Thinking Outside the XBox (v1)

Wellington Loop Professional Development Day:

Gaming for Learning

Ewan McIntosh

Exploring ideas and sharing experiences with gaming in education 

Putting your ideas across and communicating ideas is the number one skill employers are looking for, in any industry.  Coming up with creative ideas is crucial and collaboration is key.

The opposite of play is not work, it's depression.

Engagement 
You have to fail to win

Engagement isn't synonymous with fun, it's also about challenge, driven concentration and reaching achievement - winning is always possible.

Epic nature of video games - epic goal

Flow - Time flies.  Consumed by the mission undertaken.

Borrow the lessons from video games as contexts for curriculum learning.

NAME levels of achievement v. World of Warcraft 200 levels, though shorter achievement goals, get increasingly harder.

Gamers are their own boss; in charge of their own destiny.  Even when playing collaboratively. 

The Tinkering School - TED Talks

Calamity becomes the learning point.  Exploring by doing.  Tilting towards completion. 

Entrepreneurial Learning

Take risks

Build teams to make their ideas happen

Not the most creative, but prepared to jump off a cliff without knowing the answer why... yet

Guitar hero in English

Playing the game is not the point of learning, it is the context for learning

How does motivation show itself?

Don't take quiet as unmotivation.  

Any student, any gender can engage in any context.

Don't approach gaming as a male world, it's just a world like any other.

Skills explored when using Gaming in Learning
Play
Performance
Simulation
Appropriation
Multitasking
Distributional Cognition
Collective Intelligence
Judgement
Transmedia Navigation
Networking
Negotiation

Transmedia Navigation Example
CSI episode where killer not revealed.  SecondLife rooms and labs were created by viewers where people met to nut out the answer.  Real scientists, police people, specialists working on details from show - the body, evidence, crime scene.

Myst 'Exile' in the classroom

Assessment - questioning and reinforcing student answers, validating responses
Technology integration - low tech, one copy of game,
Loved - engagement, interaction teacher with students not to students

Viewing Myst from an English point of view

Music and tone of voice over creating atmosphere of mysterious past

Establishing background story and giving player context and so emotional/personal investment in game and the need for succeeding.

Point of view of player interacting with characters

Mise en scene

Pathways to encounter knowledge that builds capacity to succeed in game.

Narrative aspects of content to lead narrative pathways through the game.

Conflict and disorder contribute to emotional investment and challenge to defeat obstacles and adversaries 

Manipulating narrative to follow preferred path as can return to previous point later. 

Writing focus from viewing Myst

Stimulus for rich writing

Feeling of the water in the scene

Mise en scene, film language

Punctuation pyramid

Vocabulary -visuwords, wordle

Use screen shots to illustrate creative writing online, for backgrounds of presentations, photostory

Write success guides to playing the games as formal writing activities

Games

Rome
Sim Park
Myst
Spore creature creator - biology

Sim City

Hotel Dusk - crime novel pitched as a game

Call of Duty 4 - 16+ modern terrorism. Epic goal = save the world!!

Guitar Hero

Peacemaker - History, solving Palestine crisis
The Incredible Machine
JMOL - build molecules - bio, chem, free plugin for Moodle
Tycoon series
Oolite - Space trader - Social Studies, History, Economics, Marketing, Maths
Ceel Craft
Lightbot 2 - logic, sequencing
Electrocities - city planning, Maths, resource allocation, time, graphs
Smackdown - Professional wrestlers - History, PE - professional, athletics, nutrition, Maths, Physics, animation

Other tools:
Posterous.com