Aran Nulty (alumna 2006-2008, MEd) studied adapting epistemic games to meet the needs of elementary school-aged players. She worked with Padraig Nash on a version of the Digital Zoo game that ran in the Spring of 2007 with a 4th-5th grade class at a Madison K-8 school.
As researchers studying new media, it only seemed appropriate to let people know about our work using well, new media.
This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Project and the National Science Foundation.
In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.
I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games….
Reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog:
This was my first time at AERA, and it was quite an eye-opening experience.
I went to two sessions: Can Computer Games Improve Student Learning? and Stories of Mathematics Instruction, Rich Media Technologies, and Their Uses to Understand and Improve Teaching that together made a strong argument that technological tools shouldn’t be what students learn, rather they are a central part of how students learn. Continue reading »
The young planners at Urban Design Associates were excited to see their work in print this summer. Susan Troller from the Capital Times wrote this article about Urban Science, and the Wisconsin State Journal covered the game twice, once during a site visit and once during the mayoral presentation.
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:
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, (subscription required) “What’s Wrong With Vocational School?” Charles Murray critiques the “false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.” Murray suggests that instead of touting 4-year college as the top educational option, we should recognize that because of its traditional emphasis on “advanced analytic skills” applied to a broad range of information, it is really just an option for those to whom this kind of education appeals, which is by no means all students. So what about everyone else? Continue reading »
