World Bank forum
David spoke recently at a World Bank Forum on Serious Play and Urban Planning:
As children, we learn through play. Can the same process, through carefully designed games, prove a practical learning tool for development? In this learning event on September 28, 2006, conducted partly via videoconference from the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and organized by the Urban Planning Department of the World Bank Institute, experts in interactive learning design spoke about the potential of these technologies.
Urban Science is discussed at length by experts from around the globe….
Elizabeth’s Contact Information
Elizabeth Bagley
Graduate Student/Researcher
Department of Educational Psychology
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Educational Sciences Building, Room 1075B
1025 West Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53711
phone: 608.262.0393
email: easowatzke at wisc dot edu
Games for good
Another entry in the growing category of games for (positive social) good, this time about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Global Conflicts: Palestine.
What makes this game particularly interesting is that you encounter the conflict through a professional role, in this case as a journalist:
Games in higher education
Wisconsin Week, the University of Wisconsin newspaper, ran an interview with David this week on simulations and games in higher education:
Urban science in the news
A writeup about GAPPS and GameLab in MetropolisMag … with a nice piece about Urban Science:
In an experiment to remedy this, the GAPPS group has forwarded the concept of “epistemic games,” which expose kids to the technical language and problems of a particular profession. Game Designer is based on this model, as is an earlier prototype designed by the GAPPS group’s David Williamson Shaffer that aims to introduce schoolchildren to the fundamental concepts of urban planning.
If SimCity achieves this partially as a by-product of a Robert Moses-like power trip over a Lilliputian world, Shaffer’s game, called Urban Science, explicitly sets out to ape the professional model. The game casts players as urban planners charged with the task of redesigning State Street, the main thoroughfare of Madison, Wisconsin, in a set of parameters defined by the actual profession. If, for example, the player chooses to bulldoze a civic center and build a giant parking lot, he’ll find the mayor on his doorstep complaining of angry letters from preservationists. Players have to deal with various constituencies, including the area’s environmentalists and those lobbying for more affordable housing; and once their redesign is under way they’re required to submit a report to a real urban planner for evaluation. The results have been impressive. “Suddenly,” Gee says, “the kids are using complicated language about urban planning.”
