The Education Arcade

Check out Revolution by The Education Arcade, built on the Neverwinter Nights engine.  The company does not charge for this 18th century American Revolution mod, however, you do need a copy of Neverwinter Nights to run it.  Is this a game built with educational goals inherent in its design or a video game with education tacked on as an afterthought?

http://www.educationarcade.org/node/357

Becker

Katrin Becker's work on serious game theory is noteworthy.  She began this body of work by asking these questions:

1. What is it about games that makes them so engaging?
2. How can we transform that into games for learning?
3. How can we design GOOD games for learning?
4. How important is it to know how the technology works, if you want to design artifacts that use it?

http://www.minkhollow.ca/becker/doku.php?id=serious_games

I am interested in exploring a broader sense of student engagement through games.  However, meeting the needs of boys is ultimately where I see this taking me.  To get to the crux of what it means to engage 21st century learners and the digital literacy skills required to navigate this terrain, it will be important to explore both genders and their unique sets of needs.

This is a link off of Becker's website to Christine Daviault's work, Look Who's Pulling the Trigger Now: A Study of Girls'/Women's Relationship With Video Games.

http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ54260.pdf

I am drawn to outliers, what occurs in the margins.  Female hardcore gamers interest me because they challenges my assumptions about the interests of boys and girls.  Let's crack this open.

Black Ops

I'm at the video store with my 13 year old son and his friend.  The two of them are chewing massive wads of berry-flavoured bubblegum, perusing the aisles and chatting about the latest video games on the shelves.  I overhear, "I totally want to play Black Ops," followed by an enthusiastic exchange of indeterminable teenaged male utterances.  They refer to, of course, the new Call of Duty game, one that is rated 'M' and stands a snowball's chance of ever entering my household.

At launch, Black Ops sold 7 million copies and as of December of 2010, a combined 68,000 years worth of game time has been logged.  Chrysler has even manufactured a limited edition Black Ops Jeep Wrangler in response to the popularity of this game.  It's no wonder my son finds himself caught up in the wave of media attention this game has received.  As a parent, how do I respond?

How are Call of Duty games catering to the interests of boys and what compels my son to participate?

http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/83240/gamers-have-already-played-68000-years-of-cod-black-ops/
http://kotaku.com/#!5667616/treyarch-explains-the-call-of-duty-jeep-wrangler

Quest to Learn

Cool website promoting the school, Quest to Learn:

http://q2l.org/

"Quest’s standards-based curriculum supports students in becoming active problem solvers and innovators of the 21st century. Our curriculum is design led and inquiry-based, in that it immerses students within complex problem solving contexts where they are challenged to innovate around possible solutions. Tinkering and theory building are critical practices supported across the curriculum. Students are given time, space and purpose to tinker with systems (games, simulations, small machines, social systems, ecologies, etc.)"


The idea of providing space for tinkering caught my interest.  When I think of tinkering, tinkertoys come to mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinkertoy), robotics, Mechano, Lego, heavy duty mechanics.  How do we create space for tinkering for our students?  What does tinkering look like for the 21st century learner?

Kafai

My advisor, Michele Jacobsen, lent me the text, Constructivism in Practice.  Yasmin Kafai's chapter on Electronic Play Worlds is of particular interest.  Kafai's 1996 study reveals some interesting gender differences pertaining to game design.  She set out to determine "whether children would import such features as the violence and male-oriented gender stereotyping that are embedded in commercially available video games into their own designs" Also, "given the choice, what kind of video games would girls produce if the design of all the features - genre, place, characters, and interactions - were left to them?" (p. 98).

Kafai observes some key differences between boys and girls pertaining to game design.  She reports that "almost all of the boys created adventure hunts and explorations, whereas the girls' games were more evenly divided among adventure, skill-sport, or teaching games."  In addition, "the sharpest thematic difference between boys and girls concerned the morality issue - the contest between good and evil" and that "not one girl incorporated the conquest for evil in her game" (p. 105).  Also of interest is the fact that "the majority of students created fantasy places" in their games, however, "six of eight girls confined their game places and worlds to real-life settings" (p. 106).

This study is a bit dated in that it precedes the current releases of casual games and games targeted at girls.  Kafai argues that "today's commercial video games do not address girls' interests and concerns" (p. 121).  This study was conducted prior to the release of games such as Nintendogs (http://nintendogs.com/) or websites such as http://www.girlgamer.com which attract a female audience.  That being said, there is still much to be gleaned from Kafai's work.  She does stress that "making video games, as opposed to playing them, clearly engaged girls' and boys' minds and fantasies for a long period of time.  When the tables are turned, video games become a medium for children's personal and creative expression" (p. 121).  The content may differ, but the engagement in this medium for both genders is noteworthy.

Text: Constructivism in Practice - Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World edited by Yasmin Kafai and Mitchel Resnick 1996 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.  Mahwah, New Jersey.  The study itself is Electronic Play Worlds - Gender Differences in Children's Construction of Video Games by Yasmin B. Kafai.

I was digging around and came upon another Kafai text I will have to check out titled Beyond Barbie & Mortal Combat
http://www.gse.upenn.edu/node/569

TED.com

TED.com is responsible for the thesis.  I suppose to be fair, Hasbro should also share some of the blame. After all, they hold the rights to Transformers and G.I. Joe.  As a child, I remember spending countless hours reenacting battle scenes, staging daring rescues and escapes, holding out for a hero (rock on, Bonnie Tyler).  My lips uttered the movement of rusting mechanical parts and tanks under suppressive fire.  I was a boy.

Here I am at age 37.  The boy becomes a man.  Men have all kinds of societal expectations placed upon them.  Just look at any cologne or fashion advertisement (http://www.magazine-ads.com/col.html) and come to your own conclusions as to the roles men are projected into.  We role play, whether it is in our professional or personal lives.  In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle cautions us that "when you play roles, you are unconscious" and "this causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating."  Tolle also argues that "authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role" (p. 91).

With this thesis, I intend to create an honest, authentic body of work.  Permit me to embrace my boyhood.  Together we will reminisce about the hours spent playing The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers.  We will relive episodes of The Mighty Orbots, Rubic, and Teen Wolf and contrast this with current content, from Star Wars The Clone Wars to Call of Duty:Black Ops to Beyblade.  Let us journey together to determine how to best meet the learning needs of a boy.

Ali Carr-Chellman: Gaming to re-engage boys in learning | Video on TED.com

Ali Carr-Chellman: Gaming to re-engage boys in learning | Video on TED.com