Recent posts for Padraig Nash
Dispatches from the front lines
Epistemic games, by design, are very difficult. The concepts, the terminology, decisions, the challenges are usually completely foreign to our young players. We can ask young people to do work that would likely be impossible for most of them to do by themselves precisely because the games provide careful scaffolding. A primary source of that scaffolding are in-game mentors who interact with the players via chat as they play.
Working as a mentor in an epistemic game is also very difficult.
A glimpse of what’s hidden
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.
Mentor modeling: The internalization of modeled professional thinking in an epistemic game
Nash, Padraig & Shaffer, DW (2010). Mentor modeling: The internalization of modeled professional thinking in an epistemic game. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Chicago, Illinois.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/ICLS2010_pnash_submission_final.pdf
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.
Modeling Learning Progressions in Epistemic Games with Epistemic Network Analysis
Rupp, A, Choi, Y, Gushta, M, Mislevy, R, Thies, MC, Bagley, E, Nash, P, Hatfield, D, Svarovsky, G, Shaffer DW. (2009). Modeling learning progressions in epistemic games with epistemic network analysis: Principles for data analysis and generation. Paper to be presented at the Learning Progressions in Science conference (LeaPS), Iowa City, IA, USA.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/leaps-learning-progressions-paper-rupp-et-al-2009-leaps-format1.pdf
