Projecting ourselves
Things are finally beginning to slow down (at least in terms of travel) after a very busy March and April, but many ideas from this year’s DIGITEL workshop (in Taiwan) and AERA annual meeting (in Chicago) have continued to bounce around in my head and in several different on-going conversations.
David Williamson Shaffer quoted in Newsweek
Newsweek’s Periscope feature in the April 16th 2007 issue describes how more and more schools are using simulations and video games to instruct their charges. “Videogames,” they quote David Williamson Shaffer, “let us design obstacles that give kids a chance to learn things we value. Plus, they provide kids with the motivation to do it.”
One blogger’s take on teaching technology
Patrick Higgins, in his blog CHALKDUST, recently posted his take on teaching technology. He emphasizes that students need to learn not just a variety of technologies, but also how to decide which technology is the appropriate one for any given problem. In describing why this ability to match the correct technology to the problem is so important, he references David Williamson Shaffer’s ideas about how we need to be preparing children for a global market by teaching innovation.
Epistemic Games address the issue of knowing how to solve problems in the real world because they are modeled on the training experiences of those who do. Further, they are expressly designed to instill innovative thinking in an authentic context.
A teacher’s observations of her 4th/5th graders participating in Digital Zoo
When I say I’m working on a game where players become engineers, people often ask me: but will that be fun? Of course, what makes a game a game isn’t that it is fun, but that it is motivating–it makes you care about what you are doing and thus want to do it. In a recent test of Digital Zoo that involved a class of 4th/5th graders, we were interested in comparing the children’s focus during the game to their focus during school. The children’s classroom teachers observed the game and had the following types of things to say about their students:
China and the US admire each other’s lawns
Re-education, a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, illustrates a classic case of the grass being greener, with the future of two countries at stake.
The article describes how Chinese educators, “concerned that too many students have become the sort of stressed-out, test-acing drone who fails to acquire the skills ‘” creativity, flexibility, initiative, leadership ‘” said to be necessary in the global marketplace…. are trying to blend a Western emphasis on critical thinking, versatility and leadership into their own traditions.”
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