It looks as though Appalachian State University here in Western N.C. received over $400,000 to research middle schoolers and their learning in a virtual world setting. The researchers and students will be using the Qwaq environment. Sounds promising!
-Lucas
Came across the article, Virtual Swords to Ploughshares, today. Researchers at Duke University have partnered with area company, Virtual Heroes, to create a virtual world/simulation in which students practice skills in diplomacy and crisis response. The program is called Virtual Peace. The scenario in this game-based environment was designed by educators from the Duke-UNC Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution and resembles Central America following hurricane Mitch. Students work in teams to decide how they’ll distribute relief funds and deal with unexpected crises, often generated on-the-fly by their instructors who monitor the virtual environment as the game takes place.
Students participating in this scenario don’t even have to be in the same physical location. The design, very similar to an MMO such as World of Warcraft, allows student players from all over the world, to work collaboratively.
It’s promising to see researchers and designers leveraging the power of MMO-like environments for educational purposes.
-Lucas
I took my last thesis revision and put it into Wordle. It creates a very interesting representation and gives you a good idea what was studied. Have you heard of Wordle? Wordle analyzes any text that you copy and paste or a website with RSS feed to produce a representation of the words used. Words used more frequently are larger. You can then select your colors, fonts, and the orientation of the words.
-Lucas
To date, I haven’t spent a great deal of time discussing my thesis research, because it has been an ever-changing work in progress. Without anything “final” I didn’t want to throw anything out into the blogosphere. However, I’m very close to finalizing it and will be sharing my work here soon.
To provide some background, I used Tabula Digita’s Dimension-M game with middle school students to see the game’s impact on their mathematics achievement and attitude. In addition, I wanted to see if gender played any role in the outcomes.
Though the group I was working with was small and the period of the study was short, the results were very interesting. I’ll be sharing those results here once the thesis is finalized!
-Lucas
I was invited into the beta test for an upcoming game design program called Atmosphir. Wow! The guys at Minor Studios have put together a very user-friendly game creation package. The presentation is extremely smooth and creating your own levels is really simple. The user interface is very intuitive and easy to learn. The complexity of what you create is pretty scalable too.
I’d love to see the addition of the ability to add dialogue or text allowing the player to make choices. Then, we’d have a story! I’d also love to get this into the hands of students to see what they might create and to observe their decision-making processes while they create.
Looking forward to watching this game develop!
-Lucas
Constance Steinkhueler and Sean Duncan found some interesting results in their researcb that used World of Warcraft with boys in an after school program. Read more about it at:
http://www.livescience.com/technology/081003-school-games.html
Want to see something amazing and learn about quality game design at the same time? Take one of today’s popular video game titles or even a title marketed as an educational game and have an non-gamer or digital immigrant give it a spin. It’s a pretty fascinating experience.
I had just such an experience today as I worked with a lady who will be teaching a course called Virtual Math at one of our district middle schools. In this course we’ll be using the game, Dimension-M, by Tabula Digita, to provide students with an immersive and exciting instructional, game-oriented experience. The lady who is teaching the course has had little experience with first-person video games. Well, obviously she wanted to play the games to see what the students will be doing in the class and to see how the game will support student learning.
We sat together in the computer lab where she’ll be teaching the course and began playing the game. It wasn’t long before I quit playing on my computer and simply watched her as she began learning the game’s controls and adapted to Dimension-M’s environment. To my knowledge she’d never played a first-person shooter game before. By the time she was halfway through the game’s first mission (and following the game’s tutorial), she had quickly adapted. She began to naturally move the mouse about to “look around” in the game environment, she was using the WASD keys to move about, and was even beginning to get the hang of using the spacebar to jump from one location to the next. It was fascinating to watch her skills so quickly adapt and improve.
The point is, again, that games today are much more complex than they were in the early days of electronic gaming. And as Jim Gee says, all games are ultimately about problem-solving. The best games quickly “teach” you how their world works and integrate that learning and assessment into the game play.
-Lucas
Wow! That was fast! Many of the sessions from GLS 2008 were recorded and are now online. Check them out at:
http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted4/Catalog/front.aspx?cid=b8aa7b8a-fac1-4e7b-80cb-9551d26a414c!
-Lucas
Elizabeth and Lane Lawley
This was a great fireside chat session and really, a great close to my time at GLS 2008. Elizabeth is is the director of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a gamer (three level 70’s in WoW!). Lane, 14, is Elizabeth’s son, and was influential in Linden Lab’s creation of a teen grid for Second Life.
The discussion revolved around the good things that often emerge as a result of a player’s immersion into video games. Lane, for example, developed an interest in 3D modeling and programming as a result of his experiences in Second Life. This has been one of my biggest arguments in favor of video games, and I’ll simply cite my earlier post, “10 Educational Things I Learned From Playing MMORPG’s.” Again, I encourage readers to add to this list!
Another discussion that emerged during this chat was the critical need for parents to be involved in their child’s life, specifically their gaming life. Parents, if your kids are playing video games, by all means, play with them!
-Lucas
