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May 16, 2012 | 10:23 AM | By

Teachers Transform Commercial Video Game for Class Use

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, Tech Tools, Games, Minecraft, video games
April 2, 2012 | 1:09 PM | By

Student-Created Video Games Enter Science Class

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
February 7, 2012 | 10:30 AM | By

How Computer Games Help Children Learn

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
January 4, 2012 | 9:49 AM | By

The Power of Play in Learning

Flickr: Ernst Vikne

By Aran Levasseur

The goal of the videogame “Civilization” is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. You start the game in 4000 B.C. as a settler and, with successful gameplay, can create a civilization that lasts until the Space Age. Throughout the game, you need to manage your civilization’s military, science, technology, commerce and culture.

One doesn’t read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to develop strategy before playing the game. One starts by playing. This is true for all videogames. You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you’re supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory.

Students begin to develop a self-reliance that enjoys independent experimentation and exploration.

This model of learning is not only effective for videogames but for all digital tools, and I would argue that play — especially in the digital sense — is emerging as a pedagogical keystone for education in the 21st century.

Stuart Brown, M.D., explains in his book, Play, how a range of scientific disciplines have revealed the importance of lifelong play. Playfulness amplifies our capacity to innovate and to adapt to changing circumstances. Adults who are deprived of play are often rigid, inflexible and closed to trying out new options. Play is an active process that reshapes our rigid views of the world.

THE POWER OF PLAY

Play is also a powerful vehicle for learning, something that’s been underscored for me in my work at San Francisco University High School where we began a one-to-one iPad program in the fall.

The iPad has been hyped as a device that will revolutionize education. And, while I’ve witnessed glimmers of this potential, it isn’t microwavable. Migrating from an analog to a digital environment sounds simple enough, but the reality has been more disruptive.

Disruption can signal the onset of innovation, but this isn’t comforting to the organizations and individuals that are at the epicenter of such turbulence. Yet with a schema of play, we can start to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Games, play, video games
November 1, 2011 | 1:09 PM | By

What Do Wii Remotes Have to Do With Science? Ask Sixth-Graders

WiiScience

Amidst grim reports this week that California schools are “failing to invest enough time, money and training to teach science well,” and that only one out of 10 elementary school students gets to play with hands-on science experiments, a shining counter-example is  happening at the Nueva School in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough.

Sixth-grade students are using Wii remote controls to collect scientific data on things like positive and negative acceleration and thinking about conceptual issues like the difference between engineering and science.

Led by Stanford researchers, the class is using Wii remote controls (available online for anywhere from $15 to $40) to create things like a rat-trap car, a marble roller-coaster, and balloon-powered vehicle to test different theories.

With the rat-trap car, students have created a Wii-strapped vehicle with CDs as wheels, like a skateboard. They’ve already experimented with smaller mousetraps and lighter batteries to see if the cars would go faster, but landed on the rat trap as the best way to measure the information they needed.

The main objective of the experiment is not necessarily to measure speed, but to show students how to capture data like scientists do. Kids are typically confused by graphs, but with the Wii experiment, they could see the horizontal, vertical, and lateral aspects of the accelerometer.

With the Wii remotes, students are using interesting new technology and participating in the creation of their own designs.

“Kids see patterns in data,” said Wendy Ju, one of the Stanford researchers working with the students at the Innovative Learning Conference held at Nueva recently. “What does that data do to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Games, video games, Wii, WiiScience
October 17, 2011 | 11:30 AM | By

Is Gaming the New Essential Literacy?

TB

By Aran Levassur

“When people learn to play video games,” said James Paul Gee, “they are learning a new literacy.”

This is one of the reason kids love playing them: They are learning a new interactive language that grants them access to virtual worlds that are filled with intrigue, engagement and meaningful challenges. And one that feels more congruent with the nature and trajectory of today’s world.

As our commerce and culture migrates further into this emerging digital ecosystem it becomes more critical that we develop digital literacy, of which video games inhabit a large portion.

Gee, a linguist and professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, thinks we should expand the traditional definition of literacy beyond reading and writing because language isn’t the only communication system available in today’s world. And there is no better example of a new form of media that communicates distinctive types of meaning than video games.

THE LITERACY OF PROBLEM-SOLVING

Although games can be immensely entertaining, it would be a mistake to consider them as only a form of entertainment. Games are fun, but their real value lies in leveraging play and exploration as a mode of learning the literacy of problem-solving, which lowers the emotional stakes of failing.

A critical part of being literate in the digital age means being able to solve problems through simulations and collaboration.

In Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, he reminds us that our educational system has stigmatized mistakes. As a result, kids are frightened of being wrong. Yet if we are not prepared to be wrong than we won’t be able to come up with anything creative or solve complex problems. Videogames, on the other hand, embed trial and error into the foundation of gameplay.

Kids aren’t naturally great at gaming the first time. They develop mastery through disciplined practice — a path marked by dead-ends, wrong turns and blunders. Yet gamers aren’t angst-ridden Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, game-based learning, Games, James Gee, video games