The end of spelling?
Those of you who are regular readers of epistemicgames.org know that I am not a big fan of spending lots of instructional time teaching spelling. But if you are going to do it, I suppose you should at least do it right.
This bombshell just out from the British "National Strategies" for teaching (from an AP report):
The morality of zoos
A thoughtful colleague, Gene Koo, recently sent me a draft of a paper on moral development and video games. In the paper, Gene quotes a brief excerpt from a paper (Stevens, Saticz, and McCarthy 2008) about a 15 year old girl playing Zoo Tycoon:
In her everyday life, Rachel and her family cared for stray and abandoned cats awaiting adoption through a local animal shelter. We often observed her readily pause her game play to monitor a cat’s health or attend to its needs. In-game however, Rachel’s decisions about the animals she was caring for as zookeeper were driven by monetary gain rather than the happiness or well-being of the animals. For example, while creating a zoo for different types of cats (e.g., tigers, lions, and leopards), Rachel learned of a new birth in her zoo and responded by selling the newborn animals immediately.
So, naturally, this leads one to wonder what kind of lessons kids learn playing the game.
Play to learn
Nice short piece from the IEEE that mentions work on Epistemic Games.
David Williamson Shaffer, a professor of learning science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offers no surprises when he says that to remain competitive, high-wage countries need to produce products and services that can’t be readily copied by low-cost competitors. To produce such goods and services requires innovative thinking, which can be taught Shaffer says—and here he may raise an eyebrow or two—through computer games.
Evidence-centered Design of Epistemic Games
Rupp, A, Gushta, M, Mislevy, R, & Shaffer, DW. (2010). Evidence-centered design of epistemic games: Measurement principles for complex learning environments. Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 8(4).
