Epistemic games

With the current U.S. focus on testing and accountability, we have made sure that our schools are better equipped than ever to produce commodity workers, but not innovative ones, writes UW-Madison education professor David Williamson Shaffer. But the high end of the value chain in a global economy is the knowledge needed to design innovative products, services, and technologies that let people share information, work together, and do things in new ways.

Williamson Shaffer promotes the value of epistemic games in education games requiring students to make, apply, and share knowledge. Epistemic games are rigorous, motivating, and complex, just like the professional training on which they are modeled. Instead of learning facts, information, and theories first, and then trying to apply them, the facts, information, and theories are learned and remembered because they were needed to play the game that is, to solve some real world problem in the first place. (from WCER)

Epistemic Games

[photopress:digitalzoo4.jpg,thumb,pp_image][photopress:digitalzoo4.jpg,full,alignright]computer role-playing games where players become architects, engineers, urban planners, journalists, and other professionals

learning:

to understand problems that matter by thinking like the people who solve them

research:

on how computer games can help children succeed in the digital age

Literature Blaster in Harpers

A recent issue of Harpers looks at video games in education, and includes a conversation:

Lesson plans are being adjusted accordingly. Last year hundreds of new educational video games were released, on subjects ranging from algebra to U.S. history. In order to assess the video game’s pedagogical potential, but also its implications for the English language, Harper’s Magazine brought together four experts — two video-game enthusiasts and two teachers — and charged them with a task: to dream up video games that might teach, of all things, writing.

I wonder what they would have thought about science.net, or any of the other versions of journalism epistemic games we’ve developed?

At one point they talk about a game where:

In order to move to the next phase of the game, you would have to read literary texts and answer questions about them.

Great. Literature blaster instead of Math blaster. One more example of making academic content the obstacle to fun.

Letter to the editor

Sometimes, it’s easy to see that good games can change how players think. For example, one player of the Science.net game was so interested by her in-game research on stem cells that she continued to read about it after the game was over.

The next month she wrote a letter to the editor which was published in Time magazine.

How computer games help children learn

How can we make sure that our kids are learning to be creative thinkers in a world of global competition — and what does that mean for the future of education in the digital age? David Williamson Shaffer offers a fresh and powerful perspective on computer games and learning. How Computer Games Help Children Learn shows how video and computer games can help teach kids to build successful futures–but only if we think in new ways about education itself.

Shaffer shows how computer and video games can help students learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need to survive in a changing world. Based on more than a decade of research in technology, game science, and education, How Computer Games Help Children Learn revolutionizes the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of digital learning.