« Barab: Quest Atlantis -- A 21st Century Curriculum | MacArthur Games & Learning Panel Draws Crowd »
Wednesday 7th February 2007 1:49 pm
Pinkard: Videogames Inspire a Different Design for Classroom Learning
How can video games can help educators redesign classroom-based learning environments?
What can video games tell us about designing classroom-based learning experiences? Understanding how video games engage kids to continuously work through a problem without giving up is a lesson that can have great impact for classroom instruction. This fall the University of Chicago’s North Kenwood Oakland Middle School and the Center for Urban School Improvement’s Digital Youth Network team used principles such as those outlined by Jim Gee in his book, What Video Games Tell Us about Learning and Literacy, to design a real-life simulation for our incoming sixth grade students.
The challenge we chose to accept was to use video game design principles to design a course to develop students’ digital media skills, media critique skills and overall computer literacy. If successful teachers could effectively take advantage of the resources afforded by the school’s 1:1 computing environment. Our solution - a 90 minute weekly media arts class set up as a simulated record label taught by two members of the Digital Youth after school staff who are involved in the music industry. Each sixth grade class was given the goal of creating by the end of the school year; 2 recording groups, 7 songs, 2 music videos, a publicity campaign that included a 30 second radio promo, a website and a CD. The culminating activity for this Media Arts class is a record label launch party.
To achieve their goals, students have to play the roles of musician, poets, artists, writers, producers, directors, managers, sound engineers, publicists, graphic artists, videographers, and media critics. In addition, they have to learn how to collaborate, work on an individual piece of a project, critique each other’s work, work under deadlines, and work from a plan. The teachers are using a variety of scaffolds/learning aids to support students including mini lessons; weekly media critique sessions, visiting artists, and journaling assignments that require students to reflect on messages in today’s media through creating their own original poems, song lyrics and collages.
Where are we five months into this project? The students are on track to complete their tasks. Many students are spending time before school, after school, during lunch and on the weekends working on their products. According to the school staff, the sixth graders’ media skills rival those of the 7th graders in the school that did not have the luxury of their own media arts class. Several students have discovered a digital media passion through attending the class and are exploring their interest through membership in the Digital Youth Network Program. The students are learning the significance of continuously reworking a product over time until they achieve their goal of producing a product that truly represents their thoughts and ideas. This is a new experience, considering the fact that it is positioned during the school day and resembles students experience with video games of trying to get to the next game level.
In closing, while it is important to focus on using video games in classrooms we need to also take this opportunity to examine how the design principles used to create video games can inform the redesign of classroom learning environments.
Category: Ecology-of-Games
Like this post?
- Email this page using tell-a-friend, or
- Save it with one of these social bookmarking tools:
, or - View author profile for Nichole_Pinkard.
Comments
Department of Pscyhology, Minot State University
http://www.minostateu.edu
Posted on February 12 2007 5:54 PM
I am excited to learn about your program and your progress. As a cognitive psychologist, I applaud the concept you use to positively capture the motivation of your students in a tremendously beneficial learning environment. I am personally looking for ways to use digital media to introduce alternative communication systems into the classroom, in the hopes of breaking down barriers and stereotypes among individuals with differences in ability to communicate. So, in particular, I like how the novelty of the experience you provided creates something “fresh” for each student, regardless of each child’s background.
ADP
Posted on February 13 2007 12:39 PM
I would like to talk with Ms. Pinkard and others about the use of games in adult learning. I think our basic death-by-powerpoint or death by text approach is losing traction and I’d like to learn how simulations and games could spice up learning. Games are now a side-light for review and “breaks.” I have a feeling that they could play a more central role in instructional design.
Having pontificated in this way, I should say that I am not a gamer and that I am visually challenged, that is, I don’t draw and have trouble with visualization of concepts in my teaching.
Posted on February 14 2007 1:41 PM
I think we need to raise our awareness of children learning with all their sensory modalities. Pinkard has done a wonderful job in engaging students outside of the traditional visual and auditory approaches. Just look, for example, how the Wii game platform has been enthusiastically received by kids—it is extraordinarily kinesthetic. I am attending the “Learning and the Brain Conference” this week in San Francisco, and if anyone reading this is also attending, I’d like to meet with you and brainstorm on alternative media experiences in the classroom.
Florida International University, Center for Urban
http://education.fiu.edu/urbaned/
Posted on February 16 2007 2:05 PM
It’s not exactly games, but some interested 6th graders at Frank C Martin K-8 Center in Miami (an IB school) are building a website entirely on their own. They will devise committees to do the tech work, production and editing, art and design, and content, which will include poems, musical performances, interviews, podcasts, and photos/videos.
I see Nichole’s project as an exciting example of a new and necessary direction in language arts education: a 180 degree turn away from mandated tests of “grammar” and 5-paragraph themes. The writing produced by taught-to-the-test students may be suited to measurement and “accountability”, but it reads as though it were written by a committee--flat, voiceless, dry as sand.
I can’t wait to see the products of Nichole’s approach. Can anyone really worry that the students won’t be able to spell or punctuate correctly if they don’t spend enough time on drills? Far better to give them the responsibility of putting their best forward. They will fold the same concerns we all have with form into their products. Would they record a song with an inaudible bass line? Will they not check, double-check, and triple-check the invitations that will go out to announce their hard work and that all their friends will see? I’m not worried at all.
Maybe our crowd could make contact with your crowd for an interview or something?
Congratulations already, and more power to you.
Greg Bowe
Posted on February 24 2007 10:52 PM
Paul,
I agree that in addition to K-12 we need to think about the relevance of games for adults. The flight simulator is one successful example. The work of the now defunct Institute for Learning Sciences (ILS) headed by Roger Schank is another example. Through the creation of Goal-Based Scenarios, ILS worked with Fortune 500 companies to rethink training. In addition, the institute trained employees of Accenture, formally Andersen Consultng, to do similar work for their clients. In addition to Roger Schank, Kemi Jona at Northwestern University is a great contact about the application of this type of work to adult learning scenarios.
Michelle Crames
http://www.leanforwardmedia.com
Posted on February 9 2007 6:37 PM
This is quite impressive - I believe there is so much competing for the attention of our young people today that interacting and engaging with content is a much more compelling learning model. I look forward to hearing more.
Warmest,
Michelle Crames