Wednesday 7th February 2007 1:42 pm
Shaffer: on Epistemic Games
How can computer games help children learn to be creative thinkers in a world of global competition?
In my work I build and study epistemic games: computer games where players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, architects, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools for innovative thinking that they need to survive in a changing world.
This work shows how video and computer games can help teach kids to build successful futures--but only if move beyond worrying about standardized tests of basic facts and skills, taught in schools developed in the industrial revolution and start to think in new ways about education itself.
Based on more than a decade of research in technology, game science, and education, epistemic games look beyond the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of digital learning and to help start building the future of education in the digital age.
Category: Ecology-of-Games
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Paul D Boyer, PhD
Hillcrest Bridge Center (Kenosha, WI)
http://www.kusd.edu
Posted on June 23 2008 7:05 PM
As a science educator in an at-risk environment for students expelled from grades 6-12, I find myself in an enriched population of “unplugged” digital natives who are functionally alienated by the approach to thinking and building understanding characteristic of our nation’s efforts to educate teachers. While we make inroads with some students, too many remain “left behind” largely because they’re disengaged.
I’m fascinated by the research suggesting the need to shift paradigms in order to build success in educating digital youth, because I see such great hope for the students I teach. Their facility in mastering digital environments contrasts strongly with their seeming inability to read or write a single sentence. Granted, much of their edutainment is inspired by alleged predatory “instincts” to maim and kill, but the work by you and your colleagues suggest there are indeed ways to develop new technologies out of our deep-felt desire to build knowledge. Gamers early recognized the power of inspiring changes in brain wiring for children born in the digital age, but educators (who usually aren’t digital natives, at least not yet) seem bound by old schemata today’s youth no longer appear willing--or able--to take ownership in.
I laud all the efforts being made to build bridges to communicate results of this research with classroom teachers, so many of whom are more than willing to re-engage students in learning if we only knew how.