iterating toward openness » games

The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education

david — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:53:16 +0000

I was really privileged to work with Brett Shelton on editing this new book, and now it’s available! While we weren’t able to convince the publishers to use a Creative Commons license for the book, they did agree to provide perpetual access to a free electronic copy of the book. So download yours today, kick the tires, and if you want something to curl up in bed with then consider picking up a printed copy.

Games, Learning, and Society

david — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:37:29 +0000

Kurt Squire told me earlier today about U Wisc’s new minor in Games, Learning, and Society. Looks absolutely fabulous. Congratulations, Kurt! From this page I found Constance Steinkuehler‘s course on Critical Education Practice on the Internet. Lots to read here…

Which Pre-85 Video Game Character Am I?

david — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:38:18 +0000

Via Alec Couros, via D’Arcy Norman. Apparently, I am a Gauntlet Adventurer:

I am a Gauntlet Adventurer.

I strive to improve my living conditions by hoarding gold, food, and sometimes keys and potions. I love adventure, fighting, and particularly winning – especially when there’s a prize at stake. I occasionally get lost inside buildings and can’t find the exit. I need food badly. What Video Game Character Are You?

An IF Textbook for IT

david — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 23:36:30 +0000

Brett Shelton, who is now officially my partner-in-crime, recently had a great idea. I was standing in his door, and he was sitting down in his cozy chair, which is how we conduct most of our converastions.

He’s currently teaching this rockin class on games and learning, and the class is looking specifically at interactive fiction (think the genre of Zork). The way I understand it, they’re developing an IF game around the great Spoon River Anthoogy (via Gutenberg or Amazon) targeted at middle school age kids. His new idea is to build an IF game for instructional technology, perhaps as a textbook for a Foundations course.

I think this is a brilliant idea. Being a partner-in-crime, of course, I’m obliged to go along anyway. I’ve been trying to brainstorm possible settings for the game… At first I thought of a sort of MUD virtual conference where you and other students could wander around, meet NPCs of Anderson, Bloom, Gagne, etc., hear them give presentations, talk to them afterwards, etc.

Then I thought something more along the lines of my personal favorite from my childhood, Bedlam, might be interesting. Imagine what being locked in an asylum with IT faculty would be like…

(Whatever environment we choose, I’m hoping that PKing is enabled and the Merrill and Jonassen NPCs wander into the same room.)

The goal, of course, is to familiarize students with the major authors of the field and their contributions to the same. How would you structure it?

Gagne, Games, and Learning

david — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 16:37:22 +0000

Reading Brett over on Rhymes with Purple got me thinking about the Gagne Assumption. The assumption is two part. First, there are different kinds of learning (e.g., learning facts is a different thing from learning to classify). Second, different conditions are most suited to bring about these different types of learning. If one buys into this assumption, which I do wholeheartedly, then a prescient question regarding games becomes – what type (or types) of learning are best promoted by game-like instructional conditions?

I haven’t read nearly as much of Gibbons‘ work as I should have (and neither have you, by the way). But I would hazard a guess that Andy would say that when students are learning about complex systems, games are a great condition under which to learn. Andy talks about students poking and prodding parts of the model to see how the model responds. For example, I’ve watched my nine year old playing the role of Mayor inside Sim City 4, seen him zone huge areas for high-density housing when there was no infrastructure to speak of. The model responded in a particular way. I’ve seen him ignore expert advice to put some fire departments in place. The model responded in another way.

This action-feedback loop is what underlies all learning. And now, for a brief digression in which I reveal more about myself than you wanted to know.

Here’s Wiley’s theory of learning in a nutshell. An agent (you or I, or a cat or mouse for that matter) sends messages out, and receives messages in return. The rest is a combination of pattern-matching and purposiveness on the part of the agent.

As a teacher, or from the outside, there is very little that we can do to change the pattern-matching and purposiveness parts of the activities agents engage in (other than the usual meta-cognitive coaching and reward / punishment stuff you already know about). This means that the big opportunity for instructional designers or teachers lies in crafting the messages that go back to the agent.

Now, this all sounds very behavioral. And, in fact, it can work that way when the agent is only pattern-matching and not engaging in purposive activities. However, to the extent the agent begins to act purposively, these same mechanisms will underly the most constructivist types of learning. The agent will engage in some activity which (in an abstract way) sends a message out into the environment (like writing and running a program in Netlogo), the agent will receive a message (some feedback) back from the environment (perhaps the program will throw errors or behave in an unexpected way), and the agent will use this new information to form another probe out into the environment. I do this all the time when trying to install new software from source or tweak the CSS on a webpage. I send messages out to Google, it sends messages back to me, and if the contents of the message meet my purposes I stop. If not, I rinse and repeat. In it’s reliance on conversation as a mechanism, I suppose it’s quite a Pask-ian view of the world. (FWIW, I think this very simple view of the world meshes very well with what we know about the biological mechanism underlying learning.)

So, in a pointless attempt to be clear, I think there are four things worth considering when we think about teaching and learning: (1) the types of messages the agent sends out, (2) the types of messages that come back, (3) the pattern-matching mechanism, and (4) the role of purposiveness.

So what does all this have to do with games? I think we have to think carefully about the types of learning games are really suited to facilitate. I think we have to think carefully about the types of messages we enable learners to send into the virtual environment, the types of messages the environment sends back, how the learner is going to make meaning out of patterns in these messages, and how the learner expresses their purposiveness in the game environment. If there’s any response to this post, maybe I’ll do a quick sketch of Sim City or another game from this perspective.