Gaming - Educational

Gaming School? What kids wouldn't jump at the chance to be part of this innovative and forward-thinking institution.  I was totally blown away.  Here are some highlights to peak your interest. 

Quest to Learn:

• 6-12 grade public school in New York, established fall 2009
• Centers on how games work as learning systems
• 10-week gaming missions are broken down into smaller challenges
• game design can help kids think deeper
• Kids work through missions and levels, they know where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going
• Multimodality, interacting with different media

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Games and Education Scholar James Paul Gee on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy

• Games are simply a set of problems that you have to solve in order to win
• Games are designed to teach you how to learn how to play the game or else they would go broke
• There is a particular learning theory embedded in games
• Most adult would give up gaming after 25 minutes and these kids are persevering
• Assessment and testing is what drives our current school systems
• If you want change in school systems change the driving force, assessments
• The design and trust is build into gaming systems, no need to administer a test, why then do we test students after we teach them 12 weeks of algebra?  Do we not trust that we taught them?
• Situated and embodied learning that uses information as a tool to solve problems in context
• We have a whole school curriculum happening outside of school

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Classroom Game Design: Paul Andersen at TEDxBozeman : Set your classroom up like a gaming system

• Recreate the feeling of trying, struggling and then success
• School should be fun
• Failure is okay - if it takes you 30 times to get something right than so be it
• Leveling, like gaming - will allow students to move at their own pace
• Message - everyone starts with an A…. and then falls from there, no video game would ever be set up that way
• Try reinventing your class as a video game
• Some of the gaming structures: The lectures are a point, there are activities where you apply knowledge, There are inquiry labs, Take mastery quizzes where you can repeat the quiz as many times as needed
• Everyone is leveled and start at 0 experience points
• There is a leader board where their avatars are displayed (most popular used tool in class)
• Teach skills then apply them to real life situations
• On any given day you will see kids working at various task, individually, or collaboratively, like a more traditional shop class
• Traditional classroom is like a school bus, everyone gets on at the same time, teacher is the bus driver and makes sure everyone gets to where they need to go - in his model he gave them the keys to a brand new car and some drove right into a wall, more scaffolding is needed
• Kids struggled on reading the text independently, many kids need that dynamic presentation of the book material complete with examples to make the connection - something to fix going forward
• School is a social event, if it weren’t we’d all be learning by sitting in a computer pod alone - bring in more elements of human interaction, collaboration
• Fail, learn, repeat