This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Project and the National Science Foundation.

In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.

I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games….

This was my first time at AERA, and it was quite an eye-opening experience.

I went to two sessions: Can Computer Games Improve Student Learning? and Stories of Mathematics Instruction, Rich Media Technologies, and Their Uses to Understand and Improve Teaching that together made a strong argument that technological tools shouldn’t be what students learn, rather they are a central part of how students learn.

Both sessions presented work in math education. The first included work with a computer game, Math Pursuits, developed to improve middle school students’ math learning. In the second session, graduate students presented posters on their work with Dr. Patricio Herbst, who coordinates a study to help math teachers learn to analyze teaching moments using a computer simulation.

These projects were both about using technology to improve mathematics education, but their foci were different. Seeing how technological tools are being incorporated into math education in such different ways and at different levels made me realize that education is beginning to mirror today’s world in which technologies are not their own domain, but part of the infrastructure of all domains of knowledge.

My own research on the epistemic game Digital Zoo similarly looks at how the computer technology is not an end in itself. It is a tool to achieve a larger end: a way to let players use information and skills that professionals in today’s world develop.

In Digital Zoo, as in Math Pursuits and in Stories of Math Instruction, the focus is not on learning how to use the software, it is on using the software to learn how to create professional products that they would not otherwise be able to make.

It is exciting to see the ways in which computers are becoming a foundational part of how education is designed. These sessions reminded me, though, that schools have some catching up to do. If we want to prepare students to be technologically fluent in the modern world, we need education to be at the forefront of the use of innovative technologies.

“[He] has lasted longer than he would have at school, even with hands-on activities.”

“I’m AMAZED that this activity engaged her for 2.5 hours.”

“[One Design Advisor] has a couple of boys who can easily get distracted and goof around but also really don’t like each other (and one has been accused recently of teasing the other) but you’d never know it from their group behavior.”

This teacher’s observations, which sound like pretty strong endorsements, will be helpful as we investigate new ways to introduce epistemic games to schools. These observations indicate that the children participating in the game were able to focus in ways that they typically don’t in school. But the reason this teacher was surprised that the children were so engaged was not only that they were behaving differently from how they usually would in school, but also because of the nature of the tasks in the game. Digital Zoo is fun, but it is also hard and frustrating!

The children were willing to focus and work hard for long periods of time because they were invested in the premise. Once they accepted the fiction that they were engineers, they were willing to struggle to fulfill the expectation of being an engineer. They were willing to play the game, even when it wasn’t “fun.” This phenomenon is clearly something missing in schools, where all too often students are motivated by grades, if they are motivated at all.

Murray offers that options such as vocational school and two-year colleges are better for some students in that they “provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly.”

Epistemic games might be another solution to the problems with 4-year colleges that Murray highlights.  These games are in fact explicitly not vocational, but they are based on ways that professionals in the world think about problems.  They provide learners with ways of thinking and problem solving that people use.  For example, in the Digital Zoo game that I am working on, the idea is not for players to become engineers, but rather for them to learn to think like engineers. Modeling education on professional practices yields an approach to teaching and learning that prompts students to think deeply about complicated, significant problems.

In his article, Murray suggests a dichotomy: 4-year colleges that try to do too much vs. more practical options like vocational schools.  Epistemic games offer a third option that uses the best elements of both, because epistemic games offer deep analytical thinking about complex problems, but they do it in a way that feels authentic and practical to the player.

http://epistemicgames.org/cv/papers/Hatfield_Shaffer_ICLS_08.pdf