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World of Warcraft Finds Its Way Into Class

March 5, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
Wow

World of Warcraft

Students’ passions can be a powerful driver for deeper and more creative learning. With this knowledge, some educators are using popular commercial games like World of Warcraft (WoW) to create curriculum around the game. And they say they’re seeing success, especially with learners who have had trouble in traditional classrooms.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay (MMOR) game, where players take on the identity of characters in a narrative-rich plot, working together to overcome challenges.

“In my estimation, a well-designed video game is pure, scaffolded, constructivist learning at its best,” said Peggy Sheehy, one of the designers of WoW in Schools, an elective English Language Arts curriculum built around the game. “Mastery of content opens up new content and offers unlimited opportunity for success.” And that’s what learning should be like, she says: interesting, engaging and collaborative. Research on gaming in an educational context corroborates Sheehy’s viewpoint that games demonstrate mastery learning because a player cannot move on until he or she has completed a set of tasks.

“Game designers get that failure is anticipated and celebrated. It’s a learning opportunity.”

Sheehy designs “quests” with particular learning objectives in mind that the students or — “heroes” as they’re called in class — must complete. Quests might include components of comparative writing or characterization exercises. For example, Sheehy had her students read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as they progressed through the course, and for one assignment, they had to pick a character from the book and categorize that character within World of Warcraft. They were asked to defend their choices in writing, supporting their argument with the text. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, game-based learning, Games, video games, World of Warcraft

What Can 135 Million Video Gamers Add to Our Collective IQ?

September 28, 2012 | 11:22 AM | By

Flickr:Blakespot

By Jennie Rose

An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that’s not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold’s book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of “supercollaborators,” as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who’s interviewed in the book.

Rheingold connects the dots on collaboration literacy and what he calls “Social-Digital-Know-How.” Multi-player games in particular, and virtual communities in general, are technologies that require cooperation. And when you consider the cumulative amount of technical knowledge, these gamers could be the first wave of people who possess what scientists have started calling “collective IQ.” Already, gamers who play the online game Foldit have cracked the code of the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, which has eluded scientists for years, and could lead to a new drug.

It’s hard to think of a realm of human behavior that has not been influenced, in some way, by a form of mass collaboration.

This idea of collective intelligence and digital culture came from French media scholar Pierre Lévy, who argues that a networked culture gives rise to new structures of power, stemming from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations. Together, these groups refine their understanding of the world.

Wikipedia is one of the best-known byproducts of this process of refinement and social production. Though the website is still dismissed as a research tool in some education circles because it does not represent a traditionally vetted information source, danah boyd, a senior Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Games, Howard Rheingold, video games

How to Use Video Game Tactics in the Classroom

June 12, 2012 | 4:07 PM | By

Science teacher Paul Anderson says video games teach kids that failure is okay — that it’s part of the learning process.

“Trying something, failing, trying something again, that’s something we aspire to see in kids,” he says.

So he created a class around the premise of a video game — without a video game. Anderson honestly talks about what worked and what didn’t. Check out how it turned out.

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Games, TED talk, video games

Teachers Transform Commercial Video Game for Class Use

May 16, 2012 | 10:23 AM | By

MinecraftEDU

By Katrina Schwartz

Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now — to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.

So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as “How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity.” Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

Teachers like to use Minecraft because it’s a “sandbox” game — it provides players nearly limitless freedom to build within it. As a player’s skill develops, the game’s complexity increases ad infinitum. In multi-player levels, players collaborate on building complex structures, use programming features to build contraptions, games, or compose music. Meanwhile, beginning players use their problem solving skills to scavenge for materials. They learn to mine stone for building, and coal for making fire.

“Many educational games start with the question, ‘What should we teach with the game?’ and they forget the most important part, that it should be a great game too.”

Koivisto and Levin decided to pursue a classroom application after observing students solve complicated problems with their collaboration in the game. When Koivisto tested Minecraft at a Finnish school, one-third of the 20 teachers in the study later chose to incorporate the game into their teaching.

Koivisto and Levin, who uses the game with his second-grade students, are part of the growing movement of teachers who see video games as more than entertainment and educational games Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Games, Minecraft, video games

Student-Created Video Games Enter Science Class

April 2, 2012 | 1:09 PM | By

Globaloria

By Jennifer Roland

Identifying bones in a skeleton, learning how chemical elements react, understanding alternative energy uses. These lessons have jumped out of the textbook and into the hands of students who created video games that teach the concepts to their peers.

It’s part of Globaloria, a national program that allows middle school and high school students to design educational video games on topics related to math, science, engineering and social issues. In the process of creating the games, they learn about the topics, as well as how to program a video game.

In Mission Impossib-Oil, for example, players guide a crew tasked with cleaning up an oil spill. They’ll have to make decisions about biological resources and human resources based on Environmental Sensitivity Index mapping guidelines, as well as how to spend their budget.

William Dorsey, who teaches biology at Capital High School in Kanawha County, writes that his students are not only learning about the topics they create the games around, but also “soft skills” like self-directed learning and teamwork. His students “taught themselves the guiding Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Games, Globaloria, video games

How Computer Games Help Children Learn

February 7, 2012 | 10:30 AM | By

Flickr: Loren Kahle

By Aran Levasseur

Imagine you’re a senior manager at a leading videogame company. Your job is to devise the company’s competitive strategy in a rapidly growing and dynamic industry. What prices will you set for the consoles? How many games will be available for your platform?

This is the premise of Platform Wars, an epistemic game, or management simulator, developed by MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The game’s learning objectives are to allow students to interactively experience the challenges of strategic competition in complex and dynamic markets.

Epistemic games are computer games that are essentially about learning to think in innovative ways. They’re designed to be pedagogical tools for the digital age where the player learns to think like professionals by playing a simulated game of such professions as management, engineering, journalism or urban planning.

“In playing games, [students] are doing explicitly, openly and socially what as adults they will do tacitly, privately and personally.”

As schools aim to prepare students for life outside of school, they need to realize that the world now values knowledge and skills that can be applied in creative ways. Epistemic games fit the learning requirements of today’s world because they allow students to role-play professions while learning skills that they apply in the game.

One of the nation’s leading scholars on epistemic games is David Williamson Shaffer, whose landmark book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, demonstrates how particular kinds of video and computer games can cultivate innovative thinking. Shaffer outlines how modern schools developed in a particular time and place to meet the specific economic and social needs of industrialism and now, he contends, education needs to change to fit the needs of our current world. The traditional educational paradigm prepared students for a world of standardization, whereas today’s world puts a premium on independent thinking and creativity. As a result of the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Games, video games