Video Games

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Free Book: Introduction to Using Games in Education 2.1 Preface to Introduction to Using Games in Education 2.1.1 Learning Through Game Playing 2.1.2 Computational Thinking 2.1.3 Puzzles 2.1.4 Brief Overview of Contents 3 Free Play Makes A Comeback 4 Recent Relevant Articles 5 Some Additional References Contributed by Michael W. Hurst 6 Author or Authors

[edit] Introduction

Video games are an important, large, and growing part of the Information Age.

For many years, people have argued about and studied television’s influence on children. Now, for many children, solo or group interaction with video games has overtaken solo or group television watching. Both video games and television have a significant impact on children and their education. Many people argue that the impact is more negative than positive.

Many people have suggested, "if you can't beat them, join them." Thus, it is not surprising that educationally-oriented video games continue to enter the market. Moreover, ideas from video games are often incorporated into computer-assisted learning materials.

By and large, such edutainment has proven to be a poor merger of entertainment and education. However, there are some notable exceptions in various computer simulations.

[edit] Free Book: Introduction to Using Games in Education

The following book is available under a Creative Commons license:

Moursund, D.G. (June 2006). Introduction to Using Games in Education: A Guide for Teachers and Parents. PDF version. Microsoft Word version. A revised version of this book is scheduled for posting to the web in mid July, 2008.

[edit] Preface to Introduction to Using Games in Education

All the world’s a game,

And all the men and women active players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And all people in their time play many parts, …

(Dave Moursund—Adapted from Shakespeare)

The term game means different things to different people. In this book, I explore a variety of board games, card games, dice games, word games, and puzzles that many children and adults play. Many of these games come in both non-electronic and electronic formats. This book places special emphasis on electronic games and the electronic versions of games originally developed in non-electronic formats.

This book does not explore many types of games. For example, I do not explore sports games, such as baseball, basketball, football, and soccer, or any of the sports in the summer and winter Olympic Games.

Since my early childhood, I have enjoyed playing a wide variety of games. Indeed, at times I have had a reasonable level of addiction to various games. In retrospect, I feel I learned a great deal from the board games, card games, puzzles, and other types of games I played as a child.

In recent years, a number of educators and educational researchers have come to realize that games can be an important component of both informal and formal education. This has become a legitimate area of study and research.

Oodles of games are now available in electronic format. While many are distributed commercially, many others are available for free play on the Web, and some can be downloaded at no cost. In this book, I am especially interested in games available at little or no cost that have significant educational value.

Some electronic games are merely computerized versions of games that existed long before computers. Others only exist in a computer format. Computer networks have made possible games that allow many thousands of players to be participating simultaneously. (The largest is World of Warcraft.) The computerized animation and interaction in these games bring a previously unknown dimension to games.

[edit] Learning Through Game Playing

This book is written for people who are interested in helping children learn through games and learn about games. The intended audience includes teachers, parents and grandparents, and all others who want to learn more about how games effectively can be used in education. Roles of games suitable for a formal school setting receive special emphasis.

As you know, education has many goals, most informed by a huge amount of research and practitioner knowledge about teaching and learning. This book is well rooted in this research and practitioner knowledge. Five important ideas stressed are:

• Learning to learn.
• Learning about one’s strengths and weaknesses as a learner.
• Becoming better at solving challenging problems and accomplishing challenging tasks. Learning some general strategies for problem solving is a unifying theme in this book.
• Transfer of learning from game-playing environments to other environments.
• Intrinsic motivation—students being engaged because they want to be engaged. This idea is illustrated by the following quote from Yasmin Kafai, a world leader in uses of games in education.

If someone were to write the intellectual history of childhood—the ideas, the practices, and the activities that engage the minds of children—it is evident that the chapter on the late 20th century in America would give a prominent place to the phenomenon of the video game. The number of hours spent in front of these screens could surely reach the hundreds of billions. And what is remarkable about this time spent is much more than just quantity. Psychologists, sociologists, and parents are struck by a quality of engagement that stands in stark contrast to the half-bored watching of many television programs and the bored performance exhibited with school homework. Like it or not, the phenomenon of video games is clearly a highly significant component of contemporary American children's culture and a highly significant indicator of something (though we may not fully understand what this is) about its role in the energizing of behavior (Kafai, 2001).

[edit] Computational Thinking

Your mind/brain learns by developing and storing patterns. As you work to solve a problem or accomplish a task, (as you think) you draw upon these stored patterns of skill sets, data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Beginning more than 5,000 years ago, reading and writing have become more and more important as a mind/brain aid. In the past few decades, computers have contributed substantially to mind/brain processes by providing improved access to information, improved communication, and aids to automating certain types of human “thinking” processes.

Notice how the thinking of mind/brain and the thinking (information processing) of computers are melded together in the following brief discussion of computational thinking.

Computational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine. Computational methods and models give us the courage to solve problems and design systems that no one of us would be capable of tackling alone. Computational thinking confronts the riddle of machine intelligence: What can humans do better than computers, and What [sic] can computers do better than humans? Most fundamentally it addresses the question: What is computable? Today, we know only parts of the answer to such questions.

Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everybody, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability (Wing, 2006).

Games provide an excellent environment to explore ideas of computational thinking. The fact that many games are available in a non-computerized and in computerized form helps to create this excellent learning environment. A modern education prepares students to be productive and responsible adult citizens in a world in which mind/brain and computer working together is a common approach to solving problems and accomplishing tasks.

[edit] Puzzles

A puzzle, as a game, challenges one or more persons to work from initial givens to a stated outcome. To better under the purpose of this book, think about some popular puzzles such as crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and logic puzzles (often called brain teasers). In every case, the solver’s goal is to solve a particular mentally challenging problem or accomplish a particular mentally challenging task.

Many people are hooked on certain types of puzzles. For example, some people routinely start the day by spending time on the crossword puzzle in their morning newspaper. In some sense, they have a type of addiction to crossword puzzles. The fun is in meeting the challenge of the puzzle—making some or a lot of progress in completing the puzzle.

Crossword puzzles draw upon one’s general knowledge, recall of words defined or suggested by short definitions or pieces of information, and spelling ability. Through study and practice, a person learns some useful strategies and can make considerable gains in crossword puzzle-solving expertise. Doing a crossword puzzle is like doing a certain type of brain exercise. In recent years, research has provided evidence that such brain exercises help stave of the dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

From an educational point of view, solving crossword puzzles helps to maintain and improve one’s vocabulary, spelling skills, and knowledge of many miscellaneous tidbits of information. Solving crossword puzzles tends to contribute to one’s self esteem. For many people, expertise in solving crossword puzzles plays a role in social interactions.

[edit] Brief Overview of Contents

Each chapter ends with a set of activities for the reader of the book, and a set of activities that might be useful with students of varying backgrounds and interests.

Chapter 1 illustrates the idea of thinking outside the box. This idea, important is solving puzzle problems, is also essential in solving many real-world problems.

Chapter 2 provides some general educational background needed in the rest of the book.

Chapter 3 uses a puzzle called Sudoku to explore some aspects of puzzles and their roles in education.

Chapter 4 explores some additional puzzles and sources of free puzzles on the Web.

Chapter 5 explores solitaire card games that can be played with ordinary decks of 52 playing cards can be played on a computer.

Chapter 6 explores competitive two-person games such as Checkers, Chess, and Backgammon. Nowadays, many people play these games using a computer as an opponent.

Chapter 7 explores games that typically involve more than two players, but only a modest number of players. Examples include Poker, Bridge, and Hearts.

Chapter 8 discusses the development of game-based lesson plans.

Chapter 9 provides very brief introductions to a miscellaneous collection of ideas related to the topic of games in education. Were I writing a longer book, some of these topics would be individual chapters.

Appendix 1 summarizes the problem-solving strategies explored in the book. It also provides additional information about effective ways to use games in education.

[edit] Free Play Makes A Comeback

This section was written by Xan Johnson in a 7/3/08 email message. It is reproduced with his permission.

Hi Brain Research Enthusiasts,

Just a quick note and reference for your own FYI. Most of you have heard me go on and on (OK, stamp my feet and pontificate) since the mid-90s about how the loss of free play in childhood plays a major role in the exploding population of troubled, chronically stressed, and often medicated preteens in our schools today. Neuropsychiatry reports an 80% increase in ADHD diagnoses since the 1980s. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned us in the late 1990s that kids were entering Kindergarten with significantly higher levels of cortisol in their blood stream compared to the 1960s.

Translated, this means that children are easily stressed and such anxiety, when constantly activated, has the ability to shut down short term memory, damage the hippocampus, and turn off the immune system. One huge factor is the loss of childhood in our culture today, especially the critical loss of time for free play in a neighborhood that is safe, watched by parents that interact and safeguard from a distance without interfering in the play, and where children between the ages of 4 and 14 play together, learning how to trust, risk, make mistakes, negotiate, and problem solve interpersonal conflicts on their own … the building blocks of human empathy and emotional intelligence.

The AAP are pediatricians, not play theory researchers, which makes this even more interesting that pediatricians see the fallout from a medical perspective. Play researchers would add that free play with more than one child involved breaks into two basic categories of play. Mixed age group play in larger groups where game play dominates … hide and seek, run sheep run, random pick up sport games, on and on … this kind of play generates social intelligence and conflict resolution skills. Same age or close to same age group play in small groups where dramatic play and creative movement play dominate … this kind of play generates creative thought, personal expression, and self reflection (the building blocks of learning) along with social intelligence and conflict resolution skills. But again, FREE PLAY.

Of course, I make the case (but not here) that drama and dance can help fill the gap created by the loss of childhood by providing a self-motivating, brain prioritizing, socially interactive learning medium that balances free play with adult enrichment based learning … but that is another discussion for another time.

After reading the AAP Newsletter brief and the article about free play linked within it, I also recommend you take the time to read the following two new fascinating books:

The Case for Make Believe/Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008) by Susan Linn (A Harvard psychologist, director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.)

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (2008) by Marco Iacoboni (A neuroscientist that studies mirror neurons using fMRI scan technology.)

[edit] Recent Relevant Articles

Emery, Chris (4/20/08). Foster, Andrea L. (12/21/07). Video games, from scratch. baltimoresun.com. Retrieved 4/24/08: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-te.md.games20apr20,0,4162161.story.

'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 12/18/07: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=shfdyqcckqndc9kp75skbvnbb5gm2ynw. Quoting from the article:

At the meeting, Aaron E. Walsh, founder of the nonprofit endeavor and an instructor at Boston College, and two other researchers showed a gathering of about 40 people how virtual spaces can do more than entertain.

Their goal is to build three-dimensional, interactive lessons that will grab students' attention in the same way that popular computer games like World of Warcraft do — but without the violence and titillation associated with many online games.

"It's important to allow educators to mix and match media types to construct a virtual learning environment that's right for their students," said Mr. Walsh.

Knop, David (11/12/07). Brandeis IBS Gets Serious About Games. Retrieved 11/13/07: http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/52805. Quoting from the article:

IBM is working with Brandeis International Business School (IBS) to test "serious games," video games designed to help students build combined business and IT skills often required in today's work environments.

The video and computer games are gaining traction in the enterprise and educational arenas as a means to teach new skills to a generation of young adults raised on video games. According to marketing consultancy The Apply Group, between 100 and 135 of the Global Fortune 500 will use gaming for instructional applications by 2012.

O'Brien, Ciara 7/5/07). Teens using M-rated games to vent anger. The Register. Retrieved 7/5/07: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/05/teens_videogame_anger_mgmt/. Quoting from the article:

Teenagers are using violent video games to vent their stress, a new study has found. According to the Massachusetts General Hospital's (MGH) Centre for Mental Health and Media, many young people play video games to manage their feelings, such as stress and anger, and those who play violent video games are among those more likely to play to deal with their anger.

The study found that almost all young teenagers play video games, with only six per cent not playing any in the six months prior to the survey.

…

"Contrary to the stereotype of the solitary gamer with no social skills, we found that children who play M-rated games are actually more likely to play in groups - in the same room, or over the internet," Cheryl Olson, ScD, co-director of the Centre for Mental Health and Media and lead author of the study, said.

Royle, Karl (2008). Game-based learning: A different perspective. Journal of Online Learning. Retrieved 4/13/08: http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=433&action=article. Quoting from the beginning of the article:

Video game use in education has focused on the application of games within the existing education system and on their inherent potential for producing learning (Gee 2003). However, research has revealed a fundamental mismatch between the goals of games and the object of school-based learning (Sandford et al. 2006; Squire 2005; Becta 2002). As a result, efforts to integrate games into the curriculum have frequently fallen flat despite the best intentions of teachers and the gaming industry. Such efforts have failed either because games designed to educate do not engage their intended audience, or because truly engaging games do not provide enough educational value.

In part, this failure has been because games are fundamentally incompatible with the school environment (Exhibit 1). From the student's point of view, integrating games into the school culture dilutes the experience of game playing. From the teacher's point of view, games are too long, too immersive, and focused on the wrong outcomes, motivating students to achieve defined win states rather than to seek knowledge. The problem is that educational game designers have approached the problem backward: Rather than striving to get games into education, educators should be investigating ways to get education into games.

This article suggests ways to accomplish this via a new genre of video game that engages gamers outside of formal schooling. This approach is contextualized by a brief outline of the shortcomings of video game usage within education. The article then illustrates how curriculum-related learning material can be integrated into commercial-quality video games.

Steenhuysen, Julie (7/5/07). Video games rob reading, homework time: U.S. study. canada.com. Retrieved 7/5/07: http://www.canada.com/technology/story.html?id=6773555b-fe9a-4dd6-a48b-ebc8cc9235d3&k=72463. Quoting from the article:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Boys who play video games on school days spend 30 percent less time reading and girls spend 34 percent less time doing homework than those who do not play such games, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

[edit] Some Additional References Contributed by Michael W. Hurst

Clark, D. (2004). ADDIE-1975. Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/addie.html.

Crawford, C. (1997). The art of computer game design. Reprinted by Washington State University. (Original work published 1982) Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/ACGD.pdf.

GamaNetwork (2004). The Art & Science of Making Games. Retrieved 3/25/08 from: www.gamasutra.com.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1990). Nintendo to support learning research. Tech Talk. Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1990/may16/23174.html.

Min, R. (2004). Simulation and discovery learning in an age of zapping and searching. Retrieved 3/25/08 from website: http://projects.edte.utwente.nl/pi/Papers/DiscLearning.html.

NPD Group (2007). Amount of time kids spend playing video games in on the rise. Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_071016a.html.

Prensky, M. (2002a) What Kids Learn That’s POSITIVE from Playing Video Games. Marc Prensky – Writing Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20What%20Kids%20Learn%20Thats%20POSITIVE%20From%20Playing%20Video%20Games.pdf

Prensky, M. (2004a) Digital Game Based Learning. Chapter 10 “True Believers: Digital Game-Based Learning in the Military” Marc Prensky – Writing Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Game-Based%20Learning-Ch10-Military.pdf.

Prensky, M. (2004b) Marc Prensky: What Can Educators Learn from Computer Games about Engagement and Children? Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.marcprensky.com/speaking/++Prensky-Speech-CoSN-13min.wmv.

Spectre, M. and Prensky, M. (2004). Theoretical underpinnings of Games2Training’s approach. Retrieved 3/25/08 from www.games2train.com/site/html/theory.html.

YoYo Games. (2007). Gamemaker 7.0: Make Retrieved 3/25/08 from http://www.yoyogames.com/make.

[edit] Author or Authors