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Goals & Objectives:
The core components of educational gaming reflect the following objectives.
- learning can be fun,
- gaming as experiential learning,
- gaming as an opportunity for discovery,
- a possibility for social exchange through multiplayer systems,
- personalization through programming, and
- additional core learning objectives such as mathematics or language
mastery.
Prerequisites:
Instructor must model a lesson within or around the use of a software application.
This application must be available to the students.
Materials and Resources:
What needs to be prepared in advance by the teacher? The assignment description.
What does the student need to bring to the lesson? The willingness to participate
and access to the required software.
Guiding Questions for this Activity:
Depends on the overall purpose of the activity, but a general guiding question
would be, how well will the students be able to solve dilemma x using application
y.
Activity Outline and Procedure:
At the beginning of a course, students are given the opportunity to acquire
or gain access to the required gaming software. When appropriate, an activity
will be designed whereby the students utilize the software towards a given
purpose. Using the tools provided by the software, the students try to accomplish
the given task. The game is usually synchronously.
Teaching Strategies:
- Learning goals should be made clear so that students know what they should
be learning from the given gaming event as well as what their achievement
will be measured by.
- Most serious or educational games allow for multiplayer, providing for
an opportunity to create and assess collaboration.
Accommodations:
What accommodations may be needed for students with disabilities or other
special needs? The software used or the activity itself may need to be altered
to accommodate those with special needs. For example, a chatting application
within a virtual realm will need to be accessible to text-to-speech software
for the blind.
Timeline:
Not including the time required to master the software, the time frame of
a single activity may be as small as 15 minutes. An educational goal should
be accomplished within one hour.
Ideas for Activity Evaluation and Teacher Reflection:
How did the students like the lesson? End of semester evaluations should
ask about the usefulness of such activities.
Ideas for improvement may be suggested.
What did the students learn? Some method of analyzing student achievement
must be built into the activity. Often, dialogue will be primary data for
assessment as well as game performance. The game may be more of a teaching/learning
activity rather than assessment strategy.
Additional Readings:
Here is just a small selection of resources on gaming in education. Key
search phrases include "educational gaming" or "serious gaming".
- Armstrong, M. (2005, December 28). Serious video games for education,
activism. [Podcast] News & Notes, National Public Radio. Retrieved
January 17, 2007, from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5072275
- Gamer's Realm. (1993-1998). Games & Education Newsletter.
- Archived newsletter dealing with games and education. Retrieved January
17, 2007, from http://www.rpg.net/sites/edu/
- Gutenschwager, G. (1979, September). Gaming, education and change. Journal
of Architectural Education, 33(1), pp. 30-32.
- Kirriemuir, J. (2002, February). Video gaming, education and digital
learning technologies. D-Lib
Magazine, 8(2). Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february02/kirriemuir/02kirriemuir.html
- Serious games. (2006). CALT Encyclopedia: The Encyclopedia
of Learning Approaches and Technologies. Cedex, France: The Centre
for Advanced Learning Technologies. Retrieved January 17, 2007, from
http://www.calt.insead.edu/encyclopedia/?serious%20games
- Washington, D.C.: The Serious Games Initiative. [Website]. http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html
- (2005). Innovate:
Journal of Online Education, 1(6) - Entire issue devoted to gaming.
Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=search&type=browse&issue=9
A list of serious games can be found in the following Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_games
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