A Future Focus of Gaming

The authors discuss the instruction of soft skills by games and simulations as a future direction for the use of educational gaming in P-12 education. Technical or hard skills are taught in the educational curriculum; however, soft skills training, such as communication, collaboration, decision-making, problem-solving, negotiation, and leadership, are lacking. Soft skills training through games and simulations have been successful in areas such as the military, medicine, business, and disaster response, as well as those individuals with learning disabilities; therefore, the authors investigate the potential for soft skills training using games and simulations. In addition to instruction of soft skills, this article also addresses the inherent nature of games and simulations as teaching and assessment tools.

Minecraft Schooling

Playing digital games is an important leisure activity for a large number of us. Research shows that a large number of children play digital games for leisure purposes. One of the games played is Minecraft. This chapter outlines how Minecraft is being used in junior year settings by referring to academic literature as well as communities of practice available on the internet. The authors outline a set of activities incorporating Minecraft aimed at seven year olds which were designed to introduce a series of curricular topics in a class in a Maltese school. Following qualitative data analysis the chapter outlines a series of outcomes that were extracted from this project

The Creation of a Rubric for the Evaluation of Language Teaching and Learning Videogames

This chapter reports on the creation and evaluation of the Language Education Videogame Evaluation Rubric (LEVER) which, it is hoped, will be of benefit to those involved in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Based upon a sociocultural model of language development, this research is unique in the manner in which it draws on up-to-date best practice in the domains of both language pedagogy and videogame design. This chapter will then report on the application of the LEVER to two titles which have been created to teach a foreign language, in order to both to test the games for quality and the rubric itself for rigour and ease-of-use.

Flipping the Paradigm of Education

The purpose of this chapter is to define a prototype for a comprehensive educational program that integrates virtual immersive learning environments into traditional educational settings to develop innovative educational programs. The Future of Learning (FoL) protocol combines an integrative curriculum guide providing educators with thematic modular units of study that are designed based on problem-based learning principles and a FoL learning management system where online learning environments are structured to be integrated into p-12 educational settings and provide a login protected interface for educators and learners to access all the aspects of the FoL protocol including 1) a home page for the educational program linking all aspects of the protocol, 2) a learner home page, 3) a learning analytic system and 4) access to a 3d simulation world. The comprehensive and modular design of the Future of Learning protocol means that it can be integrated in a multitude of p-12 educational programs and define the future of learning.

Designing Digital Objects to Scaffold Learning

The design of digital objects and representations in digital games is highly consequential for learning. Digital objects in learning games provide opportunities to scaffold teacher and student learning toward deeper epistemological understanding of the concepts they represent, but objects and representations can also be interpreted in a manner that misrepresents the concepts in whose place they stand. For the current study, one teacher was observed using the SURGE learning environment. During the study, the teacher combined the learning environment with direct instruction to teach Newton's laws of force and motion. Findings highlight the importance of designs that (a) explicitly model the meaning of the representations in the learning environment, (b) provide opportunities for teachers and students to interact with the full range of the properties of the representational object, and (c) incentivize players to utilize representations in the environment to their full extent, such that the learning environment repeatedly reinforces the core concepts of the representation.

The Theory and Process Involved with Educational Augmented Reality Game Design

This chapter explores the issues associated with training teachers to become effective Augmented Reality game designers in their own educational settings. Within the context of defining and defending the use of games as instructional tools, the authors of this chapter describe a project in Queensland, Australia which involved training 26 teachers from the greater Brisbane area on the theory and process of designing narrative-based Augmented Reality games. This process resulted in usable games that the participants could then implement in their own educational setting. This chapter includes a discussion of the issues and challenges that were faced throughout this training process, and the authors propose potential solutions to address those challenges. Additionally, the authors propose future directions for further research into this area.

Game Design Frameworks and Reality Guides

The gamification trend has cultivated a wide variety of game design frameworks. In this chapter, we use the concept of reality guides to analyse the characteristics of a few of these. Reality guides are applications that aim at assisting the user in the real world. As such they are not games, which is why we can use them to investigate the applicability of game design frameworks in a wider context than they are originally introduced for. Although these frameworks are for games, we find them at least partially applicable in the design of any kind of software and services. We also further refine the concept of reality guides as a type of application and consider the apparent usefulness of these frameworks on them.

Games and Their Embodied Learning Principles in the Classroom

This chapter explores how educators can use games and their embodied learning principles as a source for student learning, motivation, and engagement. It begins by highlighting important educational issues, such as lack of motivation and how technology has affected students and communication (Prensky, 2005). It then illustrates how digital games can address these issues and support learning and foster meaningful engagement by exploring Gee's (2007) learning principles and Prensky's (2005) activities and learning techniques. Each learning principle and activity is addressed with a summary of the concept, an example of how video games exemplify the concept, and practical methods for integrating the idea into classroom instruction through games and activities. The chapter concludes with an overview of main concepts and highlights future directions for research connecting learning theories to digital games.

Navigating Through Virtual Worlds

With the rise and success of digital games over the past few decades, path planning algorithms have become an important aspect in modern game development for all types of genres. Indirectly-controlled playable characters as well as non-player characters have to find their way through the game's environment to reach their goal destinations. Modern gaming hardware and new algorithms enable the simulation of large crowds with thousands of individual characters. Still, the task of generating feasible and believable paths in a time- and storage-efficient way is a big challenge in this emerging and exciting research field. In this chapter, the authors describe classical algorithms and data structures, as well as recent approaches that enable the simulation of new and immersive features related to path planning and crowd simulation in modern games. The authors discuss the pros and cons of such algorithms, give an overview of current research questions and show why graph-based methods will soon be replaced by novel approaches that work on a surface-based representation of the environment.

Mission HydroSci

Distance Learning through game-based 3D virtual learning environments has promise for helping rural and other communities that have become increasingly dependent upon online learning to meet the Next Generation Science Standards. The team developing Mission HydroSci (MHS) envisions a learning product that integrates a game-based 3D VLE with a learning progressions approach to curriculum and innovative methods for teacher support and learning analytics. MHS uses an eight level game which at each level immerses students in a simulation environment for learning about water systems and then requires the student to put that knowledge into practice in a context of developing their competencies for scientific argumentation. This chapter describes the vision for MHS at the beginning of the development process funded by a grant award from the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund of the U.S. Department of Education.