Four groups were partnered to present during this 90 minute session.
Using Videogames as a Strategy for Teaching Complex Topics, Robert Brown UNCG. I could have sworn the presenter's name was Bruce but I could be wrong, and he had a female colleague co-presenting with him who's name I failed to catch. The presentation focused on a game that had been designed to teach introductory Economic principals to Undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. The course, "Principles of Microeconomics" was designed as a complete replacement for the introductory econ course - its is delivered completely online and runs 24/7. All assessments are in-game, most can be repeated but the final assessment (a Jeopardy-like game) can only be played once. Grades are based entirely on game performance and progression through a series of levels and tasks and performance on quizzes. The adventure game about a group of aliens that crash land on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic earth presents economic concepts such as the law of dimishing returns and supply and demand through game-related scenarios. There are also humorous mocumentaries (e.g. parodies of Martha Stewart) and short twitch games that also help to present or reinforce concepts as well as ensure continued engagement. The class has run for 3 seemsters and 300 students have completed it - results show that those students do as well, if not a little better, than students in traditional classrooms (determined in part through similar sets of quiz/test questions in the game-based and traditional classes)
Serious Games by Serious Instructional Designers, Jamie Henderson and valerie Hainley
These designers asked the question that has been asked by many that have come before them, can/should instructional designers design games? Their clients, mainly military, bring many constraints, e.g. flash-based only games - nothing that has to be installed on the machines. They found that it was unsettling, at first, as instructional designers to create a program that would foster failure first and then learning through that failure as part of the game-play experience, but respected the fact that it was a powerful learning experience for players to see what happens when they do something wrong. The game that they designed for the Army was based on a course on Tactical Questioning and was designed to teach questioning skills to soldiers that were going to be deployed in the Middle East. They found, upon reflection, that the definitions of instructional and games are fairly close - in both instances things are being done that lead someone to (hopefully) accomplish goals.
Educational Game Design: Confidential, Meagan Rothschiled and Javier Elizondo
This is a Star Schools Grant Project being developed at PREL (Pacific Resources for Education and Learning). Their inital belief was that traditional game design wasn't that different than educational design. In their presentation they recounted many of the challenges they faced along the way to developing their newest game, including culture clashes between very formal corporate cultures and more informal game-design cultures, designers and producers, etc. They also explained some of the constraints of the grant itself, i.e., that the game be delivered on mobile devices and usable in SES settings. They found the evaluation experience to be challenging as well, and suggested the importance of keeping sights on the end-game player that you are designing for - rather than designing for the evaluator. One of the presenters shared a comment made by Will Wright at the Star Schools kick-off meeting - when asked if they could be successful at creating educational games he said "no" - education is about rules, sequences, etc. and games are not. I suspect that it will be interesting to see who is right in the end. Their game seeks to focus on delivering vocabulary content to 4th grade struggling readers.
Games &Schools: A Marriage Made in Heaven or Hell? Angela McFarlane - Presenting on behalf of Futurelab a non-profit group in the UK, McFarlane presented on the Teaching with Games program that they are working on. This program is sponsored by EA, and is a study of Commercial, off-the-shelf software use in classrooms. Specifically they looked at The Sims, Knights of Honor, and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and asked general questions about game-use in education. McFarlane pointed out the challenges of getting games on computers in schools - a technical problem that should not be underestimated. None-the-less, they found that 31% of teachers had used COTS in lessons, 59% said they would like to do so in the future, many felt students could gain actual content knowledge as well as higher-order thinking skills through game-play. There were, however concerns over sterotypes and the need for them to be addressed proactively in-class (e.g. Euro and American-centric slants in WWII games) and anti-social behavior. 49% of respondents laced access to appropriate equiment to support game play. Lack of examples and evidence were noted by teachers as being obstacles to implementation, other obstacles included: licensing concerns, time necessary to prep for game us (can't flip through a game like a book), and gaming literacy. They found that gaming literacy couldn't be assumed - not everyone plays games and not everyone that plays them plays well. Even in cases where students reported proficiency at gaming - they were often unable to play well and needed much intial instruction and support. They also found that good teachers did the best job at incorporating games into instruction - more so than younger teachers or more tech-savvy teacher. Another project, Newtoons, allows students to play puzzles that explore Newtonian Physics, and then create and share new puzzles with their peers via cell phones. Their research for this project looks at the effects/outcomes of: Make,Play, Share, Edit or Play, Create, Edit philosophies of gameplay and game design. Do students learn from the games? Do they learn from collaborative experiences related to their gameplay? Do they learn from the experience of creating games? etc. McFarlane concluded by stating that "learning is a process of creation, not a process of consumption" and she reinforced the need for schools to devote more resources to providing tools to create rather than merely products that provide pre-packaged content.
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