Context is Content:

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• Context is Content
• What educators do and dont know about gaming
• Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin-MadisonCo-Di
  rector, Education Arcade
• Room 130

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• What do researchers know about learning through
  gaming?

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• NOTHING.

j/k
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Some basic things

• Do we learn through game play?
• Yes (e.g. Gee, 2003 Squire, 2003)
• We need more on how
• Are games motivating?
• Yes (duh?) (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 Malone, 1981)
• Challenge, control, fantasy, curiosity,
  competition, collaboration (Lepper, 1985)
• Can we learn academic stuff through game play?
• Yes (Colella, 1999 Cordova Lepper, 1996 White
  Frederickson, 1998 Squire et al., 2004)
• Do games work better than other media for
  learning?
• For some people, some times, to learn some
  things, yes (Boocock, 1966)
• For other people to learn other things at other
  times, no (Clegg, 1991)
• Context is more important than the game itself
• How do we orchestrate powerful game-based
  learning contexts?
• I dont know
• j/k. (kind of?)
• Learning, The Learner, Contexts

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Learning?
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Exogenous
Endogenous
Rieber, 1996
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Traditional
Contemporary
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Supercharged!
Supercharged!. Games-to-Teach Team.
(2003). Thanks to Henry Jenkins Randy Hinrichs,
PIs. Devs Philip Tan, Tom Wilson, Rob
Figueredo, Megan Ginter, Tim Heidel
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Designing Supercharged
Have you seen the real-time Physics in Halo?
Theyre incredible!
John Belcher, MIT Astrophysics
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EM Visualizations
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Learning Physics

• Scientists express their subjective
  involvement by taking the perspective of (and
  empathizing with) some object being analyzed and
  by involving themselves in graphic (re)enactment
  of physical events.
•  Ochs, E., Gonzales, P., Jacoby, S. (1996).
  When I come down I'm in a domain state Talk,
  gesture, and graphic representation in the
  interpretive activity of physicists. In Ochs, E.
  Schegloff, S. Thompson (Eds.) Interaction and
  grammar. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.

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Using Knowledge as Tools

• Supercharged
• Interviewer What do does the electric field
  looks like around a positive charge?
• Student The electric goes from the positive
  charge to the negative charge like this drawing
  a curved live from a positive charge to a
  negative charge. I know this because this is
  what it looked like in the game and it was hard
  to move away or toward it because the two charges
  are close together so they sort of cancel each
  other out.
• Control
• Student It has lines going outward from it like
  this drawing lines with arrows pointing outward
• Interviewer Why do you think it looks like
  that?
• Student I dont know. The teacher said so and
  showed us a picture and that was what it looked
  like.

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Findings
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Findings
Problem How do we scale?
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Should games grade you?
Interpretive Framework
Observation
Model of Cognition
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Using Knowledge as Tools

• Supercharged
• Interviewer What do does the electric field
  looks like around a positive charge?
• Student The electric goes from the positive
  charge to the negative charge like this drawing
  a curved live from a positive charge to a
  negative charge. I know this because this is
  what it looked like in the game and it was hard
  to move away or toward it because the two charges
  are close together so they sort of cancel each
  other out.
• Control
• Student It has lines going outward from it like
  this drawing lines with arrows pointing outward
• Interviewer Why do you think it looks like
  that?
• Student I dont know. The teacher said so and
  showed us a picture and that was what it looked
  like.

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Understanding Learners
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Biohazard ETC Jesse Schell friends
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Understanding Learners
Who is the user?
Identities him/herself with content?
Orients toward school?
What is the players economy of pleasure?
Task-oriented?
Likes competition?
Gamer?
Likes groups?
Hates groups?
Introvert?
Efficiency?
Game resistant?
Negatively?
Shies away from competition?
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Learning is really tricky.

• People are not computers
• Sense making (social) organisms
• Perception cognition
• Learning to see
• Pattern recognition / making
• Driven by experience
• Colors perception
• Shapes understandings
• Learning is a complex social process
• Identity
• Co-constructing

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Gender Play Patterns
From Jenkins, 2001, adapted from Laurel.
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Big Idea Understand the Learner
Builders
Explorers
Socializers
Nurturers
Mini-maxers
Transgressors
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Learning through Civilization III

• Playing Civilization III is hard
• Generating hypotheses
• Thinking across multiple systems
• How learning occurred
• Failure ? interpretations
• With existing understandings / identities, i.e.
  colonial simulation
• Knowledge (geography, history) as a tool
• Games are appropriated (if theyre any good)
• We will use and play them in new ways
• Preparation for future learning
• Tracking learners in school
• Looking at communities

Squire, K. (2003). Replaying History. Unpublished
dissertation. http//website.education.wisc.edu/k
dsquire/
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Idea 3 From Content to Context
Learning as experience
Games-to-Teach Research Team. (2003). Design
Principles of Next-Generation Gaming for
Education. Educational Technology, 43 (5).
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Civ 3 Learning Experience

• World history as interdisciplinary
• The right location gives you luxuries which
  gives you income. More income gives you
  technology which affects your politics. It all
  connects.
• Entrée into historical positionality
• Money is the key money is the root to
  everything. With money you can save yourself from
  war, and that also means that in politics you can
  save yourself with money.

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Social Contexts

• I want every city planner to play SimCity. But
  I dont want to live in a city designed by
  someone who only played SimCity.
• - Doug Church

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Problems in simulations

• Learners dont
• generate hypothesis
• attend to right things
• interpret phenomena
• manage learning
• Increasing transfer
• People pattern match wrongly sometimes
• Over-generalizing from one case
• Embedding structures improves performance
• Apply what was learned to new scenarios

From de Joong Van Oligen, 1998.
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All in one box

• Do you want your game to
• Show relevance
• Police users
• Provide practice, feedback, examples, counter-
  examples
• Providing alternative cases
• Assess, evaluate
• Do you want to become
• Social engineers
• Assessment
• Instructional Designers

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Game-enhanced Experience
Peers
Just-in-timelectures
Web-basedResources
Texts
Field Trips
Experts
Game
Reflection
Students
Communities
Demonstrations
Learning Context
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Assessments in Context

• Social process of knowing
• Peer-review
• Do arguments hold up
• Performance in complex contexts
• Showing robust understanding
• Action replay
• Demonstrating competence
• Acknowledges social context

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• Kurt Squire,
• http//website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/

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Teachers appropriation of materials

• Teachers (like gamers) do stuff you never
  intended.
• Designing customizability, etc.
• But will they kill what makes it interesting?
• How do you embed the pedagogical values in the
  game?

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Learner-Centered Design

• From QA ? usability ? learners
• Understanding target audience
• Modeling the user over time
• Designing Failure managing difficulty
  (Supercharged)
• Multiple learning styles (Rise of Nations)
• Naturally equalizing systems (Viewtiful Joe)
• Dynamically adjusting difficulty (Enter the
  Matrix)
• From artists to designers
• Designing for someone else

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Implications

• Transparency
• Everyone wants glass hoods but that may be way
  more than is necessary, or even desirable
• Bias
• You cant be any good at a game and not
  understand bias
• The problem isnt with the
• Getting kids to think like designers is
  important