Trend

Games as Practice: A Trend of Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition > Games as Practice
Games as Practice
Gaming platforms become critical training areas for work, problem-solving, and learning. A genre of “serious games”—aimed at education, professional training, cultural immersion, cognitive fitness, and exploring ideas—is expanding the practice of gaming beyond entertainment for youth. Games are not solely digital—many emerging games utilize hand-held mobile technologies to supplement and encourage face-to-face interactions. Blending play, research, and collaboration, games will become a medium and literacy in many facets of life.

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  2. Use social impact and education games with your students at Games for Change

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  4. Stay up to date on the use of games in health, education, training, and public policy at SeriousGames

Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future, talks the differences in the increased level of engagement and optimism students have with games over the classroom.


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What do you think?

Ed Jones  said…  April 7, 2010 08:39 AM

How do we bridge the gaps between developers and teachers? Students want the games, we know. Teachers' time is very limited.



We have the old-skool textbook publishers, who try to create some simple interactive for every third lesson. The results are not deep, not innovative, and not engaging.



We have the game console people with the odd full featured video game which impart some skill and some content, but mix the two with much fiction.



We have computer games people like Muzzy Lane with it's Making History, again in order to make payroll blending in fiction.



Finally, we have the big TV content producers like PBS and BBC who tried to adapt games, and did well with narrow, rich content, but sort of moved on after the fad ended and the funding, cost, and use did not match.



What seems to be being used is teachers making the class into a game on their own, as at mrroughton.com.



How do we get independent developers the opportunity to work with teachers and students?



I'm thinking Ohio's new Flexible Credits law could be of some legal help. Its nice to think that one's game could be turned in for credit absent it being in the lesson plan of the month.



Still, there's work to be done by the foundations and intermediaries. Money for educational gaming is still extremely tight. We can look at the Hastac competition as a fairly rare and minimally funded example of funding for game developers.



And there's some Web 2.0 infrastructure to be build too.



Jane talks here of collaboration. At classroom 2.0, teachers collaborate in a way as to the general use of all kinds of resources. There's much still to be done.



Beyond the NING discussion type platform, I'm thinking there is new social-media type infrastructure which could be built to aid teachers in sharing and improving and combining online gaming.

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