Archiv der Kategorie: education

Serious game „Tiebranimes“ to download

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Nearly ten years ago I attended a seminar about „Kinderspiel – Kinderspiele: Theorie – Empirie“ („Children’s Play and Games: Theoretical and Empirical Views“), where one possible task was to create a learning game. I was flabbergasted that the three other groups came up with – quite adorable, I have to admit – variations of games similar to „Trivial Pursuit“ for pupils: Roll a die, draw a card, answer correctly and go on. This seemed to me like an unfortunately quite realistic representation of schooling.

Depressed and feeling slightly challenged, I and a co-student went to work on a game suitable for students of pedagogy: It should be usable to give new students an overview on historic and contemporary educators, but also deliver a tongue-in-cheek view on the study of educational science in the cogs and wheels of the university.

So, here’s a serious game about historic educators, where you can cook your fellow students‘ goose while competing for the scarce ressource of books in the department’s library. Testplayers enjoyed the game and found the short descriptions, categorisations and quotes on people like Comenius, Flitner, Socrates etc. quite helpful.

You may now download the card game (german texts, 88 cards, rules, and a nifty box to store the stuff) in 300dpi-print quality. This game was my first attempt on an educational card game, a labour-of-love as well as a proof-of-concept: You know, not all learning games have to work like quiz games!

By the way: „Tiebranimes“ can be read backwards, then it spells „Homework assignment“ in german.

First Faculty Research Day

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This wednesday there will be a presentation of projects and initiatives stating research interests of members of our faculty. As it seems, my poster (german) will be up, too, to give a slight and very superficial overview on Game Based Learning and its implications, as expressive medium, ethical playground, experimental simulation, metagame and cultural mirror. The first feedback so far: Nice idea using Tetris. And having a certain yellowpress-appeal in its brutal bluntness. Well, one can do worse, I guess.

All initiatives can be found at
http://www.epb.uni-hamburg.de/de/forschungstag2009.

Reviewing the seminar “Games, Play and Education”

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This is a short review on the seminar “Games, Play and Education” I held as a combined event for both online students in ePedagogy Design and offline students of educational science from Hamburg University during summer term 2008 in Hamburg.
From the official seminar description:

“Educational games are advertised as a cure for most ills of our stratified information society with its ‘demand’ for life-long and self-reliant learners. A player is usually intrinsically motivated and angst-free to experience and practice new knowledge in a problem-oriented and highly contextualised manner, in a controlled artificial environment – and even has fun doing it. If the factual, practical, or reflective game-knowledge could be transfered to the player’s everyday life, we’d have an ideal educational setting (or a bloody massacre) at hand. The stunning visuals of contemporary computergames lead to a common fallacy in the understanding of play: We don’t play games because they resemble reality. We play them because they don’t. Games are powerful as learning environments on different levels, but they are also full of paradoxons.” Weiterlesen →

Creating cognitive tension – and then what?

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I stumbled upon this entry in the great BoingBoing-blog, an excerpt from a longer Smithonian article: Steve Martin explaining a special method of eliciting laughter from the audience, in comparision to the usual comedian’s technique of creating tension and releasing laughter via a punchline.

Martin’s approach is different: Creating tension – and not to relieve it. Giving an unexpected anticlimax, not the expected ‚unexpected‘ exit. And then let the audience choose a point where to relieve the upbuilt tension. Steve Martin:

„What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.“

This seems to be a good approach, too, for educational gaming. In a usual, moderate constructivistic setting, you have the path of

[exploration] – [encounter of a task/test] – [correct solving of the task/test] – [reward].

What will happen if you constantly deny the learner the ‚punchline‘ as confirmation that he learned something he was meant to learn?

Three learning theories mini games

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For my seminar „Games, Play and Education“ I’ve scraped together (via skinning, modding, recontextualisation) three minigames. These should serve as an intro to the three learning paradigms of Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and their possible realisation in games via their very different gaming mechanisms.

The 32 cards and the rules can be downloaded as printable PDF (three pages) via this link: ThreeLearningTheoriesMinigames.

ThreeLearningTheoriesMiniGames

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Gaming: A cheat mode for reality

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I’ve noticed that rubberbanding (aka levelled gameplay or dynamic game balancing) is a good metaphor to describe what Lev Vygotsky, a russian educational scientist, described as keeping a learner in the ‚zone of proximal development‚. This means that the environment – parent, teacher, virtual learning environment – keeps up a certain level of difficulty in its tasks, to further emerging abilities in the learner. Coincidentally – or not so – this goes quite well with theories (for example Brian Sutton-Smith) that play and game are the most fulfilling when experienced in a state of internal insecurity of the outcome.

Thus rubberbanding is a game designer’s meta cheat to keep the player in the game and the learner hooked to the knowledge.

It could be discussed whether any game, by artificially creating rules facilitating a fair, inherent meaningful and fulfilling gaming experience is a cheat mode for the game we call ‚reality‘ and a tutorial mode (or editor) for the game we call ’society‘.

A path unwanted: Impossibly realistic games

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One of the distinctive criteria of games compared to ‚reality‘ is their loose connection to the latter, a worksafe simplification of rules and goals. This doesn’t mean that these games are simple to play, but that rules and metarules are stated or can at least be relied upon as unchanging background as long as we play the game.

The same two mechanisms, simplification and a stated stable background, are the cornerstones of politics, especially in times of war. Knowing the enemy, recognizing the enemy, destroying the enemy, all executed in an unerring, straightforward mode.

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In search of a game’s True Meaning ™…

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As with the ongoing ‚Killerspiel‘ debate in Germany, public and politicians are in search of The Meaning of a game. Though it’s understandable that there’s concern over violent, pornographic or propagandistic content, few seem to understand that games can also be created as toys.
To quote Marvin Minsky in his ‚Society of Mind‘,

„A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.“

Games can take the form of paths, labyrinths, and landscapes, and the latter ones are difficult or even impossible to fathom. If seen from a literary point of view, I’d even deny a linear game to be ‚understood‘ in its ‚entirety‘, just by being played from a narrow social, temporal and mental vantage point.

I’m often asking myself, whether this is political actionism, populism, wishful thinking, technological and medial ignorance, or a mix of all these.

There seems to be a strong urge for a world which is deterministic, monocausal, where any one thing has one discrete meaning. Which fits nicely on the description of ‚digital‘, without the analog fuzz surrounding it.
Thus this drive is both very compatible with an information society, but also somehow incompatible with social, cultural, individual reality, diversity, and most of all ambiguity.

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Narrativer Wissenstransfer

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Die Erzählung ist vermutlich eine der ältesten Methodiken der Organisation und eines der ältesten Medien der Weitergabe von Wissen. Grundvoraussetzung ist ihre kulturelle Einbettung in die Verstehenswelt des Zuhörers oder Lesers während das mögliche Ziel gleichzeitig auch die Umkehrung in Form der Enkulturation sein kann.
Geschichten sollen entführen – und heimführen.

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