Bascom Hill Society Showcase Series
The Bascom Hill Society offers presentations by UW faculty and staff. Held throughout the year, their showcase series offers interesting, entertaining and even controversial topics to members. Click on the following link to find a recent talk by David Williamson Shaffer on the potential learning benefits of computer and video games.
Games, Learning, and Society Group Video
The Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin – Madison conducts research on technology, games, and learning. This video includes interviews with members of GLS, including David Shaffer:
NBC 15 Interviews David Shaffer
Here is a TV interview with David Williamson Shaffer around the time of the release of How Computer Games Help Children Learn:
A day at the museum
I’m in California for a few days with my family, and today we went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco. For those who don’t know it, the Exploratorium is one of the best and most famous hands-on science museums in the world. Imagine an aircraft-hanger sized space filled with stations that let visitors experiment with phenomena in physics, biology, mathematics–and even some magic.
We had a chance to play with gyroscopic forces, take mini psychology tests, see optical illusions, experiment with a vacuum, build a catenary arch, generate a wave, and see ourselves “fly” in angled mirrors. Great stuff. While trying out all of these stations at the museum, we had a chance to talk about why bicycles work–and why you are more stable if you ride fast, which is a particularly salient topic for my daughter who is learning to ride without training wheels. We talked about Galileo, and card-counting, and standing waves, and a bunch of other good science topics.
After our visit to the museum, we had a picnic outside on the lawn at the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Exploratorium is located. While we were eating, I asked my kids: “Did you have a good time at the museum?”
Workshop Overview
The goal of this workshop (presented at the 2008 International Conference for the Learning Sciences at Utrecht University) is not to talk about epistemic games for their own sake. Rather, we will use the techniques, methods, and ideas we have developed in creating epistemic games as a starting point for a broader discussion of the learning science of developing and testing theory-based games. In working towards this goal, participants will have an opportunity to discuss and reflect on their own work on game development and to create and/or refine their own ideas about games and learning. Specifically, by the end of the workshop, participants will have begun to develop a ‘toolkit’ of strategies and techniques for the design, implementation, and assessment of their own games. We will also create an online discussion board for the participants to use after the workshop in order to continue the conversations started during the session.
