Million-Dollar NSF Grant to Spark Young Gamers’ Interest in Science

The blog title says it all. Here is the article.  Its just proof that grants can be had.

STEM game design Competion

I wish I had time to work on something for this competition to design STEM educational game.

Hell I wish I had time to do more than one post every other month on this blog.

Sébastien

gamers crack protein folding puzzle

Interesting, and not entirely irrelevant, news story:

• http://goo.gl/ktdDd

Virus

From University of Wisconsin's "Wisconsin Institute for Discovery" is an article about their approach towards game design for teaching science and specifically talks about their Virus game for iPad. I like their attitude towards games  for education. I wish I had an iPad so I could try it out.

PS: Hopefully someday soon I will have time to generate actual content in this blog instead of just posting cool links

Code Hero: a programing learning game

This game looks pretty cool. Your gun fires computer code that changes behavior of its target.  You can load you gun with different kinds of code. (eg:  Move(0,0,400) or AddForce(100,0,0). ) that you either write your self or copy from other objects.

NASA Education MMO game getting funding

I was about to write a response to Ian's last post when I found this post about a NASA Education Game.

Here's the homepage for the game and a NASA post about it.

Its very similar to what we've been considering.

Sébastien

playing the whole game

My current bedtime reading is "Making Learning Whole", by David Perkins (http://goo.gl/w8kj1). He advocates teaching students to "play the whole game" right from the outset, or at least a respectably complete junior version of it, rather than the common educational patterns of "elementitis" (teaching them isolated elements only, e.g. "You'll learn what math is for after you've mastered arithmetic") and "aboutitis" (teaching them *about* science rather than teaching them *to do* science).

In that vein: Is an educational "game" about astronomy going to teach students about astronomy, or to do (basic) astronomy? Is one about physics going to teach them the contents of physics textbooks, or about what it means to "do" physics?

If the latter: There may be a dramatic backstory and all, but we'd better have learners role-playing astronomers or physicists or etc. (implicitly at least, if not explicitly).

Or are we content teaching our students *about* what scientists have already figured out? That does seem to be the primary content of intro-level courses, especially for non-majors. (I suspect Perkins would criticize that approach.)

Thoughts?

Exoplanet Exploration Game

This article describes a fascinating looking game of exploration and discovery that may not necessarily be a science-oriented.  It seems to be more about storyline and 'discovering the secret of the solar system'.

Its a vague description and I bet I'm projecting all kinds of my own ideas onto it but I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Sébastien

EDIT: looking at the publisher's website I'm not sure how hopeful I should be.

redesigning, thinking…

Short post: I'm deeply embroiled in designing/redesigning my courses for the fall. For one (Computational Physics II), I'm adopting an approach that's a combination of "mastery" and "standards-based grading", with significant room for students to choose what to work on. I'm finding that this is consonant with some of the big principles of "game-like" course design. I'll post more details when I've (a) actually finished the design, and (b) have a bit of a breather to write something. Classes start Monday!

Q about this blog

I'm finding this blog rather inconvenient to keep up with, because my various blog software (MarsEdit for writing, NetNewsWire and Google Reader for reading) don't seem willing to connect to it, or even recognize it's existence. I suspect that's because of the privacy settings, though I would have thought there would be a way to tell these apps to authenticate.

Is anyone else here using blogging tools with success?

Leveling Up and Rewards

Some questions I've been wondering about ...

1. What would it mean to level up in a pedagogical game? In a regular game, leveling up would grant a player new "skill" or "tools" that make harder tasks more accessible. In a teaching game, in some sense leveling up means the student has mastered a learning objective, which makes me wonder if any game "skill" or "tool" would simply feel to contrived. Not sure about this issue.
   
   
2. Would rewards need to be contained only in the game? Lately, I keep thinking about rewards as badges that students could present to their instructor for tangible benefit - for example, being excused from a related homework.
   

"Gamification" in Education and Business.

This article on Forbes describes interesting attempts to integrate successful game techniques into the classroom that you guys will find interesting.

Sébastien

Physics Video Game: Ludwig

I found an interesting game called Ludwig. It's still in beta testing and aims to teach physics, specifically energy.   Click on the Watch Video button or download the demo (PC only), its pretty interesting.

I point this one out because of its similarities with the game idea we discussed. There are a few features in the game that I like, though I don't necessary like the way they were implemented:

• There is a concept map you can refer to that grows as you discover new concepts.
• There is a laboratory where you can start to run experiments once you've found the correct items
• There is a storyline that, in theory, requires you to learn about concepts of energy in order to progess

From what I've seen the game so far however, it looks like all you have to do is find the right materials and combine them and you can progress, there doesn't seem to be any real learning. You can basically get pretty far by walking around, picking up everything you find and testing to see if it will fix the task assigned to you.

Sébastien


Ian: this game was made using Unity, the 3D engine we had talked about at FFPER.

Is game-style learning fundamentally incompatible with school as we know it?

(Cross-posted from my personal blog, Think Twice. Please forgive the impersonal style, as if I'm not writing for those of you here on Science Gaming Brain Storm.) My current scholarly "thing" is thinking about what we can learn about teaching, especially teaching physics, from the phenomenal power of video games to motivate, captivate, and teach. The impetus to ponder this comes from wishing that students would bring the kind of hard work, determination, creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration to learning physics that they bring to playing, say, World of Warcraft. (For a blockbuster introduction to the topic, read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.) At the moment I'm more interested in lessons we can learn from video game design and take into more traditional, classroom-based instruction than I am in creating an actual video game that teaches physics. (The latter, however, is also a fascinating challenge to contemplate.) In that vein, a definition by Bernard Suits (quoted in Jane McGonigal's excellent book Reality is Broken) caught my attention:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (p.22)

The key word here is "voluntary". McGonigal makes a case that if it isn't voluntary, it isn't a game, and many of the remarkable phenomena associated with game-playing disappear. The entire psychology changes. Yes, attending university is in principle a voluntary choice, as is one's major; but beyond that, we pretty much tell students what courses they must take and what they must do along the way to succeed, and keep them in line with grades and transcripts. Does that doom any attempt to make learning more deeply game-like? What I'm getting at is that the very structure of our educational system frames learning activity as an externally-motivated, externally-directed, authority-laden series of tasks and assessments. I'm concerned that trying to embed a novel learning micro-environment -- say, a gaming-inspired self-paced learning activity -- into such a matrix could be doomed to failure, not because of the micro-environment's worth but because of drastic dissonance with the matrix. If I'm even more ambitious and try to construct an entire course as something analogous to a game, I still have to assign a grade at the end, and students know it. Those of us who would like to experiment with gaming-inspired alternative paradigms and challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about what instruction should look like, and who don't have the luxury of creating an entire parallel educational system to do our testing in, need to worry about such things.

CiteULike group created

Hi. I've created a CiteULike group named "science gaming brainstorm" to accompany this blog-based discussion:

• http://www.citeulike.org/group/15427/library

It's private (to preserve signal-to-noise ratio), so you'll need an invitation to get in. I've sent invites to Sébastien and Ed already. Anyone in the group can invite others.

I seeded it with some books in my to-read or just-read stacks.

Cheers,

:Ian

#1: How to use this Blog

I've recently had several fantastic conversations about video games and education.  Ed Prather and Dan Loranz planted an idea for a game in my head that's been stewing for a month and then I got to throw ideas around at FFPER with Joe Redish, Ruth Chabay, Elizabeth Gire and Ian Beatty.

At Ian's suggestion, I created this blog to start up a PER/video game community to get us to put down ideas and help each other flesh them out with the ultimate goal of collaboration on projects.

Everyone I talked to was very excited about the untapped potential of video games in education.  There are many aspects of video games that would appeal to us education researchers (e.g. student-centered learning, group work).  In a well designed video game, players are taught the rules of the world and are confronted with increasingly complex problems to solve as they learn more of the game's rules.

This is a starting point for the various discussions need to have in order to figure out what kind of projects we are interested in developing in the future. We need to talk about the existing work on learning and gaming (such as work by James Paul Gee), how to incorporate what we've learned through Physics and Astronomy education research into games, and much more.

Here is how you contribute:

1. Write your own post with your ideas on some other aspect of gaming & education.
2. Comment and offer suggestions on the existing posts.

Let's start a discussion!

Sébastien

#2: A Game Idea

I'd like to outline a game that was first suggested to me by Ed & Dan.

Game Outline
It is a single-player game for an Astro 101 class.  You play a character that has to master astronomy skills in order to solve problems and overcome obstacles to be able to advance to the next area where you learn new concepts and master new skills.  The game follows a storyline that starts with introductory concepts in a primitive village setting. As you progress and the concepts gets more advanced you would move on to a more advanced setting and solve more advanced problems (eventually the fate of the universe will be at stake). 

Progression
All video games have progression.  You start as a character with limited abilities, you solve problems and are rewarded with new abilities that allow you to solve more complex problems.  For example:  in World of Warcraft a mage starts as a level 1 able to cast only one spell and completes quest to gain experience to learn new spells, and acquire new equipment which allows them to solve more advanced problems.  When they reach level 85 they have reached a high level of mastery for a mage but most problems are now only solvable in groups. Group work is something I'd definitely like to work into the game but may start with single player modules.

Example Modules

1. An 'early game' example: Imagine a module designed to teach motion of the Sun, Moon and stars in the sky. Your character lives on an island and you need to be able to navigate between several local islands to complete quests to save your people. You would be able to explore the island and encounter people who teach new abilities the help you discover concepts and develop skills
2. A 'late game' example:  One discussion I had with Ian involved a module that involved learning about gravity.  If you've completed enough gravity-related 'quests' you learn the ability to temporarily change the force of gravity of a star or planet. This has great potential for problems where you have to use this ability to guide an asteroid's path through a solar system by tweaking the gravity of planets and/or the star.

Variations
This is the basic idea and I can imagine many additions and/or variations:

1. A multi-player version of this game where you have to work in groups to solve certain problems, 
2. Modularity instead of a set storyline. We develop modules for every conceivable astronomy subject and the professor chooses the modules they want for their class

Any thoughts?