Last night in class I showed the below video - Jim Gee presenting a case for why games and game play demonstrates the type knowledge, skills, and interactions we should value in education. One of the strongest arguments one might extract from the clip is that there are is now a very strong impetus for being creative and innovative in the classroom and out. It is no longer an academic exercise, but an economic imperative to allow kids to be more sophisticated learners. BTW, I’m by no means the first to pass this excerpt along as others have earlier gotten the word out (see: Brainy Gamer).

Another term that came out of last night’s discussion, was design thinking. Although I have yet to find a definitive definition of the term, Fast Company has an article, Design Thinking…What Is That? that dances close enough around the idea to get the gist. From my understanding, it’s the type thinking exhibited by folks in professions such as industrial, interaction, and instructional design - a cognitive ability to deal with ill-structured problems in a disciplined, yet innovate, fashion. It’s an ability to deal with ambiguity and less-than-desired outcomes as well.

Playing Spore on iPod Touch.

On an admittedly small scale, we are working with a single middle school science teacher and her class to design an endogenous game experience with Spore.  Our ambition is to take a gradual approach by working a lesson plan at a time and then expanding to other topics, classrooms, and schools.

Of course, there are those who are much more ambitious, which is the case of Quest to Learn (Q2L). As the mission statement notes, Quest balances:

traditional academic needs with the reality that students today can and do learn in different ways, often through work with digital media, games, online networks, and mobile technologies…Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.

This sounds like a very timely, well-conceived plan for teaching middle and high school students in the 21st century.  It will certainly provide an interesting case study and petri dish for many of the theoretical principles and design statements being covered in our class. Also, it will be interesting to compare our small efforts in rural southwest Virgina to the urban setting of New York City.

This week the class is officially starting a 10-week playtesting session with games and platforms of their choice. One team has selected Civilization IV, one Spore, and a third Second Life. I am tagging along wth the Spore team as I prepare a book chapter discussing the incorporation of Cell and Creature stages into a middle school science class in the area.

"Xi Bao" - my creature just after making land.

As I play Spore I’m trying to keep in mind ideas from Gee’s, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2ed). We’re using this text to help better justify and articulate why spending up to 50 hours (and more) of course time playing COTS video games and exploring Second Life. This being the first week, I have nothing more to report that I’ve made it past the Cell Stage. My creature, who still retains his cell name (”xi bao” is Mandarin for “cell”), admittedly not a creative moniker.