, most importantly, for students."

This blurb announces a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop software tools that detect student engagement while using educational software--and use the data to improve learning. "To study engagement, robust learning, and emotion in real classrooms, [Ryan S.J.d. Baker's] research combines quantitative field observations of student behavior while using educational software with data mining to detect patterns in the ways students tackle the tasks that [his educational] software presents."

This article talks about a study on the positive and negative effects of "challenge stress" and "hindrance stress" on motivation to learn and learning performance. I linked the citation here; to access the full text, I recommend using Harvard's E-Research site to search for the Journal of Applied Psychology and then getting to the article via the EBSCO link in the catalog record. (Or else find J Appl Psuchol through EBSCO and log in with Harvard LibX.)

This article talks about experiential gaming and making the construct of flow operational for educational games. The study used a business simulation and questionnaire to measure videogame "flow antecedents" like clear goals and challenge-skill balance, flow state indicators like concentration and time distortion, and the "flow consequences" of learning and exploratory behavior for about 100 students attending a school of economics. "This study is part of an ongoing attempt to develop a usable and valid scale for assessing flow experience in educational games." (Log in with Harvard access)

This author advocates for using pop quizzes to motivate studying. I disagree with his method, but it's still good to see his side of the argument.

more studies needed to sort out what is happening

Updating diary research to blogging. It seems blogging can be therapeutic for teens. More girls in the study than boys. Comments from readers seems to put some difficulties into perspective.

Here is an ethnographer's in-depth look into World of Warcraft. From this site you can read the full book online, read an interview with the author, or listen to a podcast. The author "introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience."

Here is a TEDxBlue talk by Dr. Duckworth on "grit," including overviews of some of her studies.

"It has long been understood that memroy formation is an active and often exhausting process, losing them seems to happen quite passively as time elapses and new information overloads our busy brains. But a new study published February 19 in the journal Cell shows that forgetting is a biochemically active process not unlike memory formation."

"Leading figures from the UK video games industry have criticised the teaching of computer studies in schools, claiming it puts pupils off from pursuing computer science degrees at university..."