Learning Education Games 2 Schrier etal web

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The paper explores the evolving landscape of educational games, highlighting their potential to enhance learning and problem-solving skills. It discusses the transition from traditional assessments of educational efficacy in games to innovative frameworks that include real-world applications. The text divides into sections addressing classroom practices, community engagement, and technology integration, supported by case studies and assessments, while advocating for a balance between entertainment and educational value in gaming.

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Figure 1.

Squire’s framework also can be distilled into a simple classification as seen in Figure 2. Short-form games include the previously defined targeted games and some linear games, such as Angry Birds or Mario Kart. Games in this category are easier to integrate into the classroom than long-form games, and are seeing a surge in numbers due to the growth of apps and purchases of mobile devices in K-12 education (Richards, Stebbins & Moellering, 2013).

Figure 4.

Table 1. Commercial vs. Serious Games Because of these differences, COTS games will rarely contain any explicit ties to required curricula, nor will the scoring mechanisms be usable without interpretation or translation, and this is an important issue for games to be used in formal education. To complicate things further, depending on the game, a losing score can sometimes be just as valuable for meeting educational objectives as a winning one, and the actions required to achieve a positive score ina COTS game may have little to do with what players are supposed to be learning. When a COTS game is used for leaning, the connections to the educational objectives will almost always be externally imposed, even when there is authentic and relevant learning taking place within the game. With serious games designed specifically for learning, these connections are usually much more obvious and in-game scores may even be directly usable by teachers for student assessment. This places COTS games in a separate category with distinct requirements.

Table 2. Learning Theory and Game Design Connections Gee describes the properties that games have that make them “good,” such as incorporating good gamification, smart tools (inside the game), good media convergence (i.e. merging of media technologies), and taking advantage of collective and distributed intelligence. Good games have assessment built into the game, progress in the game is proven through mastery; and gameplay is contextualized and includes meaningful problem solving. However, just because a game possesses all of these properties does not mean that the things that make the game good are actually focused on elements of value in the intended educational context. For example, achieving a high Happy Home Academy (HHA) score in Animal Crossing New Leaf is a complex undertaking and can require all of the properties just outlined, but what players learn to earn that high HHA score is not especially useful in a real life context.

Table 3. Essentials of Curriculum Integration Since games are still novel educational technologies in most formal educational contexts, teachers who wish to use them will be required to justify their use in ways not typically necessary if they decide to use a more traditional technology. As a result access to resources such as curricular ties, ways in which assessment can be used to inform student progress, and lesson plans can make the difference between a game being approved for use and not. To further complicate matters, most teachers simply do not have the time to create these resources for themselves, so if these resources do not exist, it will not matter how good the game is.

Figure 1. Essential Game Elements

Table 1. Comparison of 20th vs 21st Century Approaches to Teaching & Learning Adapted from Shaw, A. (2008). What is 21st Century Education? Retrieved from http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/what_ is_21st_century_education.htm on Mar. 2, 2015. Used with permission.

During this part of the class, the leaderboards showed a disturbing trend: while a few of the students were highly motivated and competitive, most of the students stopped doing any optional assignments after a few weeks. The chart below shows the progress of the students over the first six weeks where each student is represented by a single line (Nicholson, 2013). The number of lines that flatten out between week 4 and 6 indicate the number of students who did nothing for the class during those weeks.

Figure 3. Leaderboard for EDER 679.17, 2013 This phenomenon is not unique to gamification. Becker has been using a bonus point system in her classes since 1999 where students could earn points over and above those required for a perfect score on an assignment by adding various embellishments to their submissions. These “extra” points could then be used to bump a student's grade up a portion of a letter grade. In other words, a student who had earned a B in the course could increase that to a B+ if they had sufficient bonus points (Becker, 2003, 2006 . It is interesting to note that those students who earned the highest bonus scores had also earned high scores on all other components of the course. In most cases, the extra points had no effect on the students’ score. In other words the extra work was not reflected in their grades, and they knew this but did the extra work anyway.

Table 1. Station One Rubric Boat Building Emulation For one of the first activities students created an annotated isometric sketch in their engineering notebook. This required knowledge of vocabulary, description of design goals, demonstration of an isometric sketch, and an explanation of how their initial plans were going to work. This included the dimensions, materials, and reasoning in the engineering notebook. Through this, the student could level up with review and assessment from the teacher. A passing score allowed the student to move to the next station, or resulted in suggestions of making changes to their boat, and improve their score on the rubric, and grade in the grade book.

Figure 1. Image of Boat Building Emulation Stations A word wall informed each step of the process with key vocabulary. A word wall is a collection of words, which are displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display surface in a classroom. In this lesson, the word wall contained key vocabulary for the activity such as: design, naval architecture, marine engineering, mechanical drafting, the engineering notebook, measurement, engineering and design principles, and scientific principles such as buoyancy, displacement, force, turbulence, reasoning, hypothesis testing, data collection and interpretation of the data.

Figure 2. GarageBand User Interface from Gavenda (2005)

Table 3. Scoring Table for Constitutional Convention Emulation

Table 1. Video Game Characteristics and Children with ADHD Traditional strategies for teaching and improving skills in children with ASD include direct instruction in social skills; occupational and physical therapy to help with sensory integration and motor- coordination problems; and training in communication skills such as listening, making eye contact, and reading nonverbal cues. Family and individual therapy may also be helpful, along with executive- functioning training to improve cognitive flexibility and adaptability. Some specific strategies and tools are used to train children who have more severe forms of ASD. These include approaches such as applied behavioral analysis (ABA) (Lovaas, 1987), which is a form of behavior modification that assesses the relationship between a behavior and the environment and develops strategies to reinforce appropriate behavior. Autism researchers (Whalen et al. 2010) have also identified motivation, attention, and flexibility as important tools to teach children with ASD. Given the disabilities of children with ASD, it is evident how specific characteristics of digital media and video games can be very useful in helping them.

Figure 1: I'll Get It from Carnegie Mellon Libraries (used with permission)

This framework can be used in any gaming setting that is facilitated. In the classroom, the teacher may have some students playing a game while other students observe, reflect, and engage with other resources (including the teacher). This happens in chess tournaments, where a chess game in one room is broadcast to another room where attendees can discuss what is going on. In a sporting arena or a video game competition, the spectators are part of the event, as they cheer, boo, and yell advice from the stands. This fishbowl approach can be valuable when resources prevent an instructor from having enough copies of a game for everyone in the class to play.

Table 1. Outcomes of gaming programs commonly reported by libraries (Nicholson, 2009).

Furthermore, state and federal homeschooling statistics omit large numbers of homeschoolers, because there is no agreed upon defininition of homeschooling. For example, some states (like California) consider homeschools to be small private schools. Some states count virtual school students as “public school students,” especially when these online schools are funded by the state. A recent news article explains how some states fail to count homeschoolers:

Table 1. Table of the design purpose of different larps. A special note must be mentioned for research larps, where the creator of the event seeks to explore a question or test a hypothesis. Here, the other participants are objects of study. Perhaps the most famous research larp—though not labeled as such—was Philip G. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Although research larps are ultimately useful for education, they are not designed to impart knowledge or create the conditions where participants can learn knowledge—though that may occur incidentally. They are larps, but they are not an “educational larp” by the above definition (see Table 1).

Key Frameworks Code: The Magic Behind Software

Table 1. Overview of popular programming languages

Table 2. Overview of popular game engines

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