The future of visualization
The Half-Life engine is being used as a visualization tool for projects ranging from single buildings to entire cities. A blog entry on City of Sound talks about the Half-Life engine being used to create a walk-through of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Game designers have been in the business of making realistic visualizations of cities for some time now, and maybe professional planners and architects will jump on board. Imagine a city council meeting where community members can work together to tweak the design of a redevelopment project by using gaming software. 
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’m excited to think about the outcome of citizens designing their neighborhood with state of the art visualization tools. How might the planning process change if powerful visualization tools become more commonplace? How might equity and ecological issues be addressed differently?
In the next version of Urban Science, we will be incorporating Google Earth build out scenarios into game play. We expect that by visualizing their re-designed neighborhoods in Google Earth, players will think about their city differently and begin to better understand the complex interconnections inherent in cities.
What is being learned now?
As part of the process of training Design Advisors for our upcoming Digital Zoo game, I have been going through the agenda of the training and trying to articulate exactly what the biomedical engineers who have volunteered to participate will be learning in each activity.
I designed and led countless trainings for teachers and teaching-artists in the Bronx for a number of years, but I never attempted to hypothesize the impact of each moment of a training quite in this way. Of course, I knew what I wanted those attending to get out of their training experience, but I have discovered through this process that I was making all sorts of assumptions.
Because of the multitude of responsibilities and variety of deadlines that went along with my old position, I’m not hard on myself for making so many assumptions, but now what is being learned is the object of my research (which is the object of my life…). So the minute details about the differences about what people learn in different training activities make all the difference. For example, watching experts perform is different than watching novices perform, and the nature of what one learns when doing vs. is different from the nature of what one learns when reflecting.
Part of the exciting thing about this research is that it has such natural implications to the central and necessary questions that educators face in the real world today. How to prepare teachers do a good job is a question to which everybody wants to know the answer…
Reblogged: Games are not fun
This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).
Well, of course many games are fun. But a recent psychological study shows that fun isn’t the main reason people play games.
All too often, discussions of games and learning go down a familiar path: games are fun, and learning should be fun, so games should be good for learning. The more sophisticated version of the same argument goes: games are motivating, and motivation is an important part of learning, so we can use games to motivate players to learn.
In my own work, I have argued that while games often are fun, that isn’t what makes them games. Now, a study from the University of Rochester shows a similar result.
Reblogged: What we know
Reblogged from the Macarthur Foundation’s Spotlight blog:
In the next two weeks: some of the things we KNOW about digital media, games, and learning–and what that tells us about the future of learning.
On the Sunday after the Macarthur Foundation’s Games and Learning public panel discussion, the Chicago Tribune ran a front page article: ‘Skip the textbook, play the video game.’
It is a great article overall, and does a nice job of describing the case for games and learning. And in true journalistic fashion, the writer also included the “other side” of the story–or anyway, one “other side” of the story from Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the Alliance for Childhood:
‘There is no evidence that video games are good at teaching problem-solving or collaboration or the other higher-order skills that these proponents are claiming.’
The problem is that this claim is simply:
FALSE
It is just not true that “there is no evidence that video games are good at teaching…higher-order skills.” In fact, the work of some of the presenters at the Macarthur panel (including my own work)–and many of the other researchers funded by the foundation’s digital media and learning initiative–shows that it is false!
The Macarthur Foundation has asked me to be a guest editor on their blog for the next two weeks, and I’m hoping to use that opportunity to move the the larger discussion past some of the myths about digital media, games, and learning–and along the way to look at why computer games and other digital tools are so important in children’s digital future.
Because here’s the truth:
We already know a lot about whether computer and video games can help children learn (short answer: they can!) and even about how they do it.
Has research already told us everything we’d like to know about digital media and learning, or everything we can know? Of course not. And a few blog posts won’t even begin to touch on all the issues.
There is a serious discussion to be had about what games can do for children and how they can do it. There are pros and cons, to be sure. But we are now past the point where simply saying “there’s no data!” adds to that discussion.
Blog on!
I’ve been asked to “guest edit” the Macarthur Foundation’s Spotlight blog for two weeks. I hope it will be an interesting series of posts–and discussions/comments. I’ll be reblogging entires here a day or so after they post on Spotlight, but I certainly invite anyone interested in the epistemic games blog to join the conversation there.
