Games, Learning and Society
I spent the end of last week enjoying the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, WI. Educators, researchers and a smattering of corporate folks came together to discuss how games are being used to enhance one’s learning experience.
The most compelling content for me were the case studies where IT staffs and game developers discussed their experiences building games for specific educational purposes (as opposed to the faction that builds games of their own design – without the direction of a particular teacher or course). Two of these stories are right here in our backyard – Filament Games and the ENGAGE project in UW-Madison’s DoIT team.
Dan White and Dan Norton of Filament Games made a couple of great points about building games in this space. First, they highlighted the fact that it’s more important to provide problem spaces for students to explore than it is to present raw content. The text books do the latter just fine. Second, a successful project needs to find efficient and effective means to link the designers with the subject matter experts (teachers). Without that, the output misses the mark just like it does in other software domains.
If there was any doubt about whether or not there was an appetite for new games in education, the ENGAGE team squashed it. They seemed to be overwhelmed with projects. The UW-Madison campus is filled with professors eager to add new learning tools to their courses. What they seemed to lack were tools, however. They went after each new project with a clean piece of paper and long development cycles.
Although I would never describe us as an educational software provider, we’ve always felt that our platform offered terrific opportunities for learning. After attending GLS, I’m very optimistic that this learning community can take advantage of the blend of interactive and creative elements in the platform. Not only has it proven to be a fun vehicle for building applications, but we are beginning to see that one of the most powerful aspects of the platform is the ease at which new ideas can be prototyped. Either through the re-use of components already available in the community or simply by taking advantage of the interactive nature of the environment. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try, succeed! It’s beginning to feel as if the act of application development is in itself a game!
Some of my takeaways from GLS…
- everyone needs tools that help bring the subject matter experts closer to the game/content designers
- everyone needs tools to quickly prototype ideas
- there is a void of tools that let the students become part of the lesson creation (one exception to this would be the MMOG environments like Second Life)
- unlike a lot of art-driven game design, the computer CAN be used in the design if it is interactive
One of the nice things about the blogosphere is the ability to quickly and easily get perspectives from others that participated in the same events. For more analysis from the GLS natives look here…
You can also check out the talks yourself on Sonic Foundry's Media Site (this year’s content has yet to be posted)
9. April 2009 at 6:44 pm :
[...] returned to the Games, Learning & Society 4.0 conference in Madison at the end of last week. An all [...]