Food. Shopping. Parking. Housing. Trees. What will the future of Madison look like? In Urban Science, young people decide. Using iPlan, a cutting-edge computer tool, players work as urban planners to change the look and feel of Madison. They listen to people’s concerns, redesign the city, and present their findings to family, friends, and planning experts.
In Urban Science, we explore how innovative technology-based learning environments modeled on the professional practices of urban planners inform students’ understanding of ecology. In the game, players learn about ecology, develop self-confidence and presentation skills, and start to see the world through the eyes of a problem-solving urban planner. Once players finish Urban Science, they won’t look at any street or neighborhood the same way again!
Game History
Urban Science 2008 was conducted with an after school program in Milwaukee. Urban Science 2007 was conducted over 80 hours with middle school-aged students in Madison, Wisconsin.
In Ecology 2020 middle school-aged players worked to redesign State Street for 10 hours, while in Madison 2200, high school-aged players took on the role of urban planners for 10 hours.
Check out the posts below for details on the most recent Urban Science versions including the latest technology developments.
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.
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.
Epistemic games rely on the analysis of the authentic practices of professional practica to inform their design. Here is a case where a student engaged in the authentic practices of a Journalism practicum at University of Wisconsin-Madison, includes news about epistemic games in the content created through those practices…
A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will study computer games and learning with federal research grants.
The principal investigator on several of the grants, David Williamson Shaffer, a professor of educational psychology at UW-Madison, said computers games allow students to live in a simulated world where they can face real life problems.
The Epistemic Games Group has some great news to announce (courtesy of the University of Wisconsin News Service). Watch this space for the latest updates….
Federal grants power research on computer games and learning
From a 4th/5th grade teacher who used Urban Science in her class:
Students with video gaming did better with the zoning maps; they had developed the visual hand to eye skills to be able to infer meaning with their actions. Students who spent less time gaming had greater difficulty with the maps….
The key point? That the visual skills from gaming are not necessarily just hand-to-eye. They are hand-to-eye-to-mind.
