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bartmon

Intro to GLaDOS 101: A Professor's Decision to Teach Portal - Giant Bomb - 0 views

www.giantbomb.com/...3206

games

shared by bartmon on 10 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "This is a course about what it means to be human, focused on some of the enduring questions our existence inevitably raises for us. The goals of this course reflect this focus."You roll your eyes, figuring the next four (or five (or six)) years were supposed to be about shaping your own destiny, learning how to drink alcohol without throwing up and playing a bunch of games until some ungodly hour in the morning. Grudgingly, you look at the reading list. Gilgamesh, Aristotle, Goffman, Donne, Portal....Portal. No, you haven't misread. But understandably, you look closer.Week 4February 7: Montaigne, Essays, selectedFebruary 9: Goffman, Presentation of Self, Introduction and Ch. 1February 11: Portal (video game developed by Valve Software)
  • "She's got her forestage and she's got her backstage, the stuff she doesn't want you to see," he said. "The game does an amazing job of slowly peeling back her veneer, and the stuff she doesn't want you to see or know is so slowly revealed. Those students started to exchange stories about what they saw behind the scenes or writing on the walls, little stuff they would find, little artifacts. That really provoked a lot of interesting connections between the Goffman text and GLaDOS as a character, as a personality, and the way that the environment is an extension of her and her personality. That really clicked."
  • bartmon on 10 Jun 11
     
    Interesting read regarding the game Portal being used in a freshman humanities course, alongside classics like Gilgamesh and readings about Aristotle.
bartmon

Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists - 0 views

cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/...puzzle-that-baffled-scientists

shared by bartmon on 20 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.
  • "People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,"
  • "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days,"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,"
  • bartmon on 20 Sep 11
     
    Good read on gaming and crowd sourcing to solve long-standing scientific problems.
Chas Brua

Lessons Learned in Playful Game Design - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...33876

gamification collaboration

shared by Chas Brua on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The amount of activity on the site, particularly in the first half of the semester, produced more content than I’d ever seen in one of my course web spaces. Not all of it was of equal value, of course, but sorting through it became a part of my day akin to checking Facebook or Twitter.
  • When the semester came to an end, I asked students to reflect on what they thought of this experiment: Are points really motivating? Achievements? Or is social interaction and knowledge motivating in itself? The answers on that varied wildly, but I learned that many of the students appreciated the greater sense of collaboration.
  • Chas Brua on 09 Jun 11
     
    In this blog, a prof at the U. of Baltimore talks about the highs and lows of her attempts to gamify a course Web site....
  • bartmon on 10 Jun 11
     
    Some interesting things going on around this at PSU. One of this summer's TLT Faculty Fellows, Sherry Robinson, is looking into this with a team from ETS. http://tlt.its.psu.edu/profiles/fellows2011 I've used similar tactics in my game design course, and similar to the article, results vary. Some kids get REALLY into it, while others don't really care if I 'gamify' the course or not. When I talk about this at conferences and with faculty, I sometimes get the comment "Why should I do this if it will only engage SOME of my kids?". This comment cracks me up a bit, because what do we do, as teachers, that engages every student, all of the time? I'm not sure any instructional method will engage everyone. Just another tool for the tool belt of instruction...
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