Blogging the GLS Conference: Thursday Morning Edition

Session: Managed Gaming in the College and High School Classroom: Best Practices (Workshop) : Nick deKanter, Dave McDivitt, and Bert Snow.

I am skipping the Gee session that is running at the same time because I know that it is going to be crazy full and I can always catch it later because it is going to be made available online. I always feel for the folks who are running at the same time with featured session. The funny thing is that the first thing that I saw when I walked into this room was a big ass swastika. That damn near made me turn my ass around and walk out. But I took the plunge and sat down. There are a few more women and younger folks coming in. I even saw one other African American person in the main hall (woohoo!)

(click read more to read the synopsis and observations of the morning sessions)

These folks are from Muzzy Lane Software and a school in Indiana (McDivitt) who is working with the game. Ok, it looks like I might have walked in to a big ass commercial even though the chair of the session just assured us that this is not the case.

What do you need to make a game a teaching tool?

1. Transparency: be able to know what is going on in the game. Not usually the case with commercial games. This goes back to the early post that I made about what Matt Baron said about being able to see the code of the game.
2. Customization: The ability to tweak the game so that it fits the standards that you are teaching to. (Holy shit, he's talking about teaching to the test) Important to college professors because it gives you the ability to create what if scenarios.
3. Feedback: Everything from feedback to the student to being able to take info from multiple games and identify trends.
4. Relevant Content: (Briefing, Playing the game, debriefing) You can make just about any game relevant in the briefing portion of the teaching experience.

Content Packs: Scenarios are 45-90 minutes covering a piece of subject matter. Scenarios cover a given subject

Platform that provides Managed Gaming for Education: includes key features for integration, transparency, customization, and feedback. Includes assessment and tracking features.

How do you go about evaluating critical thinking? The games seeks to provide the student with information that gives them the necessary materials to continue traditional evaluation. The game saves all of the materials created by the student during the game (notes, logs, decision tress, etc.) Teacher can evaluate in real time by playing as an observer. Walk through mode allows the teacher to save the game and to do a walk through with the students and generate discussion. They are still trying to figure out what the standard is or should be and then add questions/quizzes/etc.

Authoring tools for content creation: provides end users the ability to customize their content.

McDivitt- Oak Hills High School. Doing Beta testing. A survey course in World History.

Why games in the classroom?

1. They are fun and competition is good (for who, this guy seems like a real good ole boy)
2. Teens expect both entertainment and technology
3. Students with iPods, cell phones, etc.
4. Games help me reach more students with the required curriculum

How he got ready: Played a few turns of every playable country in the game and played to completion one 18 turn game before approaching the students with the game.

Prep work involved covering the inter war years with no “real” assessment. Divided kids into teams of 2-4 students and assigned countries (best to work with 2-3). Only real consideration given was to separate known “gamers”.   Played the game while students watched. Reading level was not taken into consideration. The reading level of the game was higher than that of the textbook (sophomores). Then students were allowed to play and he walked around and helped them through (one person on the mouse, one on the guide, and one was the goal watcher to be sure that they did more than just blow shit up). The mouse (and therefore the power) rotated everyday and gave other players on the team to run the country. The teacher stressed goals rather than allowing free play. Played the game over 4 class periods. Gamers wanted more, non-gamers wanted less.

There was approximately a 60/40 split of girls to boys in the class. He found that the girls in the class tended to be more “diplomatic” while the boys tended to be more “aggressive” (his words not mine).

Tips from the trenches: Move the mouse, know the goals (or most of them), motivate the unmotivated (give them expert advice), remind the forgetful to achieve the goals and succeed.

Things that got (un)covered with this experience: teamwork, critical thinking, understanding the geography, use of technology, and understanding of individual country motivation.

Dan Stuckhart, lead game designer worker with Prof. M. in beta testing the game in his history courses at Salem State College. Class 1: Tutorial class2: students play class3: students finish the game class4: walk through the game, discussion and analysis of what happened and why. Freshmen were tentative at first and then got into it. The majors were excited about it from the beginning. There was a UI learning curve and the designers have worked on it since then, there was lots of discussion within the game using the chat function. Differences in game play between men and women (much like what McDivitt mentioned above). They found that instructor interaction was crucial to keep folks on track and to give them context.

Content knowledge matters. Majors played the game more realistically and effectively. Non-majors made greater leap in understanding of leadership, balance, and decision-making. Students struggled with budgets and coalition governments. There was lots of diplomacy and diplomatic discussion. Students who pulled bonehead moves changed the game play, but gave the professor the opportunity to ask them to think critically about the repercussions of those actions and how they must change their own game play. This makes me think that perhaps the boneheads weren't such boneheads after all.

Things that were learned. The challenge of leadership, deeper understanding of geography.

By the end of this presenters spiel they were seriously rushing him along and rushing through the slides because they wanted to show off the product. This is more commercial-ly. Don't they understand that the discussion of the pedagogy and the assessment would be more interesting to a bunch of teachers than looking at the game play which is up next. Let us know about the teaching experiences and then give us a damned evaluation copy if we are interested!!

What the game developer learned and did based upon the beta test at Salem College:

Goals given higher priority

Simplify maps and tie them to policies for ease of use

Simplify gameplay on policy level in some areas

Simplify the UI

Cory Ondrejka & Dr. James Cook
Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything

Megan S. Conklin
101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom

This is a session by the developers of Second Life and a teacher who uses it in class.

Cory: Looking at a history of MMORPGs and where they came from. Text based MUDs. Looking at Lucas Films Habitat (note to self to look up info on that). About 10 million people worldwide playing MMORPGs and $1 billion market. Second Life (SL) is different from most MMORPGs because it has user creation: atomistic construction- in other MMORPGs you have to build a piano out of other things and then it is only decorative in SL there is an actual user created piano that is playable. All content is streamed from servers via broadband. Today is SL's second birthday. User creation is done collaboratively: interaction and creation and synchronous and collaborative. (Psychochild (the creator of Meridian 59) is sitting in front of me). Community building, economics (virtual real estate model rather than subscriptions) there is a market you can build, buy, and sell. In the last month there were 1 million p2p transactions. 30,000 user hours a day. 30% of time spent creating. Users retain Intellectual Property rights to their creations (thanks to a roundtable that they attended and Larry Lessig told them to do this). This has caused them to see an increase in users (especially educators).

This is real life. There is no gameplay, no leveling (but there are games being built in SL)   This is sounding more and more interesting. I have heard of SL, but never really paid much attention to it. No I am going to have to look into this because there is the need to program items, etc. it sounds like there might be the possibility that this is a cross between text based MOO/MUDs and graphic interface MOO/MUDs.

James: MD who is working in SL. Talking about what people are doing in the medical space in SL.

Virtual hallucinations; done by Peter Yellowlees and James Cook, MDs from UC-Davis. Simulating the actual hallucinations of people with schizophrenia. Australian doctors interviewed actual patients and created a space that allows other people to see what the patient sees and hears (only about 25% of schizophrenics have visual hallucinations). Used for med student education, family and caregiver education, in-world survey tool, and spontaneous comments. Total cost to dp the experiment was about $100 and the $.50 that he paid folks to take the survey added $75.

Wilde Cunningham: Nine physically disabled people share an account with the assistance of June_Marie Mahay. Giving the disabled the chance to experience things that would otherwise not be able to experience.

Brigadoon island: John Lester founder of Brain Talk Communities. Space used to bring folks together talk about neurological conditions (Asperger's syndrome).

Live2give: Lester and Mahay have built a new community that seeks to teach folks what it's like to live with disabilities.

Megan: Pure research in computing sciences. Using it to teach concepts of technology and society. There is a handout on 101 uses for SL in the classroom that I don't have in my hot little hands :-(   (there is a version online…somewhere).  

Some examples of activities; Changing looks of your avatar (looking at identity). Looking at how the game can be used in different disciplines. Using it to talk about IP issues with students.

Getting very sleepy quick, help me!! It probably has something to do with the fact that I can't surf the ner and kick back and relax.

You don't have to build the economy, you don't have to build the content. Bank is building an area in SL that is going to teach kids how to manage money.

lindenlab.com/gls

www.ssrn.com

terranova.blogs.com

Q&A period Looking at real world applications, People who have used it take the chance to ask real questions about what their experiences about in the real. It runs on ecverything (with the exception of the Mac mini). Second life is becoming a law school fine exam. Ok, I am dozing through the q&a where people are asking how can we keep students from seeing dirty picture, etc. in SL. This does not warrant my staying awake, too bad I can't leave without making a big commotion.

Lunch was uneventful. I sat with a bunch of folks that I didn't know and ate bad lasagna. I did however talk to an interesting woman from Arizona. She's a librarian there and they are developing a game to teach students how to work with information technology. I'd love to work on developing a game that teaches students to think critically. Anybody gotta couple of dollars to sponsor me for a while?