If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, , together with representatives from the and departments, to whip it into publishable shape.

One of the things we know about creative thinking is that creative thinkers these days use sophisticated tools: graphic designers use Photoshop and Illustrator, architects and engineers use CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, urban planners use geographic information systems, managers use gantt charting tools, accountants use spreadsheets, and everyone uses word processors, Web browsers, and email.

So it makes sense that to learn innovative and creative thinking, you need to use these tools and you need to learn to use them.

In my research, I look at how middle school students can become better writers by playing journalists in the game science.net. As players take on the role of cub reporters in the game, they also take on the responsibilities that go with being a journalist. And to help them do that, I designed ByLine, a software tool authentic to the practice of journalism, but custom-developed for the game.

ByLine lets players create authentic products. The tool was designed to work like other professional web-based newspaper management software, such as CoFax (developed by the Knight Ridder news organization). Through a web browser, players compile notes from online research and live interviews, write and copyedit story drafts, and ultimately get published in an authentic-looking online newspaper. In other words, players of the game can have the expressive power of real professionals, a power they discover when they can Google their own stories, which is itself a powerful motivator of performance within and after the game.

But ByLine isn’t designed to do what journalism software does. It is designed to simulate what journalism tools do. In some places (layout of the paper, for example), the tool simply handles complex work that contributes to publishing a newspaper but doesn’t especially help players learn to think like journalists. To successfully use the tool, however, players have to organize their work the way a journalist would. In key places–choosing a lead, for instance, or identifying sources–players have to express their ideas using the language of journalism.

As players work through the different stages of each story, they use specific sets of journalism markup tags to organize that work. The tool responds graphically to focus the player’s attention on particularly important journalism features of the story–from the presence or absence of sources to the organization and display of the story’s headline, lead and body elements.

As part of my research, I’ve studied this interaction between player and game, and these studies show that players get statistically-significant increases in their understanding of journalism practices and values from playing the game. As players progress through the game, they use more of the journalism tools built into ByLine, and they use them earlier in their work on stories. This use of journalism concepts goes hand in had with better stories, in which players write like journalists, presenting multiple perspectives, attributing sources, and writing in the neutral voice of the newspaper.

More important, these effects transfer to their writing outside the game as well: They get better at understanding and analyzing newspaper stories. In this sense, as players in science.net use ByLine they have to think like a journalist to play as a journalist. Because to learn to think about real problems they way people do in the world you have to use tools that let you think the way people do in the world.

Filled with interesting video clips that flesh out an investigative story of corporate greed and wrong-doing, BtR simplifies many of the challenging complexities of reporting to ensure players can in fact complete a round in minutes. When interviewing non-player characters, players can only choose pre-defined questions to ask (as opposed to creating their own), the only ‘people’ available to interview are people with useful information, and ‘filing’ the story means simply choosing a predefined title (and not writing a single word).

At the same time, BtR retains some very important challenges – such as deciding when do you have enough info (and that your sources have been properly confirmed) to actually file the story, or even deciding amongst the different possible sources which you feel are most important. The game also shows players important values for the profession in multiple ways, partly through an ethics handbook (a list of do’s and don’ts) and, more entertainingly, through intermittent feedback from your editor, such as “Remember to confirm your facts; follow up on what people tell you.”

Not actually doing any writing–or having to decide from a blank notebook page what questions you ought to ask during an interview–makes this feel more like an interactive movie about being a reporter than an immersive simulation. But with that important caveat, BtR does show some interesting ways that the a game engine for journalism role playing can incorporate some of the “human interactions” and other challenges of the profession.

In other words, BtR is a good example of how an epistemic game can pack more and more elements of a professional practice into the computer simulation–and thus potentially make these kind of games easier to play for more people.

Combining the excitement of scientific discovery with the thrill of publishing their own work to inform the public, young people in science.net work as reporters publishing a weekly online science newspaper. During the game, they work with professional journalists, learning skills like interviewing and copyediting. And they use these skills right away, working on and publishing stories about breaking scientific issues that matter to themselves and to their community.

Science.net is our latest and most complete Journalism.net game. This game has been played twice by Madison-area middle school students during the summers of 2005 and 2006. While playing this series of 45-hour games, players met with professional journalists, worked at each of three desks (Environment, Health, and Technology), researching stories around current science topics, interviewing UW-Madison scientists, and producing three complete sections of the Science.net newsmagazine.

It helped journalism.net players produce each of these online newspapers:

– Science.net (Edition 2, summer 2006)
- Science.net (Edition 1, summer 2005)
- South Madison Times (Edition 1, summer 2004)
- Wisconsin Science Journal (Edition 2, summer 2004)
- Wisconsin Science Journal (Edition 1, spring 2004)

The software is custom-developed, drawing technically from sources in the Learning Sciences (Guzdial’s CoWeb) and from commercial software (WYSIWYG text editors and Knight Ridder’s Cofax publishing system). ByLine also draws from ethnographic studies of professional journalism learning environments, including capstone university courses and actual newspaper offices. As an epistemic game engine, ByLine is designed to make it easier for young people to participate in the professional activities of journalists while also helping those cub reporters learn to think more like professional reporters. As a research tool, ByLine is designed to help researchers better understand the ways young people develop a professional epistemology.

The next month she wrote a letter to the editor which was published in Time magazine.

Epistemic games are one approach to creating educational games that give players skills that transfer beyond the game world by helping young people become fluent in valuable social practices. Epistemic games are immersive, technology-enhanced, role-playing games where players learn to become, and thus to think like, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, and other members of important practices and professions. In what follows we look at the design of Byline, an epistemic game engine behind science.net, an epistemic game of science journalism. In particular, we argue that rather than simply recreating the technological conditions of the profession, an epistemic game engine like Byline can encode key elements of a professional practicum and thus help young people learn through participation in simulations of the training practices of socially valued professions such as science journalism.

Part internet printing press, part computational tool for thought, ByLine is the epistemic game engine used in (Journalism Game), the epistemic role-playing game of professional journalism. Players use ByLine to write and publish stories in an online science newspaper. At the same time, ByLine is designed to help players learn to think like journalists about science and society.

Lead Researchers : David Hatfield

The most obvious, glaring thing is that librarians (in general) have absolutely no clue about what is going on in this area [of gaming and education]. Academia is only now starting to do more than just study it, but it’s not even on our radar. I’ve noted before that I talk about Millennials in the context of serving them where they are (rather than making them come to us), but I hadn’t really thought through all of the implications of the gaming side of it. If you have young children or grandchildren, you can see how gaming affects them, and in turn how they interact with information and multi-modal interfaces…

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As a librarian, I was already buying into the whole video games in libraries meme, but what also struck me was how I filtered everything I heard as a parent, too. Having a 9-year old, male gamer at home informed much of what I heard, and there were many times I thought to myself, “That’s Brent,” during the presentations. I fully realize now how much the games are content for him and just how much learning he’s actually doing…