Gaming+Overview

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This past November, President Obama launched an “Educate to Innovate” campaign to improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This campaign will include efforts not only from the Federal Government but also from leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies to work with young people across America to excel in science and math. One of the key components within this campaign will be participatory learning through the use of games. These games will engage students through inquiry and challenge-based learning designs. The use of games in education can be a rough road for many in education to accept. Let me be clear. This essay will not discuss the motivational factors of playing Madden 2010 or how MarioKart can prepare students for a career in engineering. [|Educational games] are games specifically designed to teach kids about a concept, to promote new content, to understand historic concepts and in many cases to support critical thinking skills.

As teachers, we are constantly being pushed by administrators, parents, federal and state policymakers and our colleagues to improve the critical thinking skills of our students. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, critical thinking is found throughout the state standards, and as students move through their post-secondary education they will continue to use the skills of critical thinking to synthesize, evaluate and analyze. As technology improves, our schools must embrace the changing nature of our students and the new technologies available to support their learning. Learning is no longer just the information found in a book, it is abundant on the web which is now able to be navigated through hand held devices such as cell phones and mini-computers. No longer is it necessary for students to memorize vast amounts of data. Primary skills for the [|21st Century] include innovation and creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. Through gaming, students are able to actively utilize 21st century skills in a participatory environment. This multimedia essay will examine the needs of our students, the purported benefits of gaming, my personal story of gaming, and how gaming can be used as an alternative to traditional test preparation in schools. The essay will conclude with an argument for using games as an alternative assessment.


 * __The Needs of Our Children (a.k.a... who are the 21st century students?)__**

//From Wikipedia (excerpted from '[|Generation Z]'):// Due to media attention, a variety of terms are used to describe Generation Z including Generation I, or The Internet Generation or simply, Net Generation. It could be observed however that superficial extroverts might just need to adjust to the social media that is normal to this generation where even the education system is lagging behind to adapt to the changes of the internet, where "socializing" might not consist of going to a diner, or to an arcade (or even leaving your home) to play video games with peers for this generation. It has been said that in 2008, 1/4 of post-secondary full-time education students were enrolled in fully online courses, with an estimated 44% in 2009.

They are highly connected, many having had lifelong use of communications and media technologies such as the earning them the nickname "digital natives". No longer limited to the home computer, the Internet is now increasingly carried in their pockets on mobile Internet devices such as their mobile phones. A marked difference between Generation Y and Generation Z, is that older members of the former remember life before the takeoff of mass technology, while the latter have been born completely within it. Generation Z members are described as impatient and instant minded, and tending to lack the ambition of previous generations. They appear to be an introverted and aloof generation, since most prefer not to spend much time with real people. Psychologists are claiming an "acquired Attention Deficit Disorder" or "acquired Autistic Spectrum Disorder" since their dependency on technology is high and attention span is much lower, as opposed to previous generations who read books and other printed material, along with watching live television.

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The very nature of young children and young adults is to have fun. Games make learning fun, and kids want games. In a survey completed by [|Project Tomorrow] //more// than half of students surveyed responded:

o Games make it easier to understand difficult concepts – 51% o I would be more engaged in the subject – 50% o I would learn more about the subject – 46% (56% of students in K-2 chose this as their #1 reason) o It would be more interesting to practice problems – 44%

__**Why choose gaming?**__

There are edutainment games for kindergarten children to learn basic skills. Toy companies such as Fisher-Price even sell online games for toddlers. There are all kinds of online games and learning activities for school children. Although some content is more challenging for some individuals individual to learn than others, learning new material should never be painful. The K-12 world can make learning fun. Children are growing up with online learning opportunities in game form. Their expectations for learning will not necessarily be of hour-long college lectures, but an electronic or online activity. Immersed in a technological approach to learning, students will also learn critical thinking skills and develop social networks of like-minded students. They learn leadership skills playing World of Warcraft//.// Games become part of their learning. In their imaginations, they move around within their learning. How can we compete for their attention with talking heads and static PowerPoint slides (or worst yet, hand-written overhead transparencies)? How can playing electronic games encourage them to learn content? Clark Aldrich suggests in his [|blog]that serious gaming is gaining momentum.

He says:

"The serious games movement has a very specific premise: One can create learning experiences that are so much fun, so much like a great computer game, that people will engage them primarily to meet a need for entertainment, and through that process, will happen to learn quite a bit. As a result, the serious game, and the content itself, will spread virally, and as long as they are accessible, will increasingly enrich a given culture. The example is SimCity. And fair enough."

__**My story (and Ben's)**__

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The starkly obvious difference between gaming and traditional schooling is that good games always involve play, and schooling rarely does. It’s worth stepping back to look at play in the broader sense to understand how learning environments can effectively incorporate play, and how play often incorporates learning.

My son, Benjamin recently finished kindergarten, this summer we have visited the pool, taken books out from the library, had countless watergun fights and lastly have worked together playing LEGO Indiana Jones. If you don't know LEGO has developed many games for youngsters to play that are both entertaining and challenging. In this game you complete level that often require the player to complete a number of steps in order to complete the level. Ben and I will play seemingly for hours, almost the entire time he is narrating the story and directing me on how to solve the level. While playing, Benjamin is actually learning a tremendous amount because we aren't always successful but he is using his prior experiences to determining the best steps for achievement within the level, Benjamin is actually exhibiting freedom in many distinct and practical ways:


 * Freedom to Fail**: One doesn’t actually fail at play per se, but one is free to do things at play that would look like failure in other contexts. A digital failure can be re-attempted, the child uses the prior experience to shape a new pattern for achievement. At play a child has unlimited freedom to undertake such doomed enterprises, and learns as much about the nature of things from failure as from success. Fortunately, children at play don’t have adults looming over them, fretting about the cost of these failures, and so children are free to learn from failure and move ever closer to mastery of their world.


 * Freedom to Experiment**: This correlates closely with the freedom to fail, but suggests in addition that within the gaming arena the player has some room to maneuver and invent new approaches to whatever task is at hand. It isn’t sufficient that the child solved the level, but can now seek to become more efficient and develop new pathways towards achievement. Experimentation would be meaningless without the ability to fail regularly, and the freedom to fail would amount to little if players were constrained in where they could seek that failure.


 * Freedom to Fashion Identities**: At play, the child isn’t simply examining the nature of the physical and social worlds, but is also exploring her identity in those worlds. That identity is not a fixed thing, but rather something that is itself “in play.” In gaming, you become the character and develop and a sense of perspective from that characters mind. In fairy tales children imagine what it means to be a dragon, and what it means to slay one. The child is practicing when to be aggressive, when cooperative, when assertive and when docile. Only by trying on these identities do children begin to define themselves.


 * Freedom of Effort**: They observed that children regularly exhibited this pattern of alternating between intense and relaxed play. It is easy to overlook this quality of play, but if we stop to imagine play in which a uniform effort is expected, we quickly sense the presence of a controlling adult.

play and no two players ever experience the “same” game. This creates a challenge for those looking to games to provide a standardized context for learning.
 * Freedom of Interpretation**: Learning about games and learning with games take place simultaneously. One cannot learn about or from games without engaging in their play, yet we must always remember that there is no “one” game: the individual, social, and cultural motivations of any player affect what is experienced through


 * __How gaming affects the developing mind__**
 * [|Excited learners]- students learn more easily and quickly with instruction across multiple modalities or through a variety of media.
 * [|Challenged learners]- students will progress in the game that adapts to their level of play. Students are put into situations that are achievable yet difficult.
 * Confident learners- students are rewarded for their successes and are not penalized for their mistakes, instead they are able to retry to success.
 * Social learners- students work with their peers to solve missions or levels, develop 21st century collaboration skills.
 * Learners are given guidance- students may use tutorials, and/or the teacher to solve missions in a controlled learning environment.
 * [|Teaches kids to think]- students are required to use their prior knowledge and skills to accomplish the goals.


 * __Gaming as an Alternative__**

So far you have come to understand the students of the Z Generation as being game-changers in the way that education in America is done. With regard to test-preparation, games are another tool for professional educators to prepare students for standardized assessments. The benefits of games include providing instant feedback to students, motivation through the achievement of goals, opportunities to learn from their experiences and lastly, games are fun. Games also have opportunity to move testing in new directions, rather than simply having the students complete multiple-choice questions that rely heavily on memorization of facts. Educational games represent an opportunity to move past this simplistic, narrowly focused type of [|assessment]. Combining other forms of traditional assessment with methods modern video games now use on a regular basis students can be tested on more than just the memorization of facts. Together, it's possible to create more complex and complete types of assessment than have ever been available before.

For students, games reinforce concepts being taught in the classroom and provide a framework for understanding new content. In our schools today, students are inundated with test prep, course changes and developing assessment anchors. Students are sitting in classes completing endless worksheets, administrators are organizing testing that takes up an estimated 10% of the total school year. Gaming breaks the cycle by having students learn through assessment and gaining feedback from their choices. Beyond the standardized assessment reasons, the United States government has gotten into the business of using games in the military, for disaster planning and for agricultural planning. Speaking of the military, they have been years ahead of society, war games are the forerunner of video games, military leaders would take their classroom knowledge and apply it in the field, gaining feedback and experience in how they deal with complicated situations. Businesses have also accepted the role of gaming within their industry; some companies are looking for gamers because they understand the 21st Century Skills that are required to master the games. It's time for education to get out of the industrial revolution and to make meaningful changes in the way that business is done.


 * __Conclusion__**

To move educational gaming to the next level will require hard work and a real commitment of resources. The best results will come through collaboration between educators and game designers. Educators acting alone are unlikely to fully grasp what makes contemporary commercial games so compelling for their players; game designers acting alone may not fully grasp the challenges of designing problems and activities that will fully achieve pedagogical objectives. The games that emerge can’t be seen cynically as rewards for learning. Rather, they need to be considered from the outset as organic to the educational process. Given the history of new media technologies being oversold, only to produce disappointment and frustration when they fail to yield predicted results, we need to remain clear about which games can do well and which can’t. We do not put them forward as a substitute for all traditional learning practices. Games must developed in ways that they can be linked to real world experiences and to textbook knowledge to create a richer learning environment—one that goes on “outside the box” as much as inside it.