Recent posts for Games
Former students of Urban Science make planning splash with proposal for a Central Park Airport
Just kidding.
A recent hoax, in which the Manhattan Airport Foundation proposed a new airport be built in Central Park, fooled both the Huffington Post and Inhabitat, a weblog about sustainable design.
Someone should have played Science.Net
Here’s an argument as to why it could help you to learn to think like a journalist:
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.
Urban Science in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In November 2008, the Epistemic Games Research Group collaborated with the Milwaukee Public Schools’ Division of Recreation and Community Services to run a week-long Urban Science game. This version of urban Science was notably different from previous versions. In-game mentors, who in previous versions of the game had been physically present, guided students remotely, via instant messenger. Over a dozen students from Riverside University High School took on the role of urban planners. In an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Stanley A. Miller writes that, “The students had to consider issues such as affordable housing, parking, ecological issues and crime, while balancing the desires of special interest groups such as businesses, a cultural preservation organization and other community advocates.”
He also quotes epistemic games researcher Elizabeth Bagley, “There are tradeoffs and consequences, and these are things they need to deal with as a planner. They are learning how to really facilitate compromises because there are stakeholders whose goals don’t overlap.”
While the game facilitates collaboration and critical thinking, it also connects young people to the environment and to their neighborhoods. View the full article on the Journal Sentinel website, or a PDF here.
Maria revisited
I recently gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate teacher training course on campus. I spent 45 minutes talking about epistemic games, and specifically my work on Urban Science, and then answered questions from the 30 students. Not surprisingly, the students were interested in the demographics of epistemic game players, buying the games and implementing them in their classrooms, and curious about the long-term effects of epistemic gameplay on achievement. When I addressed the last topic, I told the story I previously wrote about here, the story about Maria’s social studies assignment and her creative solution to the task. In the middle of telling the story, one of the students emphatically raised her hand and shouted out, ‘Was that last year?’ I told her it was and the student went on to say, ‘I was in that class! I was observing that class and Maria’s assignment was phenomenal! I totally remember her work!’
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Blog Examines Microworlds and Explanatoids
Check out David Learns Games to read one blogger’s thoughts on tech development, academic research, and game-based learning. In a recent post, Microworlds, Explanatoids, and Extending the Islands of Expertise Theory, the author synthesizes David Williamson Shaffer’s book How Computer Games Help Children Learn, with other scholarly work David has done with Gina Svarovsky. The blogger, who is a game designer himself, ends with the comment that, “If it is true that a game seeking to deliver learning through exploratoids must be not only iterative and autoexpressive but also expressive then I fear that I may be in a hot spot!”
