W06: Game Based Learning OER

GBL Team, great work! Your ideas about having students solve world-problems through games reminded me first of the sci-fi novel Ender's Game, and secondly of the Foldit event, in which gamer's solved a 31-year science problem in just three weeks. While there is definitely usefulness in "gamefying" problems to solve, I think there is a limit to decontextualizing problems. You suggested they might be able to solve the problem of poverty via gaming—but isn't this a socio-political issue? Many factors need to be considered, including the idea that people who benefit from poverty are likely not going to cooperate in its solution, people who may hold considerable influence or pose a danger. How do you imagine such a problem would be framed to allow gamers to solve it?

Hi, GBL team, thanks for offering us an informative OER. I like the way you guys present these engaging contents. As an EVA, I have to say that personally I am not optimistic about the prospects of the educational game industry. The core strength of a good game is its ability to provide or facilitate players with something they can't experience in their daily lives. For instance, players can create a virtual world in Minecraft, and create a variety of small programs or games with Scratch. The key to the success of these two applications is learning by doing, which enables players to experience project-based learning. While both Prodigy and Legends of learning are actually variant forms of an online quiz. The gaming elements are not the game itself. I highly doubt this kinds of educational games can help students improve their learning outcomes.

Hi guys, I really enjoyed going through your OER. Your presentation is quite interactive, I especially enjoyed your introduction video. After looking through all your pages and learning about how far we've come from learning through textbooks to now learning through video games. Your page of developing literacy through gaming reminds me of how students nowadays are learning literacy by reading graphic novels. Yes, being attracted to all the graphics and interesting texts lure the students to wanting to read more. Similar to learning literacy from video games, there are also some issues with learning literacy from graphic novels. Your OER was informative and definitely grabbed my attention to want to learn more about game-based learning.

I really enjoyed the website you lot built! The characters who invited us in were a delightful point of interest - and I especially like how you incorporated a journal quote and its reference as a call and response from the characters. That was a great point of levity in a usually dense topic. As for the website journey, I thought the layout was solid. You first responded to the problem with your "why" section, which as I've learned this term is a key step in the world of pitches. You then took us through a number of different educational gaming options - I gave Prodigy a whirl. It was quite slow (even for me), but I could see it being super good for its actual target audience. Plus, you four can obviously not be held to account for its speed - or lack thereof. And you wrapped the journey with some great ideas for future waves. The concepts you mentioned brought to mind VR adaptations which are beginning to take root now. And Augmented Reality also! Imagine if the the Pokemon GO! craze (epidemic?) from a few years back were focussed on something useful and educative! Overall, great OER, in my humble opinion.

Hey Johnny, Brogan, Chava and Sylvia A very informative and colourful OER on GBL. It was staged and put together really well, allowing for the incremental development of insight. I also particularly appreciated the explicit weighing of pros and cons to this EdTech direction, as it helped put a lot of the arguments for and against in context. Your summaries of academic frameworks in combination with the practical examples was a really great approach for tackling a large body of content. Great job! I have still come out of it a little hestitant about technologically based GBL, I'm far more for project based, emmersive style activities in classrooms like RPGs which work so well to develop meta social skills by requesting actual physical interaction with others. That being said, there are many social rules which can still be conveyed through technological GBL, so maybe we find ourselves settled back in the blended learning preference that seems to be so very prominent in educational theory :) Thanks for the adventure through this particular EdTech avenue.

Hi team, I thoroughly enjoyed this week's OER as a gamer myself. GBL can provide students (and teachers) with an entertaining way to learn and work. Congratulations on providing us with many different examples and perspectives of GBL. There are certainly key takeaways I received from your OER and may consider implementing some ideas in my classroom in the near future. I am curious to know if any members of your team have used or currently use GBL in your classrooms? If so, what does it look like and how effective do you find it to be. Regardless, thank you for the informative website!

Hi GBL team! Thanks for creating such an informative website; really loved how the website was set up for us to "progress" through the OER "game". You've provided a lot of information with regards to game-based learning for us to consider. I particularly enjoyed the literature research, especially Gee's principles (I'll be bookmarking that page for future reference). I read in another study that collaborative games actually result in greater increase in performance, compared to games that use leaderboards and points and competition. That study also reported that games that use AI technology to adapt the difficulty of the questions in the game based on current student performance results in even greater academic achievement than collaborative and competitive games. I used to think that educational games that can most resemble a video game would be the most successful ones, but that study found otherwise. Were you able to find any games that give students the opportunity to work together towards a common goal? Are games like that less common in the edu-market than competitive ones (and if so, why might that be)? Jagušt, T., Botički, I., & So, H. (2018). Examining competitive, collaborative and adaptive gamification in young learners' math learning. Computers & Education, 125, 444-457.

Hello Week 6 team! Thank you for creating such an interactive and informative week involving game-based learning. I understand that games and learning have been separate spheres for quite some time and are ever so slowly coming together and overlapping in the school environment. My class has been using Hour of Code as an opportunity to combine coding in the context of games, and it has been so popular that there are electives once a week where some of our students learn higher-level coding for certain games. One thing that I have learned from gaming is that the spirit of competition is a critical factor in what makes them so alluring. If there are future games out there that contain this spirit of where students can work together as teams or compete against one another, this may build their confidence as they spend more time with the activity. I enjoyed the exposure to different available activities - nicely done!

Hi GBL team! I really enjoyed your OER and like how you provided a multitude of resources for all of us to explore. My two favorites that you included have to be MindCraft and Scratch. Both of these allow the users to explore, be creative and "dig" deeper in their learning while using the programs. Thank you for including the information on video games and literacy. As a young adult who frequently games, I may have even dabbled in WOW for a few years, there is so much deciphering that needs to happen in order to navigate and "play" any games on the market these days. The current gaming generation can read these games like nothing, however navigating their way through academic texts in the classroom is becoming more and more challenging. I have several students in my classroom right now that can win every Fortnite battle or be on the COD leader board, but yet can't be bothered to open up a book. So my big question is, how can we engage these students in our classrooms to promote academic literacy, like they are engaged with these games?

Hi GBL team, did you have any thoughts on some other forms of gaming such as AR/VR/MR? Also, in a world of ubiquitous connectivity, did you encounter any games that leverage networks, proximity or that could put all the students into the same game space at once (Minecraft would, but what about others?)? NFC, GPS, cameras, texting and other mobile features would be intriguing components to see used in gaming and perhaps be way to further get students engaged with their mobile devices.