Wellington Loop Professional Development Day:
Gaming for Learning
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.
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
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
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
