Recent posts for Featured
A glimpse of what’s hidden
A few days ago I was meeting with a teacher who ran Urban Science in her classroom last year. We were sitting in her classroom after school, and talking about plans for her to run another version of the game this spring. We were excited because many of the same students from last year are in her class again and we thought it would be interesting to see how they played the game for the second time. Also, the site that the students would be researching and rezoning in the game was actually the neighborhood where the school is located and where most of the students live.
While we were talking, one of her students walked into the room. The teacher enthusiastically told her that the class would be playing Urban Science again this spring. The student looked at us and wordlessly unzipped her coat to reveal the Epistemic Games t-shirt that all of the players got the previous year.
While I don’t want to go too far in interpreting the synchronicity of this encounter, I couldn’t help but think that 5th graders do not make sartorial choices lightly. It can sometimes be hard to know the inner transformations that happen as kids are learning and growing. But every once in a while, if you are lucky, you can get an unzipped glimpse of what kids take with them.
Urban Science game teaches children how to think like urban planners
This video describes the epistemic game Urban Science, which simulates elements of the urban planning process to teach middle school and high school students how to think like urban planners. It was was produced to give educators a view into what playing urban science is like. The video includes footage of middle school students playing and talking about a version of Urban Science that ran in 2007, and also interview footage with a teacher from Lakeview Elementary in Madison, Susan Hobart, who ran a version of the game in the spring of 2009 in her classroom.
The lessons of a PIM fail
I had an interesting–and terrible–experience this past week. My email/calendar/addressbook/to-do list system had a catastrophic crash. For basically a week it just stopped working. Or, almost worse, it worked sporadically and unreliably.
I was suddenly caught without my external memory field, without reliable communications, and without any way to reliably deal with the information that was coming into my life. I had come to depend on this technology, and then it failed.
A lot of things fell through the cracks: phone calls, doctor’s appointments, email exchanges.
[For those of you wondering, I did manage to recover the data. But if you sent me email last week and didn't hear back, it might be a good idea to resend it!]
The result, though, was an opportunity to ponder, first hand, one of the darker sides of technology…
D&D Redux
I just went to the game store with my oldest daughter and helped her pick out her first set of D&D rules and dice. I was so proud that it brought a tear to my eye.
UW-Madison student writes about rehabilitative uses of Wii
A student at UW-Madison wrote a paper discussing the rehabilitative uses of the Wii. She included an interview with David Williamson Shaffer in which he discussed how video games create virtual worlds that are energizing for players.
