Quests and Achievements in the Classroom

This chapter discusses how the quest structure and achievement systems so prevalent in popular videogames can help teachers and directors reform their pedagogy. The idea is to give teachers new ways to guide and motivate students, investing them more fully in the course and encouraging them to deeply explore the subject matter. The chapter provides theoretical support for this model as well as practical advice on its implementation.

Collaborative Online Roleplay for Adult Learners.

Game-based learning has gained popularity in schools and has been proposed for adult education, both at Universities and in the corporate training sector. Games are becoming a new form of interactive content and game playing provides an interactive and collaborative platform for learning purposes. Collaborative learning allows participants to produce new ideas as well as to exchange information, simplify problems, and resolve the tasks. Context based collaborative learning method is based on constructivist learning theory and guides the design of the effective learning environments. In this environment the teacher or trainer becomes the active partner, moderator and advisor of the educational process, not just a repository of the information importing his or her own knowledge to a passive learner as in traditional education. Learners bring their prior skills and knowledge to the classroom community. The trainer structures learning situations in which each learner can interact with other learners to develop new knowledge and fashion their own needs and capacities. Knowledge is generated from experience with complex tasks rather than from isolated activities like learning and practicing separately. Skills and knowledge are best acquired within the context. This helps the learners easily to transfer learning from classroom to “real life” and back, or information from one subject to another. Therefore this method requires that the trainer and learners play nontraditional roles such as interaction and collaboration with each other within the educational process. The classroom drops the physical boundaries and becomes a goal-oriented platform dedicated to learning. Online role-play scenario platforms offers an environment where trainers can define their own role-playing scenarios and provide the opportunity for learners to apply factual knowledge and to gain experience through the digital world. Trainers can define new games or adopt and modify sample games without any programming skills. Some platforms provide a variety of communication means within the scenarios; players can communicate with the use of multimedia discussion forums, text and voice chat modules, as well as through multi-user video conferencing. These platforms foster participation in problem-solving, effective communication, teamwork, project management, as well as other soft skills such as responsibility, creativity, micro-entrepreneurship, corporate culture, and cultural awareness. They are designed for use as a supplement to normal in-class teaching and corporate training, but it is also possible to be used independently from a class course. The constructivist design required for successful Game-Based Learning will be discussed and a model is provided to display how Game-Based Learning occurs in a collaborative online environment. This chapter will present example scenarios and highlight resources available to interested teachers and trainers.

Design-Researching Gamestar Mechanic

This chapter presents the results of a three-year design research study of Gamestar Mechanic, a multiplayer online role-playing game designed to teach middle school children to think like designers by exposing them to key practices behind good computer game production. Using discourse-based ethnographic methods, it examines the ways in which the multimodal meaning representations of the language of games (Gee, 2003) provided within Gamestar Mechanic, have helped learners think and communicate in increasingly sophisticated ways with and about game design. It also examines the implications of these language and literacy skills for other areas of players’ lives, as well as for the improvement of the game as a learning environment over time.

Gaming and Simulation

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief summary of the military’s use of gaming and simulation to accomplish training. Historically, the military has been a forerunner in the exploration of training techniques that incorporate aspects of games and simulations. Training tools emerge in various gaming formats such as simulations, edutainment, commercial-off-the-shelf games (COTS), and serious games. To develop training in the form of games or simulations, elements of instructional design must be considered to include learning objectives, game play, and feedback. Emerging technologies provide possible solutions to training challenges such as achieving affective learning domain objectives and the portability of training. The military, as an early adapter of games and simulation, continues to forge the way by integrating gaming and simulation, instructional design, and emerging technologies to achieve the ever growing demands of training.

Designing Serious Games for People with Dual Diagnosis

This chapter is concerned with the potential of serious games as effective and engaging learning resources for people with learning and sensory disabilities. This is considered, followed by detailing of a suitable design methodology and its application, description of a range of types of games that have been successfully developed for this target group, and an explication of accessibility guidelines. Future development in this area is discussed, and it is concluded that there is great potential in the wide range of possible areas of research into, and development of, serious games for supporting people with learning and sensory disabilities, which would contribute greatly to their inclusion in society.

Benefits of Video and Eye Toy Gaming for Children with Autism

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how video games, which incorporate eye toy technology, can be utilized to teach social learning to children with autism directly through video modeling and multimedia social story interventions and indirectly through engaging typically developing students with educational video games that increase their sensitivity, knowledge, and behavioral intentions when interacting socially with children on the spectrum and with other disorders, as well. The popular medium of gaming is designed to enhance the appeal of rote instruction for children and their families as well as to create tools that improve a child’s ability to generalize learned social and adaptive skills. Moreover, these tools will offer richer research methodologies for tracking and understanding important micro-developmental changes in daily and weekly interpersonal skills development among both typical and atypical children.

Games and Simulations in Training

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of the research literature on the use of gaming and simulation in adult and professional education. The chapter will describe the difference between games and simulation; provide a review of the history of games in adult education; investigate important audience characteristics, including generational differences; examine how games affect motivation; and discuss the application of learning theories and instructional models to game design. The impact of games on learning, especially for those born after 1980, is profound. Games and simulations delivered using a variety of technologies may be an integral part of the educational mix offered by corporate trainers in the near future.

Using Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Video Games to Facilitate Habits of Mind

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a theoretically based argument for using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) video games to teach life science topics in the seventh grade science classroom. Specifically, the game Spore™, a turn-based strategy game, will be examined as a potential tool and environment for cultivating knowledge building and model-based reasoning. Though the diversity in methods of the reasoning processes are great and varied, researchers believe that “scientists’ work involves building and refining models of the world” (Lehrer & Schauble, 2006, p. 371). The argument forwarded is that Spore™, contextualized by purposeful efforts of instructors and researchers, may facilitate the development and refinement of scientific habits of mind and computational thinking. An exploratory case study derived from an overview of five sections of a seventh grade life science course (n=85), where a two-week lesson on evolutionary biology was significantly revised, illustrates opportunities for and challenges to incorporating COTS games into formal middle school science classroom.

Video Games in Education

There has been an abundance of writing about video games1 in education. Characteristic of a young field, much of this work is theoretical and not necessarily based on data (de Freitas, 2006). Classroom integration strategies rely on researchers’ arguments, anecdotal evidence, and teachers’ pragmatism. Unfortunately, video games are often created for profit and to entertain, leaving many additional issues to consider (i.e., marketing, effectiveness, etc.). Researchers’ arguments combined with video games’ widespread popularity and potentially spurious advertising may leave teachers confused or misinformed. To exemplify this issue, this chapter contrasts the salient properties of a commercial game (Spore), an immersive context with game-like features (Quest Atlantis), and a pedagogically based immersive context (GlobalEd 2). Specifically, the authors describe the educational and technological affordances of three contexts, the limitations associated with each, and the necessary yet pragmatic steps involved in their classroom use.

Educational Simulations

Learn-by-doing simulations can provide tremendously effective learning. This chapter examines previous and current work in the area of educational simulations and looks ahead toward several potential futures in the field. The chapter includes a number of simulation-based success stories and case studies from past years, along with a discussion of why they worked as well as what could have been done better. It also describes approaches to ensure that a simulation is educationally effective while still being engaging and even entertaining. In addition, the chapter includes a design and development process that can be followed in order to maximize the educational value and usability of a simulation.