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