Recent posts for Gina Navoa Svarovsky
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!”
Epistemic Network Analysis
Shaffer, DW, Hatfield, D, Svarovsky, GN, Nash, P, Nulty, A, Bagley, E, Franke, K, Rupp, AA, Mislevy, R (2009). Epistemic Network Analysis: A prototype for 21st Century assessment of learning. The International Journal of Learning and Media. 1(2), 33-53.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/IJLM0102_Shaffer.pdf
Epistemic Games Video
As researchers studying new media, it only seemed appropriate to let people know about our work using well, new media.
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….
David Williamson Shaffer speaks on NPR
In 2008, David participated in a broadcast about video game research on National Public Radio (NPR)’s The Infinite Mind program. In this episode, “Taking Games Seriously”, he speaks about epistemic games and how they can be used to prepare children for competition in our global economy. Later in the program, Epistemic Games group members Gina Navoa Svarovsky and Padraig Nash were joined by a student who has played the epistemic games Digital Zoo and Urban Science to talk about the games’ design, what it is like to play the games, how they are different from traditional videogames, and the benefits gained by playing them.
If you haven’t already installed Real Player, get it here.
Reblogged: Thinking like an engineer
This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).
In an earlier post on the Macarthur blog, Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the Alliance for Childhood, was quoted as saying: ‘There is no evidence that video games are good at teaching problem-solving or ‘higher-order skills.’
Sadly–or perhaps I should say, happily–that’s simply not true.
In the game Digital Zoo, players become biomechanical engineers and design creatures of the kind you might see in an animated movie. And it turns out that, yes, by playing as engineers they learn to think about problems the way engineers do.
