Week 2 Reflection

I really enjoyed the work we did as a class this week.  I liked thinking about the components of a serious game.  This was a hard task for me as I was able to come up with quite a list.  I narrowed my list down to my top 5 and am quite happy with what I came up with.  I think many of the elements of serious games are also important elements of a good teacher (I don’t think this is a coincidence).  My group worked very well this week on the wiki page.  We all contribute a great deal and we have been able to come up with a strategy that works for all of us and able to collaborate even though we live in different places.  The twitter meeting was again helpful this week, it helped me think through the question that we had as our topic to blog about.  

What are the common components of serious games?

After doing some reading, research and reflecting on serious games this week I’ve narrowed down my list to 5 factors.  The components of serious games that I have found include:

• Have specified learning goals and objectives – If teachers are going to use class time to have their students play serious games then the games must have learning goals and objectives to justify the time spent playing them.

• Personalized learning styles – A serious game must be able to customize a learning path to be exactly what a student needs at any time in their educational career.  Also if a computer can gauge the level of the player and cater to their learning style a student will be more successful.  There is just not enough time in the day to fill in all of the gaps that each of our students have developed over the years, games can analyze the standard that the individual student is missing and help to recover those specified tasks so that they are successful. Today’s children have grown up with technology at their fingertips and their learning styles are quite different than their parents.  Technology is just an extension of their everyday lives and this is often how they learn best.

• Immediate feedback – To keep the students attention, immediate and frequent feedback must be given to the student to let them know how they are doing.  This feedback will help the player make decisions on the rest of the game, motivate them to keep trying their best and influence the learning process.

• Challenging on many levels and appropriate for the player – To keep students interested, serious games need to be challenging but attainable for the individual playing the game.  “Moderate levels of complexity create intermediate levels of cortical arousal, which is both optimally pleasing to most interpreters and maximally efficient for learning in most instances.”  (Husain)

• Teach us to think and solve problems – Serious games should cover real world problems, these problems not only are interesting but can teach life long lessons.  “Video games have the power to change us, games can teach us to think and solve problems.” (Thomas)  Rote memorization and spitting out facts do not belong in serious games “they should be games and not just drill and practice.” (Husain)

References:

Click to access layla_husain_master_thesis_2011.pdf

http://edreach.us/2014/01/18/edgamer-126-gamifi-ed-empowers-students/

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=etcpress

Click to access Video-Game%E2%80%93Based-Learning.pdf

Week 1 Reflection

After getting past the initial shock and letting my brain sort out the different tasks that we needed to do for this class I am getting settled in and starting to absorb some of the information.  I needed to google the definition of serious games before I could do a search for them.  I can see that there are so many games out there that are intended to be used for educational purposes and it is a little overwhelming to think of the time that it will take to sort through the ones that I don’t want to use and then once I find a game that I like, take the time to figure out how am I going to assess the students. I also worry about how much time students are behind the screen at home and is it a good idea to require them to spend more time at school behind a screen even if it is for educational purposes?  There is also the question about having the technology in my classroom.  We have a computer lab and a computer cart but they are usually booked.

I think the Tuesday meeting was very helpful in explaining exactly what we will will be doing in this class and helped to navigate our way around the blogs and the twitter meeting was also very fun.  I liked how I got me more comfortable with twitter since I had never posted before and there were lots of good conversations going on.

This week I posted to Brandies blog and Gary’s blog as well as responding to comments left on my blog.

What serious games exist for people ages 13+? What can we learn by playing these games?

Serious games are embedded into all of our lives, especially with the boom of the smartphone.  With just a swipe of my finger I can pull up my game of words with friends make a move and continue on with my day.  The definition as taken from wikipedia is “A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The “serious” adjective is generally prepended to refer to products used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion, and politics.”  As a fifth grader, I remember playing the Oregon trail, this is an example of a serious game from way back.

The first online game that I looked at was Flood Sim.  This game helps raise public awareness by makes its players make decision on where to invest money to help protect its country against flooding.  Some decisions include what type of barriers to choose, which regions to invest money in, how to improve knowledge of flooding, where to build new buildings and how to keep the public informed.  At the end of the simulation you are ranked against anyone else who has played this simulation.  The second game that I looked at was CityOne.  This game has players solve real world business and environmental problems and control loss.  The third serious game that I looked at was Tragedy of the Tuna, a game where students make decisions about where to fish.

What can be learned by playing these games?  I think there is a serious game for all types of learning.  I’ve managed to find games for education, business, health occupations and healthy living.  I’m not convinced yet that these games will improve all our students ability to learn in our classrooms but “serious games [may] open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education.” (Serious games for higher education)

I’m excited to see how this concept of serious games grow as the course moves forward.

Some of the other articles that I read this week include:

Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity
Developers get serious: Expanding how video games are used