Recent posts for Urban Science
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.
UW-Madison Journalism student writes about Epistemic Games
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…
Computer Games in Education
Oct. 22, 2009
by Emily Mawer
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.
New epistemic grants
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
Sept. 29, 2009
A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently won $4.5 million in federal grants to study computer games and learning.
It is anecdotal data, but nevertheless…
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.
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.
