But not just any games. The kinds of games that require some flexibility in problem solving are the ones I am most interested in. By looking at these games we can consider some of the elements that might inform how we engage students in well-designed instruction.

Games have not changed much.

There are some different genres now, and computers take much of the computation out of the complex games that we would have played in small groups. You can now play Risk, Monopoly, D & D, and stat sheet baseball all on the computer.

But what makes games fun are the same some core elements that have always been there.

The reason I have them in this order is that the first games I have seen my toddlers engage in is imaginative play. Is imaginative play a game? The kids take the toys and do what they do. Making sounds and telling us stories about what is happening; they put pillows under the table and make a race car. This is really productive learning. It is modeling and practicing what they see in the world. So perhaps imaginative play is not a game from the perspective of a formal definition, but it is often at the root of games with narratives.

Games with narratives are important for passing on cultural and professional knowledge.

But some games do not always have narratives. Cribbage does not have a narrative, neither does kick ball.

The big idea is that some games have these elements and some do not. But games can be a model for developing culturally valued skills, or for entering worlds of story and preparing for the development of competencies. What would happen if you explained to your kids that chess was a model for practicing battlefield tactics? Games are often representative of some abstracted system. In chess, you don’t have all of the details that make war tedious, like supply lines, morale, weather. But what you do have is a formalized system that necessitates strategy, resource management, and creative tool use. In addition, one must use the imagination to visualize all of the potential moves your opponent might do to counter. This kind of predictive play is the same kind method Einstein used in his thought experiment for Special Relativity.

When we think of this first step, we need to remember that play and games are powerful tools that take the facts, often conveyed in a lecture of from a text, and ask us to interact with them as processes and contexts. This potentially offers opportunities to develop deeper and more flexible knowledge of the system being described, rather than just memorizing it. Science can be taught this way, and so can literature and any other content area that has methods of inquiry. What you are doing is when you create games is the creation of models of the world and then modifying them to explore, fantasize, escape, and maybe try on a new identity.

Einstein used this same tool for imagining special relativity! The point of this taxonomy is not to place value in the sequence, but I have noticed that each one seems to build into the next for adding complexity. Imaginative games seem to come early.

As kids imagine their play, they often begin to take on the roles and identities of who they are imitating. They eventually learn that there are rules that come with roles, i.e., white hat cowboys don’t rustle horses, or the rules are made up for new variations as they play—as in, “No, you can’t do that. You are the baby, I’m the mommy “, or “let’s turn the submarine into a spaceship.”

These possible worlds are powerful.

And as children progress with age, we start to see them playing more formalized games developed in our cultures, like board games, signifying, soccer, kick the can, rapping, and telephone. Games are beginning to gain structure here with rules, and from here they can become somewhat complicated when we add elements that create uncertainty like branching, new rules, and probability. These more advanced games may provide the kid of habits of mind that can deliver the kind of complex problem solving many of today’s careers demand. Life is not always as you would expect. This is what I am hoping we begin to embrace in our lesson designs.

This is where games like D & D and other adventure and role playing games come in. They are built on the idea that given a certain situation, rules and roles will create certain contexts, and there might be a variety of solutions. Oddly enough, games develop this complexity very early on for kids. Just recall Chutes and Ladders®. In it there was a board squares and you moved in the squares in a linear or straightforward process. You probably know that the spinner brings luck in, but what makes the game more than just a horse race is the fact that are rules built into the board too. If you land on a chute, you might be sent back; if you land on a ladder, you might accelerate forward several levels on the path.

The importance of this is that there are many ways through a game. The elements of branching and probability demand this variable experience. When you add other elements like the way Monopoly has squares on the game board where you have to take a card like Chance or Community Cents, or you have to pay rent on some one’s land or hotel, or you decide to buy it, you have to adapt and act.

What this is leading to is games and designing classroom instruction can be very similar in their approach. A key to making it playful is allowing for non-linearity—that is uncertainty. Knowing that people may experience and play in different ways, and that people like this.

Do you have a lesson where the kids can make it different but just as good? The assessments can reflect the way games guide play through criteria and structure. The key is creating some latitude in how you evaluate the final product.

Things teacher should think about:

Games and lesson plans can be designed with the same elements.

Uncertainty can be stressful, but the right amount can be exciting.

Complex games have complex problems. You may have to have do overs.

Complex games often utilize all of the elements of listed in the taxonomy in different combinations and permutations, thus demanding the player to understand the problem and react on the spot. If they don’t get it, they can try again. If they are good problems, kids will persist and seek solutions.

There can be many solutions to a problem. It is good to allow for many approaches, even if this takes more time. These alternative explanations allow for greater variety of solutions, creativity, and flexible thinking.

My experience and common sense says no, although I wish it were a general truth.

Do kids need to learn about games in school?

Yes, if we want to guide them in optimal usage, and maybe learn something from them.

This post looks at formal and informal learning and begins to make connections between what is done in school: formal learning and what is done out of school: informal. The importance of this inquiry is to look at how we can recruit these informal processes to create leverage and development in formal learning situations. What is generally true for informal learning is that the learners are learning spontaneously and then moving to the next experience. This spontaneous learning is often thought to be tacit, or below the conscious awareness. One may be able to do a thing, but may not be able to describe the process they created, much less know a name for it. Conversely, in classroom, or formal learning experiences, we hope that students are being guided through learning experiences with structured reflection to give the process and elements of the process a formal name: like reading is a process.

There are four pieces to this post:

1. Are the kids just born with gaming skills?
2. Should we teach with them? Games as embodied informal models of scientific reasoning and the role of play.
3. Why we should recruit culturally relevant knowledge like games and other out of school experiences?
4. What happens when we honor the culture, language, and experience outside of the classroom by bringing it into the classroom to connect with formal academic culture, language, and experience?

Are the kids just born with gaming skills?

Kids today are not born with digital code imprinted in their DNA. They have to learn the language of technology, just like adults.

There is a digital divide between kids that have the new technologies and those that do not, and there is also a divide between those that have the games, and those that have the games and the people to help them understand how to use them.

I have documented this with video after spending many hours in a video game after school program in Hopkins, Minnesota. What I discovered is that most of the kids did not know what to do when they were stuck in a complex game. We were playing Metroid Prime, and until Darius came, none of the boys could figure out how to get into the first air lock. Metroid Prime is kind of a complicated game. But that is what makes it worthwhile. It is an open environment game that demands that you make sense of the world and find your way. There is a hint system in the game, but for some reason, it was turned off. That was very convenient for me to watch and see what they would do—not that I had anything to do with that. The cool thing is that there are many ways that a person can get through each problem. This allows for expression through play—an aesthetic. This open-ended approach to game play was discussed in my talk at the Professionalism in Practice conference. In the slides from that conference, I described the idea of non-linearity in game design. That is, you cannot necessarily predict the steps in a progression in a game. Even a simple one like Chutes and Ladders. Because of all of the chutes and ladders being dictated by the spinner, probability makes strategizing futile. Kids can begin to estimate and hope for the spinner to land on six, but they cannot plan for it either. This might be a difficult pill to swallow for educators, but when you assess for nice and tidy answers, are you assuming that life is full of nice and tidy answers? This is the challenge, there are many similarities in life, experience, and people, but it is variation that allows us to prosper and adapt. If we did not allow for variation, we would have no innovation. We would be living on rails from start to finish.

Back to Metroid Prime

They turned on the game and mashed the buttons on the controller; each taking turns trying to make Samus (the character) do something. It seemed clear to them, in the video footage I recorded, that there must be a way to get into the space station. They figured out how to shoot things, but that was about it besides walking around.

This was different from the genre of game that these kids played regularly. It demanded that they go through the process of elimination in pressing buttons, as well as finding different combinations, and then to do the same thing by pressing things in the game environment. It took patience and a methodical approach to trial and error. But none of the boys had this patience or persistence.

Should we teach with them? Games as informal models of scientific reasoning and the role of play

Well, what is formal scientific reasoning?

Isn’t it hypothesis testing? Isn’t it reduction then looking at different combinations of the reduced elements together working as a system? It is observation, modeling, and testing in and out of context.

It is patience, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to withhold judgment until a proposition is disqualified through the process of elimination. It is critical thinking. These are elements of complex games as well as scientific reasoning

It seems weird, but in games, kids have to go through scientific process where they tacitly use abductive, inductive, deductive, and analogical reasoning. In essence, they were using informal scientific reasoning. But by tacit and informal I mean that they were making it up as they went and sometimes, they could replicate what they did, and sometimes they just got lucky; and in times past the game held their hand to get them through and made them practice until they got it. Not this time though.

The point is, games are complex and dynamic interactive systems that demand decisions and thinking on your feet. And although games require this, and some kids do enact these formal processes, I am telling you now that this language is not generally viewed in the wild folks. It is taught. And the knowledge is either tacit, in that you can do it but you can’t explain it, or it is explicit, where you have a name for it and you know how it works.

These kids were at an afterschool remedial reading program. And honestly, these kids did not have the informal skills described. They were stuck outside the space station on Metroid Prime. There were no hints to follow and imitate. As much as they all tried , they were getting very frustrated.

It wasn’t until Darius came that they were able to get into the space station. And Darius is the product of the mentorship and modeling his dad provides and the texts he reads to help him

This does not mean that Darius has formal skills. He has tacit skills where he can tell what to do, but does not have a name for the process.

In school, language is important. It is our ability to make a concept or process formalized. That is, something that can be observed and replicated. Learning this kind of language can be arduous. The key to doing this seems to be connecting to the things kids already know and give them hook a to hang it on. In essence, you can think of the experience of school as kind of a cognitive hat rack, where we create terminology and methods that are transparent, generally accepted, and not necessarily descriptive. Ontogeny anyone?

An example of tacit knowledge of a process is reading.

How many of you can define reading right now right here?

Not many, and it is not because you can’t do it, you are doing it, right now as you read. You have to reflect and think about what you are doing. You are decoding symbols and having ideas that are represented by words that you have learned, and in some cases, you are learning new ideas in the context of what you already know. You are formalizing tacit knowledge to explicit, conscious knowledge. Reading is thinking cued by text. The letters tell you what to see and hear in your mind from our common language. You are building a model that is mediated by your memories and experience. In some cases you are creating new ideas through comparison, combination, and reduction, and also making predictions and analogy.

But this is not guaranteed.

How do I know you do this when you read?

We generalize through scientific method, the methods generate this theory of what we do when we read.

Language is how we share formalized systems, and how we create them from tacit experience. A group of people get together, decide what it is and give it a name.

There are a lot of names in school. Just think of how you use academic language. Do you use the word base? How many meanings does it have through the school day?

Kids are consistently asked to develop language from content registers, which are specialized languages from fields and professions in school. The trick is to connect it to what they know—(abduction). They connect through seeing a pattern, such as A created B (deduction), or guessing that a,b,c,d are all connected to some single cause (induction). Do they do this naturally? It seems to be the case in some instances. But it is rare to see it formalized anywhere outside of school. Formalized means that it is a named, observable, replicable, conscious (explicit) process. School is that process of socialization where we negotiate and sometimes learn a new language, and with it, new competencies and new ways of interacting with the world.

Should we teach with games?

I wrote about this a week ago, Yes, games whether they be video games or instruction designed like a game, the learning principles in games provide embodied experience that can be reflected upon and formalized with our monopoly on naming. L earning is really not a big mystery, and games understand play. Play is powerful learning. We know what it looks like, and we tend to create taxonomies and hierarchies. Here is one I made. (Observed stages of play).

After my children were born, I watched both of them become conscious of their limbs, learn how to grasp, learn to manipulate the things they grasped through the motor skills they had developed through trial and error, and then to use tactics to figure out how to make the stuffed dog bark; eventually they began just watch to mom and dad do it; and they became quick studies as they sought mastery of the tools that made mom and dad seem super-powered and oh-so-independent. So they began to develop agency through activity. Ryan & Deci’s self-determination theory complements this with the idea that we seek to belong, to be competent, and have autonomy. This is often created through the ability to act in the world and be respected for what you can do. There is plenty to support this if you read Brian Sutton Smith, you will find him connecting play to Stephen Jay Gould’s evolutionary theory. He makes the case that play and learning go hand in hand, and play has been a necessary part of evolution, as it has created the variation necessary for adaptation.

Sadly, have moved away from play in education, even though we are a play culture. It seems like during the push to have efficient methods for delivering information, we only considered the efficiency of the teacher, and made the teacher the focus rather than being student centered. To be student centered, we might have to move out of the direct instruction model and allow kids to get their hands dirty and have great ideas. And kids do have great ideas. Look at research by Piaget. Look at and read Duckworth’s book called, The Having of Wonderful Ideas, where she found kids able to have great ideas. Ideas that are being consistently rediscovered and are the roots of formal scientific reasoning; The ones we teach as methods for inquiry in most, if not all of our content areas. It is through school and culture we hope to speed up the process. But we have done through using these formal systems that must be memorized abstracted from experience, rather than through discovery and reflection.

What I have found through reading, watching, and reflecting is a process of learning that looks something like these observed stages of play.

This model makes a case for a different kind of instruction in the classroom–one that begins to resemble games rather than someone lecturing at a podium. Students have to be highly motivated to learn in a lecture, unless of course they are learning they don’t like lectures. I am not against lectures, but how am I going to get a real sense of all of the kids learning if I am always talking? The structured interactions and performance as assessment aspects of games allow mastery learning and feedback, and thus much more interaction; interaction is the basis for improvement and self-measure. In trial and error, don’t we act and look for the result? That is the basis of trial and error and until we have some knowledge of the object in context – or systems knowledge. So what if we look at play and how people play as culturally relevant, not only as a teaching method, but as experience we can give to embody and share formalized concepts? That is making what we are doing conscious – moving into the realm of purposeful use of strategies.

People begin with an interest in what a thing is and what it can do. If you recall the film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, indigenous bush people living by older tribal means found a coke bottle that was thrown from a small aircraft. It was used for anything and everything the villagers could think of: carrying water, mashing things into meal, and eventually, even as a weapon.

Without guided instruction, an object may not tell how you may use it, or what you may use it for. In essence, you can shape the tool, and the tool can shape you. It is through culture that our knowledge is transmitted—language, tools, rules, relations, and objects. So what seems basic to all of us, using induction here, is to assume that we are all curious tinkerers. Looking for interesting things to do, and we begin with trial and error based upon prior experience and our ability to reason with analogy—it looks like a hammer, it must be a hammer, thus used like a hammer.

Games understand this, but they are also aware that giving people what they see and experience in everyday life is not an escape. So in order to help us find easy and early success in the game – they do want us to play and buy the sequel, as well as tell others to play it—they build in hints and guides, and simplified training stages, where the game aids you in your tasks so that you feel like you are getting it right away and becoming the king of the thing.

Metroid Prime will lead you through with hints, but as I mentioned, not this time. Darius had experience with this game and was immediately adept at telling the kid with the controller – Chris—what to do next. Where previously the boys had taken the controller back and forth trying out their ideas; the one who had the success would move forward while the others watched and learned—waiting for a turn. Darius was okay with telling them what to do, but he eventually got bored and went to the computers in the back of the room. I let the camera do the recording on the boys playing and followed Darius; he had started looking around with a browser on a computer.

What I found out was that Darius played with his dad when they had weekends together, and that he practiced playing during the week (maybe this was why he was in this remedial reading program). His dad was really into games, and he showed Darius how to get information online as well as how to prepare and apply the information in the text into action. Kind of like reading instructions to that grill, those shelves, or that workbench you bought with all those parts that require assembly. Reading to act is complex–especially when the game or object demands mastery.

Just an aside here, but, do you read the instructions first?

Do you learn about the people and company where you are interviewing before you go in?

Do you Google people before you go on a blind date?

Is that cheating, or being prepared?

How about in a classroom?

Darius used computers and magazines to find walk-throughs, cheats, and other tips on how to get through the games with ease and give him freedom to play with some flair because he had prior knowledge. Thus, he played with an aesthetic: Play worthy of other people viewing it. Play as performance. He had created ideas of what getting through a game should look like. This was probably from watching other players, as well as his dad’s values and excellence—evidently his dad is very good at games.

Darius was supported by his parents through subscriptions to magazines like Game Informer. He had modeled play from his dad as well as through what he read in magazines and on the WWW.

In addition to Darius, I also interviewed a middle school student from Stillwater. He told me he watched g4TV and met regularly with his gamer friends to play multiplayer and single payer games together. They all watched these programs and read the magazines so they would know what were the good games, they also had the chance to see other people playing games, and this showed them what to do, and then practiced so that when they met, they would be able to show what they could do. There was a lot of “lemme try that!”

In a phenomenological study I did, I found that the young woman that was my informant played DDR because it was great fun with her friends, and that she practiced at home so that she could improve each time she met with her group. This was in addition to being in traveling band, International Baccalaureate, track, and soccer! She even shared that she brought the game on a trip to play against other kids in the band in the hotel. She described the way she figured it out as watching, trying, and practicing, and then more of the same.

The big question is, are we tapping into this at school? Can we recruit these experiences to make what we teach more accessible? Can we do it in a similar way?

We can tap into and develop teaching based upon our knowledge of what kids do and like.

And we can learn something from them. And as teachers, learning is something we should enjoy and constantly model. A natural curiosity and inquisitiveness that allows for the formal methods we have been trained with as subject matter experts in all of the content areas.

All we need to do is study, ask, and connect. And what we should be studying are our kids.

Why should we recruit culturally relevant knowledge and experience that can be connected to make tacit knowledge explicit?

There are many studies of people outside of school doing the things we learn in school, but better. I must admit, I have been intrigued by the studies of brazilin street children doing complex mathematics. As I have been reading Carol Lee’s new book, she has been using this research, as well as parallel and complementary research to build a curricular approach she calls Cultural Modeling.
In cultural modeling, we need to see that actions and behaviors outside of school can be just as deep and complex as what we do in school. It is a matter of the teacher deeply understanding their content area facts, processes, and creating contexts for connecting with cultural practices outside of school.

She argues for educators having cultural understanding of knowledge, and asks that we consider structures that encourage participation and connection.

Lee asks, “are we giving poor kids direct instruction because we are convinced this is the only way they can catch up and learn?”

Lee asserts that we must establish routines to get students to persist; students may need help discovering relationships between facts that are memorized and patterns. On page 33, she says that “direct instruction and basic skills instruction are totally insufficient”, and that “a profound lack of understanding of the cultural displays of knowledge in the everyday practices of minority and low income students . . . has led to a pervasive culture of low expectations, to deficit models of student capacities, and to a myriad of misunderstandings within classrooms.”

One of the examples she makes along with the computational abilities of Brazilian street children is called signifying, which is a practice in African American English. You know what that is right? Let me model one that I heard that thought was funny: “your momma so fat, her blood type rocky road!” This is a rapid analogical exchange where insults and ideas are traded based upon representation and quick and clever turns of wit – where the person receiving has to quickly identify what is being signified, use the representation and turn it back on the originator. Lee suggests that this and many other cultural acts could support the most difficult things we do in Language Arts classrooms – identifying patterns and imagery in narrative and interpreting and extending them. Can we analogize this kind of analogical reasoning with our kids in class for books that might reflect their experiences? Can we use games which are even closer to what we do in school?

What Lee seems to be saying, is the same thing I have been trying to say—can’t we learn what the kids like, bring it in, and connect it to traditional academic reasoning structures. Isn’t there a place for new culture in the old canons? What we’re talking about here is good old transfer. Connecting skills from one experience to leverage something new quickly. This seems a much more efficient method than teaching formalized systems and then asking kids to make the connections themselves. They would have to think there is relevance to want to do this.

And why is what we are teaching more important than what kids are doing now? The question has been asked by Michael Apple –Whose knowledge is it?

Who decides what is complex and what is not. There is complexity everywhere. Simplicity is really only in our mind’s ability to abstract and reduce. According to Lauren Resnick (1978, in Lee, pg. 36), complex problems are ones for which the solution path cannot be fully specified in advance and for which there might not be simple right or wrong answers. Isn’t this what I described as a complex game? There are many paths built upon different reasons and experience?

This brings up issues of designing instruction: can it be different, but just as good?

On Friday, I was with a group of teachers and we were going through a mathematics activity where we were asked to give the perimeter of hexagons that were placed in three different series.

The math people created a table, showing how many sides:

1 = 6, 2= 10, 3 = 14 and then predict 6 connected hexagons.

I looked at them and noticed that there were six sides and that each time two were connected, you would add all the sides and subtract the two since they were no longer on the perimeter, so I just blurted an answer without showing my work.

They were a little taken aback, but I explained what I had done. They liked it, but it did not fit with the lesson. If we really worked on connecting it, we would have discovered a nice little equation underneath it (post a comment if you can figure it out)

It was not that they didn’t like it; they wanted to teach a formalized methodology. Because mine was emergent, it caught them off guard. I am an English teacher, what would I be doing with an algorithm anyway?

This was a teachable moment, and our kids are rich with valuable experiences that we can build off of.

So back to games.

They fit Resnick’s definition of complexity.

In fact, they are considered to be complex and dynamic systems.

They demand strategic thinking and planning. To win, and win with an aesthetic, one must build layered strategies, tolerating the ambiguity of each level to apply an appropriate strategy, rather than using the same tactic with every challenge.

This does not seem to come naturally. Kids need to have this modeled and imitate it. And it is. Kids play with adults and other kids who share and learn from each other.

Find out how many of your underachieving boys play video games and ask them to demonstrate them. When I did this with high school seniors, we got a clinic on Madden and NBA. You want complex dynamic games? Try one!

So are the kids digital natives? Not by birth. But they are surrounded by cultural opportunity to learn and use these devices if they are available.

What I have seen is that if kids have any of those digital devices, they must have time and have access to people who use them so that they can participate together. In this way kids become very proficient. But so do adults.

Are these two very different approaches?

It is called leveraging everyday knowledge and tapping into high interest activities like games.

We can use games to build and leverage complex problem solving. We can connect with cultural values, knowledge, and experience that kids bring with them to school, and we can relate them to the formalized systems that we attempt to teach as abstraction.

Making the connection to experience is powerful, and we can do this from multiple perspectives.

What happens when we honor the culture, language, and experience outside of the classroom by bringing it into the classroom to connect with formal academic culture, language, and experience?

I hope to find out from you.

Trying to teach voice sounds pretty boring, especially when you tell them excitedly in your teacher nerd-talk that “you’ll like it, it’s fun! We’ll look at poetry and other fiction and examine tone, emphasis, word choice, syntax, volume, and all the things that make a great reading. Just think, diction is slang! We’ll study that too!”

Booooooorrrriing.

If they don’t heckle me for saying something like that, they should.

Now what happens when we embody that lesson in something that it is kind of fun and exciting?

Let’s try another voice:

How about cutting some tracks on garage band? You are going to do the voice on the song. Then we’ll put some music and a beat behind it.

What are you going to call your act? Are you going to be yourself, or make a character? What is their sound?

What are you going to rap about? How about this? Or maybe you can try rapping some one else’s words.

Well, we better think of a logo and begin to think about how we are going to promote you. Who do you like?

Okay, let’s think about doing a video, the cover art, and do some press kits and take some glam shots.

You are going to take on a couple of roles: the talent, the publicist, designer, the manager, the producer.

Will you want to do a clothing line?

So what happens when we try out a high interest activity?

How about engaging the imagination to make something real?

When we have them create a page at MySpace it becomes real. Many of the music tracks making big money are being found through social networking and web-presence in spaces like MySpace. Here is a link to a group some of my kids were always trying to watch. If you are not able to see it, perhaps you have been cut off from the world like most students behind the firewalls. Most of the kids learn about proxy servers and go there anyway — and then we take away their computer usage! Way to reward initiative huh!

What happens if people like what they are doing?

Will there be initiative?

Do you think kids will expect and work for excellence? I am betting they will. This is what I have seen whne they perform to an audience beyond the teacher’s eyes and a red pen.

They are putting their work out there>>>>>>>>>>>>>>in the world>>>where people can see them!

We can deliver this, and all of the things that I mentioned in the first boring lesson. But in this one, the kids will engage. And they will own the lesson because it supports their quest for excellence.

And while we are at it, I can subtly add writing, visual imagery, structure analysis, media and information literacy, as well as design because it furthers their success and it is purposeful and relevant.

School relevant?

I can give them roles to play, we can design our own outcomes based upon my teacher knowledge which has been aligned with their interest and purpose to support them and help them deconstruct the process of performance with the elements of voice.

You might be saying to yourself, “what we are going to use rap music as a text book?”

And I say, “Yes, among other things.”

Why not use words from the world?

Do you think what we consider high culture now was always high culture? How about Shakespeare? He was a bit bawdy and cleverly lewd if you really try to understand the original language. And Chaucer? Don’t get me started.

Okay, so we are not going to go there. But what if we can find tracks that are G-rated? — and I don’t mean G like gangsta.

If there is profanity, shouldn’t we ask the kids what they think of that? Maybe profanity expresses some social commentary? Is it appropriate or just pushing the boundaries to be provocative?

Would you play it for grandma?

I have always been amazed at the strong morals kids have that seemingly support their efforts to be provocative, sometimes profane, and always seeking to be unique. They really do know better. And when it comes to their younger brothers and sisters, they are quite protective of their innocence.

So this unit is built to teach young people how to read, write, express themselves through language, and develop multimedia production skills usually only taught in specialized technical schools, art school, and through apprenticeships. And this is what many of the kids are interested in. Should we consider motivation and engagement? 20 years of socio-cognitive work has only led us to oversimplification of assessment until our tools are assessable, but also decontextualized and irrelevant activities. How many tests have you taken lately? There are four rhetorical modes I can think of: to entertain, to inform, to persuade, and to test.

The fourth only happens in school

To test or not to test.

Are we smart enough to design curriculum that allows for authentic assessment?

Yes, we are.

If we want to look at how to embody learning, we should look at games. Games are designed the same way that research and simulation are designed. Those are respectable activities right? And isn’t a well-structured lesson plan designed for validity and reliability, just like research and simulation? Just like games?

So what if we designed our lessons like games? If the fidelity of the simulation/ model that we are designing reflects the context and learning principles we are trying to introduce and teach; then we will likely have the interactions that we want, but with outcomes that may not be simple, clean, and convenient. This is not one-size-fits all.

So can we live in a world where different is just as good. That might mean creativity and innovation – ownership.

Pride in work? Doesn’t that come from putting your mark on it? Putting yourself into it?

Maybe we need some of that in our schools. Especially schools that have a high incidence of poverty, and assembly-line instruction fueled by tests Anyon (1980). Standardized tests seek mediocrity in most cases. How many tests stretched you to greatness? What kind of work should our kids be doing? In the Anyon article I cited, she found that wealthy kids generally evaluated and supported their positions. Even Bloom thought that was complex.

Test reading is superficial reading, Gee (2006), where you must fill in the blanks, but really don’t require much depth of thought; Allington (2006) describes this as continual testing rather than instruction—where the students are given a task that does not instruct, but assesses and tracks, and likely reduces student expectation and experience with reading complexity.

Moving on

Regular and quality feedback are essential to learning. How much feedback to improve do you get in a test? How do they adjust to your performance

We are moving closer to this with computer assisted tests. Interestingly, those tests are designed with branching—just like many games.

There is nothing wrong with tests. Life is full of tests for entitlement.

But what if the tests are not valid measures?

If you read the RAND report and the National Reading Panel’s report, along with many of the leading figures in reading, you will find healthy skepticism as well as contempt for the way we test for comprehension. I would recommend reading this book if you want smarter people than me to tell you–just read the chapter by Sweet. One of the major reservations expressed is that the tests are not built upon a theory of comprehension. It is for this reason that tests and item difficulty have to be negotiated in committees to create inter-rater reliability. Too bad inter-rater reliability does not translate to the classroom. What do we do when we want to teach these skills sets in the tests? How do we prepare the kids? What is their model? There is no model, the items are negotiated for complexity.

They tell us – Oh, use Blooms taxonomy.

Was this meant as a measure of complexity? I think not. Is recall a less complex process than synthesis? Can you even identify the process in context? When I gave a test defining bloom’s terms, the test makers and academics are stretched to identify them in context. Please write me if you would like to take this quiz.

So, if you are told to recall the process of internal combustion, is that less difficult than synthesizing yellow and blue? The answer to the latter is green. You learn that pretty early in school right. I know this is not a fair comparison, but you get my meaning right? It is not a hierarchy, it is meant as a framework for lesson design.

Readability is the same can of worms.

So, is this a difficult sentence: “to be or not to be”? The readability is high (very accessible and easy to decode).

But do you know the answer?

Can you comprehend it? There really is no easy answer to that question is there?

Complexity and readability could have a metric based upon psycholinguistic research using discourse processing models. If we are going to make a fair game, let’s make fair rules and fair play with our tests.

And aren’t we all just a little tired of shooting for mediocrity?

Are we content with passing a test that really signals nothing but a minimum standard?

Maybe it is time we began looking at things with a little more complexity and raise our standards in the meantime.

It is all about context and embodying the skills and competencies in something meaningful and fun.

Games create challenge, purpose, skill implementation, and reading and acting with purpose. If it is a good game, they will play it. And the actions are the assessments. Games assess and evaluate by their very nature. If you do not have mastery, you do not move forward. But the game will also give you help if you need it—no one designs a game that is too hard. So, maybe we should be thinking about games and how we might begin to design and structure instruction and content. We are at risk of losing our kids to disinterest because we are becoming irrelevant in teaching to the minimum standard.

We can do better for them.

We can take the classroom back. We can make it fun and relevant. We can make work feel like play. And maybe we can make work playful. Kindergarten teachers get this!

We can teach openness to creativity, innovation, and celebrate individuals rather than aggregated scores for AYP. It is my prediction that teaching from this perspective would eliminate AYP and make the tests easily passed.

Thank you for enduring this read if you have gotten this far. If you want to look at the model of comprehension I use for Rhythm & Flow: Star Maker, go here and learn about situation models. Also, there is a slide show that you can view here that describes the project here.

So, teaching reading and writing with Rap, Hip-Hop, Country, and Rock?

I am hopeful that this kind of content and instructional design can be embraced again. We need to embody learning. Teaching abstraction and conceptualization is like eating pure protein – sure it is good for you, but wouldn’t you rather have that protein in something you enjoy?

It seems like common sense to assume that the best way to learn something is to work one-on-one with an expert. Unfortunately, many of these experts are busy using their expertise in important projects at the Louvre, saving lives, winning Nobel prizes, and putting out fires—and sometimes a great expert is not a great teacher!

Teachers have many specialties and interests, but are often not experienced with having been a physicist, psychiatrist, police officer, or an engineer. But they do have expertise in the developmental issues of children; they know how to build relationships, can motivate and engage, and know how to structure learning environments. These are key attributes if you are going to create a learning outcome with a stranger– unless you are paying them!

Many teachers believe that if they were able to work with just a few kids over a long period of time, they could create significant growth. Just imagine working with 32 students over a 55 minute period – how much time would you have with each student if they started and ended when the bell rang?

So what would happen if you to design a computer game based upon teachers’ knowledge of pedagogy and childhood development, with a designers ability to portray and depict complex ideas, a computer programmers ability to design a system, an assessment experts ability to create measure outcomes and performance, and that subject matter experts knowledge?

Perhaps you would have a game. . . A game that could work as an expert system to teach.

Here is one about the brain called Neuromatrix! A secret agent fixing brains. Sounds cool.

How about nano-technology?

Business Week just published a story related to their special report on gaming on theNanoScale game, which helps players visualize and understand thespatial relationships between objects at all scales, starting with a tiny blue hydrogen atom, shown here next to a buckyball (the name of amolecule of carbon atoms arranged in a pattern of hexagons andpentagons) and a colorful strand of DNA.

This is not the first serious game. Serious games and games in general, according to David Perry at Business Week:

Now games are a legitimate academic subject, with many university courses around the world offering degrees in video game design and development. And many game designers and researchers are seeing how games influence cognitive and other skills. This summer, the MacArthur Foundation board announced it will give a $1.1 million grant to fund the Institute of Play, a new middle/high school in New York City focused on making video games. Why? The foundation has found that games are an effective tool to teach information management and other critical skills.

So are we going to begin to make this happen in our own schools and universities? It seems odd that we would ignore this trend. Training and retaining people is the one of the most expensive things we do. In addition, when we lose young people in schools, it costs us more. So what can we do to retain our students?

It is my contention that many young people have checked out. Do they know what skills they will need for the work place? Maybe they see through our worksheets and have found us to be irrelevant, or are they tired of the point-and-talk teaching model that informs the work they do in their tidy rows of desks?

One of the current issues that may need to be addressed is how we bring in the new skills and interests to an older generation who do not know what a Super Monkey Ball is, or even Madden 2008.

In respect of this, I have begun to create a wiki resource for educators who would like to explore video games as a classroom topic. This wiki has been co-created by teachers who took the class “video games as learning tools”, taught at the University of Minnesota.

In this class, we are exploring games for use in the classroom. If you are interested in looking at the syllabus and the activities, as well as finding resources and student reflections on the readings, please go to http://videogamesaslearningtools.wikispaces.com/

This wiki was created to be a resource for teachers to have structure in the course, but to also co-create the course. Included are the lesson/unit plans I used to create a 6 week unit for middle school and high school students at the Minneapolis Public Schools. The role of the wiki was to create a communal platform where students in the class could have choice in creating content, process, and outcomes in the course. They were course designers too. This co-creation is a powerful method for teaching, and wikis can support it.

The class itself was not a glorification of video games. It was a practical look at how games can be integrated into the classroom as tools as well and models for designing instruction. Since games are representations of ideas, worlds, concepts, and life, we can have them stand as metaphor to embody any process experientially.

Playing games may not be as rich an experience as taking the kids to the Grand Canyon, but, a game about the Grand Canyon can give you the chance to walk around a well-modeled representation, and maybe even give opportunities being there couldn’t. How about the possibility of flying above the canyon, and then landing and kayaking the Colorado River? All of this could be done with games and interactive story telling technology. You could definitely see it all faster in a game.

Also, games can supply us with efficacious design elements. How about this game I designed for developing performance reading? You become part of a music act and create your own image and work through Garage Band. Students take on the role of: the talent, the producer, the publicist, the manager, the designer and create their complete band package—including a MySpace page for networking and sharing your work. This game is simple role playing and use of readily available technology.

Many artists are being discovered through social networking tools. Why not have your students do it at their computer? Here is the slideshow that I presented at

Games structure interaction, they demand mastery, the performance is the assessment, and if they are well-designed, they are fun. Your lesson plans can be this way too. Why not offer work that is really fun and inspires play? It will change your teaching experience.

So this game is in the tradition of Guitar Hero & Karaoke. I call it found objects, because all the elements necessary come in many of the computers we currently purchase in schools. In this case, our school had imacs. Often as teachers, we do not have the resources to purchase some of the great games available, but we can use our eyes, ears, and creativity to use the design elements that some of the great games are built upon to build units that might be more fun, playful, and rewarding while building important competencies. I am hoping that teachers think about this and design units that allow them to participate rather than broadcast

The student basically designs a band franchise– producing an album using off the shelf Imacs and the iLife bundle of software. I looked around and Karaoke software can be just as effective if not more interesting for the fact that the lyrics can be created with it for performance and the creation of that lyric sheet represents an opportunity to think about how they might structure and format a song. We listen to a song to get the lyrics and discuss the qualities. These qualities are used to create a framework for voice and flow.

We have other mini-games in the unit like clapping academy, where we evaluate clapping and make a rubric. This act of co-creation instills buy-in and understanding by the students and is then extended when we co-create the rubrics for the songs and image elements.

The kids look for and create lyrics from poetry, prose, want ads– whatever—and read into garage band.

They record their chosen text, and then they comment on their performance reading. We use a fluency scale designed for continuous improvement that we co-create. It is meant as a model to create descriptions for different reading situations and what mastery may look, feel, and sound like with reading.

After they have talked about their track, they put music behind it, then reflecting upon why they mixed it the way they did.

This unit is intended to teach performance reading – beyond fluency, provide high interest activity, and integrate reflection on reading and emphasize comprehension through a discourse processing model and explore aspects like voice and other literary elements. The intention was to show that games that come prepackaged are great, but that teachers can design games that are effective and use existing technologies and software already available to teach traditional subjects that are relevant to current cultural values and interests.

Yes, it improved reading performance.

What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments that are interactive and look better than many films. Decisions, actions, and communications happen like they would in a face-to-face conversation, but they are done through a proxy, that is first and second-person perspectives with an avatar: a graphical representation of yourself in the game space.

Here is my avatar in Second Life.

He is a mix of Yoda, Pei Mei, Zatoichi, Master Po, and Real Ultimate Power. I would have liked to have made him old, but this is only possible if you learn to use some tools outside of the game to create more specialized characters. There are many who do this custom avatar creation, and the cool thing is that you could make your avatar something other than a person. Maybe a virus or a mailbox.

In fact, many people are already creating a comfortable living creating products for in game use. If you have not seen it yet, there are already success stories of people capitalizing on the new economies that virtual worlds have created.

In this Business Week article, one school teacher in Germany has made substantial gains flipping virtual property!

Imagine that you have the tools and access to build in these environments. In Second Life you do. You can visit models of the Sistine Chapel, Yankee Stadium, or even visit government agencies like the Center for Disease Control. You can build what you like on your virtual land.

What make this kind of play appealing is the ability to play and communicate when you want, and the possibility of meeting people from all over the planet. The prospect of building models and interacting in this environments should be very appealing to educators. This is an extension of the diorama. (Tomorrow I will talk about a project using these ideas in the classroom).

Virtual relations.

Just walk up to another avatar and find out where they are from. I was showing my supervisor around Second Life and we met a person from Austria. It was nice to try and speak a little German. We had opportunity here to practice language with a native speaker. This is a way to internationalize our classroom experiences. Why not use this for language practice? Go to Paris 1900 if you want!

Maybe we need both worlds. The virtual and the real.

Our colleagues, students, and yes, even our grandparents are logging on and playing with tens of thousands of people a night.

This all goes way beyond contact and communication.

But can chasing virtual characters in modern versions of capture the flag help kids prepare for a new economy?

The games are developing with the players, by the players, and we are at the beginning of what Henry Jenkins calls Convergence Culture, where consumers –us/we–are shaping the media and commercial landscape—how we sell, what we sell, and how we use it. We are telling companies how they should run their businesses

. . . if they want to do business.

This is what we are going to face as educators. It is my feeling that we already are.

I would like to put forward a simple idea here: This is the new economy.

Go and see for yourself. Get a subscription to World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings, or Second Life. These are interactive communities where people participate and interact for recreation, socialization, and employment. Younger students? Try Teen Second Life, Quest Atlantis, or Whyville.

We are creating what we want, when we want it.

This seems to be the games movement: FLEXIBILITY ON DEMAND.

Games are challenging and deep, but also designed for beginners with low initial usability demands. Imagine if no one but experienced players could play . . . there would be no new market for game companies to sell to.

Games are also modifiable.

Jason Hill, one of my students from the Video Games as Learning Tools course I offer at the University of Minnesota presented on how he and his colleagues in World of Warfare customize their Graphical User Interface (GUI) to be more useful and immediate for the tasks they regularly engaged in his game experience. Here is an image from his game experience:

You will notice the complex symbol systems that represent behavior and action, as well as status and inventory.

What Jason described in the presentation of his project, was that many players were not satisfied with the user interface and had delved into the code to modify the interface to be more useful and applicable for the user’s style of play. You can see here that these are complex interfaces that aid the player in their quest, help them manage resources, as well as control the character. To make them work for your purpose in learning and doing is to have some control and purpose.

Learners like this. There is plenty to recommend it. Take a look at Constance Steinkuehler’s thesis. There is plenty in her study of online literate activities and informal scientific reasoning to give you an idea how you might reverse engineer content to validate gaming as a productive classroom tool.

Further, the graphical user interfaces (GUI) are the precursor to the interfaces and controls of many new computer mediated machines. My former neighbor worked on a project that used video game GUI for controlling unmanned military vehicles. He told me that game players were much more adept at controlling the vehicles than non-game players. Much of our equipment will use GUI like video games.

So not only are students learning to play these games with very complex user interfaces, but they are modifying these interfaces to suit their style of play.

The same is happening with open source communities where HUD (Heads up displays) are being created to connect Second Life to Moodle (an open source learning management system), so that we can begin to link embodied performance and description of experience to an online grade book. Imagine moving beyond traditional distance education and offering shared simulations that are SCORM compliant, which allows for the action to be the assessment given the right scripting and activity.

So, with all of these new tools waiting to become more cost friendly, we might want to think about getting on board before the train leaves the station.

We can do this with school too.

Education and other services may be delivered like this in the future. These virtual worlds can be connected to when convenient, and can be turned off just as easily.

But this is really not all I want to tell you about.

We are already seeing the potential for using these environments for distance learning and hybrid models for classrooms. With my supervisor Renee Jessness, I am currently designing online content for virtual worlds for Minneapolis Online using technologies developed in open source movements like Sloodle.

Make no mistake, as educators, we are making progress.

We are also working to put established curriculum, like Kurt Squire’s work on Civ 3 on Moodle so that students can play the game Civilization and get course credit while improving knowledge of history, cultural geography, and accelerating their reading and critical thinking. There are other games we are beginning to integrate as well. Try Political Machine, Labyrinth, Making History, Freedom Fighter 56, Star Wars Legos, Pirates!, Harvest Moon, Pet Pals, River City, Wolfquest, Creature Control, Dance Dance Revolution, and of course, Guitar Hero!
We are also integrating traditional content into hands on studies with amazing equipment.

I was a little tough on Minneapolis’ magnet programs and did not tell the whole story. We are making progress. Wendie Pallazo, director of Career and Technical Education at Minneapolis Public Schools has just purchased a Rapid Prototype Machine as part of the CTE Engineering program, where content is embodied in Project based learning. Imagine that you take your design from the CAD software and you print off what you designed with a 3dimensional object printer.

What if we combine this with games and online environments?

The process of manufacture and distribution can be a costly process in getting products to shelves. But what if these virtual products were connected to a distribution and production system that would allow you to have it at home instantly?

So you go to virtual Target, and Target has shelves of virtual products to sell you. And in addition to selling you the object, you get the tool kit to modify the product, and, you are encouraged to change its design and sell it on Target’s virtual shelves to other virtual customers. What if you go to check out where there is an RPM machine that will print off your design in a 3d model? Myabe you can modify in the store and at home. Maybe you get a designer’s cut — I don’t know.

This is convergence culture and the logical extension of the AMAZON model of customer recommendation. Design it online, print it at home.

The products we design may be available to us by RTM 3d printer like Wendie just purchased for one of our high schools. I ti s nice that our students will experience technology like this first hand.

People are also using these environments to produce more media.

How about that lamp you mod’d online at virtual target? Print it!
What if you want a book?

How about the Espresso® book machine . . . print off one book at a time.

It is not just about products, it is about information and entertainment too.

There is Machinima, Fan Fiction, Play-throughs, and Mods.

People are learning dangerous sports and serious professions without the risk of injury because game of technology. There are peripherals that enable virtual kayaking with simulated water feel on the paddle; how about new fields like distance surgery—and ps. video games help surgeons in their accuracy.

So instead of asking ourselves if we will be able to compete with these kind of learning environments, we should be asking ourselves when we are going to join in the fun. The biggest foes we face as educators are apathy, learned helplessness, and irrelevance. You will not find those words in the same sentence with Play and Fun. According to Mumford and Huizinga, play is representation and the ability use analogy and metaphor. According to them, this is how our culture was created and the way we perpetuate and share it.

It takes a really disciplined kid to put down the controller and pull out the textbook from school. So why should they?

And as we all know, many are not disciplined in this way. If you speak to most professionals who deal with young people, you will probably find them telling you that kids struggle with the ability to delay immediate gratification. Many young people, and one middle-aged educator I know of for sure, would much prefer to play video games than diagram sentences and do second-drafts of papers. I think we struggle even as adults. Parents and people who play and develop games have much to teach us about learning and delivering instruction, and as educators, we should position ourselves to ask for that help

Parents have learned that they can leverage these games to get kids to do things that they don’t want to do. And believe me, they do. Many young people have at least one gaming platform at home: Xbox, ,Xbox 360 GameCube, Wii, PlayStations 1, 2, & 3, as well as handheld game platforms like the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, the PlayStation Portable, the Nintendo DS. Parents understand that they can get their kids to do things by using games in a token economy. Some parents take it a step further, and play the games with their children. This is smart parenting. If you are afraid of what might be hiding inside, you should go in and take a look.

Tell me,

How in the world can we compete with this?

Why would we compete with this?

Why are we not teaching like this?

Like I said, there are not the games your father bought you.

They are complex, dynamic, interactive, highly engaging, and evolving with the players: good games are great teachers.

Video games represent a great opportunity for teachers and students to connect, and not just because games are fun and they encourage play, but because it allows us to share experience and be on the same level. It allows them to see an adult learn a new thing as a beginner.

And believe me, you won’t be an expert in the beginning. Modesty and humility are wonderful when mixed with openness, eagerness to learn and share, as well as a little collegian competition. And many young people are great teachers as well as great competitors. And they do want to help you.

When I have played games with young people, I have been able to talk about the experience with them and model my reflective process. When I non-judgmentally share my experiences of the game and how I felt, and how I am making sense of what happened in the context of my values, I get a chance to talk at a whole different level of discourse. I give respect and seek to understand before I seek to be understood. This is a great way to model metacognition, affective processing, and courteous sportsmanship– a few things the world could use!

One of the coolest things we do on games is debate. The CQ Researcher has a nice article on this,a and after we have had a careful reading, we debate about things like violence and games. I asked students if we should teach kids that are seven years old to play Grand Theft Auto®. The classes have generally split half & half. The method comes from Johnson & Johnson and it is this method of creating constructed controversy and debate; it allows me the opportunity to moderate a controversial subject and suggest that we can disagree, learn from each other, and not be at war because we think differently. And the kids have great takes on why we have violence and how games might play a role.

Maybe adoption of these new approaches to play and learning can help us continue our progressive evolution. It is clear the next steps involve ubiquitous computing devices like PDAs and phones. If we all have access to the web, will we be creating hybrids between real and virtual field trips. Folks at the MIT Media lab have been doing this already and are calling them participatory simulations and augmented reality.

We can extend this by having our open source LMS capture data online as students solve the mysteries and provide the data and construct critique and evaluation supporting their findings and position.

Further, assignments that are uploaded using the built in quiz tools and other auto-grading features can evaluate the data as assignments/quizzes and give feedback, clues, and progress in the grade book in real-time. We can give scavenger hunt assignments for our museums, historic sites, government centers, and imaginary futures mapped out in real space. And these don’t have to be fictions; they can be real problems that need solving.

So when we talk about games, we are talking about what is current and maybe a little out front into the future. There is so much happening connected to these tools and so many ways that they can be used and connected.

Tomorrow I am going to share a little about my use of games for teaching literacy and literature. I will offer some approaches to teaching games as game studies and how I improved reading performance with my eight graders.

To be is to do

So Do We?

It is just good teaching

Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn.

Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is you.

Gibson talked about environment and context, with affordances and constraints. What the world gives you for advice, warning, limitation, and opportunity.

These ideas are present in embodiment and how we might contextualize our curriculum as an activity system.

One of the big lessons from games is design. Good learning is by design. A teacher, like a game designer creates the environment where we learn.

We are already attempting to embody what we teach in purposeful ways with Professional Content Magnets in our secondary schools. In Minneapolis we have Automotive, Cosmetology, Medicine, Business, and Fine Arts—just to name a couple. What we often don’t do is to integrate the abstractions of the core competencies from the traditional content areas into the context of the professional development. I have noticed that the many of the magnets still teach school the same way. Students still go to math and use a math text book, and they learn Math the same way they do in Auto as they do in Medical — they just have some specialized classes and placement programs that allow students to specialize.

We often do not teach our content in the context of doing the professional work. We do not find Algebra in the everyday world of Engineering, we teach the formulas as content rather than showing how a formula can be used for building a model for an engineering project. There is a new kind of engineering for schools – reverse engineering.

Some schools and teachers do this when they design their curriculum. There are books on it and we have explored this idea going all the way back to John Dewey .

Can we teach physics with an internal combustion engine? Dewey thought so.

Games ask us to take on the roles and then teach us to do things in the context of that role in the simulated environment.

That is embodiment.

Schools can do this too.

We can structure reflection to connect experience to our abstracted tradition of curriculum to generalize and transfer.

If you are playing as a doctor, you will do the things that doctors do.

And as you are acting like a doctor, the game gives you clues to achieve a win-state, in the form of feedback and performance assessment.

Games provide performance assessment in real time embodied in the context of what a doctor does and how a doctor gets feedback. So you learn to be a doctor by playing in a simulated world as a doctor. In the process, you are assessed on your performance by the game. It is how they keep score!

In games students are scored based upon criteria for performance that is built into the activity. The assessment is the activity.

This is different from taking tests on the content and elements of performance in print based tests and questionnaires. Thorndike anyone?

This is what games do when they are well-designed, and this is what curriculum can do when it takes these steps as well. Good teaching is good teaching, but often our teachers are not given the opportunity or resources to create hands-on experience for their students with the content built into the context of doing in the world. We tried to do this a number of years ago with the Profiles of Learning and Performance Packages here in Minnesota, but we just did not do a good job of helping our teachers do it.

Instead, we are writing a paper about what doctors do, “because this is what we do in English.” We are preparing for a time when you can be a doctor. You must write first in school, and then you can apply to medical school. Why are we withholding the fun?

I am sure you are saying to yourself that this reminds you of apprenticeship programs. And “what about the value of a good liberal arts education?”

I am with you. I originally wanted to be a philosopher! I still try to connect great books with issues we face in society. My own eight grader helped me by telling me that “sonic the hedgehop is like Odysseus Mr. Dubbels, he is trying to get home.” We also made our own version of the Odyssey– studying it to make a game. The kids said that Odyssseus was put off the bus (Poseidon Bus Lines anyone?) for being arrogant and had to walk home in a modern day, urban Odyssey.

Actions speak louder than word when it comes to learning.

And words are what many students’ days are full of: in the texts, in the lecture, in homework.

I like words, but it is important that I have experience to write and read about to connect. Something purposeful and fun.

I am here to tell you, you don’t need a computer to make learning environments like this. You can construct modern Odysseys.

I am not saying that what we are doing in school is wrong. Good teaching is good teaching, and there are many things I like to do and teach that have nothing to do with video games. I am an English teacher, and I like to read. I like to write, and I like big ideas.

Shouldn’t we be considering how we might work to teach the words-words-words-abstraction-as-content curriculum
in a more tangible way, that allows students to use the skill sets of an historian or botanist with reading, writing, numeracy, technology, and scientific reasoning built-in, as a botanist or historian would do it in the context of their job?

Imagine being Indiana Jones. Would you prefer to be Indy on a mission or in the lecture hall? I think I like the whip for jumping over a canyon better than using it as a teacher.

We can teach traditional content areas and standards as elements of embodied practice. Most of us use reading, writing, and numeracy in the context of our professions and recreation, not as we do in English class or Geometry.

When was the last time you took a content-test at work?

Subject matter expertise comes out in situated performance in my experience. Games are actually built to teach and assess through performance. In addition, games demand mastery and continuous improvement in pursuit of winning the game and even provide replay, scoring, and commentary!

What if we built curriculum in the form of games?

Can you imagine getting an instant replay with color commentary like you get in Madden 2007 on your test? In games, you have to perform with enough mastery to move on, or level up. Games do the assessment as part of their programming.

You may be asking now, “But are there games that can do what a text book does?

“What about the teacher?”

My answer: “do you want your kids learning from textbooks?”

Textbooks are great, but limited in what they can present. And they may serve a valid purpose as a reference point for exploring issues in the contexts of analysis, history of what others have done and thought, as well as jumping-off-points for more serious inquiry and investigation—just like the Wikipedia.

Yes, I know, the wikipedia is only as good as the posters, but at least there is discussion and room for published public dissent on the article in the context of the webpage where the information is posted. Can you do this with a text book?

My work as a media specialist gave me an opportunity to take a serious look at what we were doing with books and how we were using them. I was surprised that my library was more of a repository of relics, curiosities, and histories – as well as some great fiction and how-to-books.

What I was thinking as I weeded out geography texts on Yugoslavia and the USSR, was that much of what we purchase in non-fiction texts actually work better on the World Wide Web. In fact, what makes the WWW better is that we can find starting points for research and inquiry like the Wikipedia; we can read a variety of sites that might inform us and create contrast and opposing viewpoints, as well offer a variety of media opportunities in the form of video on demand, live web-camera viewing, links to other sites, community forums for discussion and community, as well as interactive media like games. And the WWW is generally updated. Not like the books on the USSR and Yugoslavia.

We should be moving beyond the static curriculum of text books.

Games can provide the context and action for our content knowledge in a situated context—almost as good as being there.

Games can do this whether they are computer games, or games that use paper, pencil, and dice.

Further, what games do well is provide context and necessitate performance. I am not the first person to say this and many more have said it better. The big idea here is that games represent an opportunity to be in a role, doing things that people in those roles do, in places where they do them, and then get assessed in that performance. A nice book on this – I like books—is David Shaffer’s book and his take on Epistemic Games. What David proposes is that there are beliefs, acts, and contexts for what the professions do.

A game I like that does this is Global Conflicts Palestine. I have been using this game with middle school students in Minneapolis at Richard Green-Central K8 school to teach about being a journalist; teach about issues in Jerusalem that affect us all as a planet; and issues in composition such as thesis and supporting details, the use of data collection, writing to inform, and rhetorical situations like writer’s purpose, audience, topic, and context. The cool thing is, in this game you play the journalist and you deal with these issues as a journalist. And this includes the creation of the articles from informants you have quoted in the game. You have to do the things I teach in English class, but while playing as a journalist.

Yes, Playing. That typically means fun is included there too!

There are still two unanswered questions here:

“What about the textbooks?” and “what about the teachers?”

Texts can tell a story, provide relevant reference, as well as provide models for how we create texts. I do prefer reading fiction from a book. There will always be a place for texts. But should they be our primary tools?

Teachers become coaches, resources, and designers of instruction. They help students through the experience of becoming. Help students set goals. Assist them in connecting their experience and structuring reflection. They become more connected.

These are not new ideas either, but they have not been implemented. Texts and teachers are often the focus of the classroom experience, even though experience and common sense tell us that student learning should be the focus. Teachers can create contexts, structure reflection, and provide resources like text books and other references to further the growth and learning of their students. They become the designers of content systems, instructional environments, or whatever you want to call them. We do need support in this. As teachers, we are not islands or independent states. Administrators, school boards, other teachers, parents, students, schools of education, game companies, philanthropic entities ( my email is below if you are a philanthropic entity) can all help.

And like I said, many of us do this now. We use cooperative learning, projects, performance, experience, and encourage students to have wonderful ideas. And this is what creates knowledge and innovation. What our country was built upon. But maybe we can take this a step further and become student growth centered. Games can help us do that.

In the next entry, I will be going into aspects of games and how they might be used to extend learning time outside of the classroom and bring the lives of our learners in. Games provide a great opportunity for distance learning. My last post will be a description of how I taught with games and some outcomes, and maybe most importantly, how I was able to get the equipment and make it happen. And to get to the point: I had no grants. I had no special resources. I bought no equipment.

I am a gamer. I am also a teacher for the Minneapolis Public Schools, and have been working with students on issues of Language Arts, Reading, and Video Games. I also offer a class called “Video games as learning tools.” This course is for teachers and people who are interested in games and education.

You are probably asking yourself, “Do these things go together?”

Isn’t that like drinking paint thinner to become a physicist?

There is a general buzz that video games are causes for illiteracy and bad behavior. And I am hoping that I can shed some light on this, because the idea that games are the root of our problems couldn’t be further from my experience teaching reading and writing. In fact, using video games is what helped me to engage and extend the learning of my students in middle school and high school, and to connect my classroom with my students’ lives outside of the classroom.

I am sure you can imagine what happened when I told the kids we would be doing a six-week unit on video games. They flipped. You probably would have too.

But wait. Step back a moment. Would you have?

These are not the games your father bought you.

Are you my age? Have you have ever used a type writer for writing a paper?

If so, we missed the whole video games experience together. I am not talking about Pong®, PacMan®, Frogger®, Asteroids®, or Space Invaders®. I am not talking about your old Atari. Kids are playing new worlds of games that we could have only imagined from reading science fiction. It is more like playing in a rich movie environment that reacts, responds, and waits for you to talk, build, and act. And many kids today have this capability with game systems and computers at home. Many young people play Halo and other games on Xbox Live in their living rooms; they play and learn with kids from all over. This kind of mediated play over a distance has not been seen before.

We have tried to mediate in the classroom, using tools like radio, filmstrips, pictures, television, books on tape, conversation, print, and video. We use media to bring the experience of places and things into the classroom so that our students can get closer and have a more tangible experience. In the best of worlds, we would take them on field trips to see the ancient cave paintings in Lascaux, to view the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius, and to experience the richness of the Amazon Basin—to see and feel the things that are the basis of our science and stories –to embody the learning experience.

But since money, travel, and signed release forms are significant barriers to direct learning experience, we might consider games. Games can provide much more interactivity and experience with objects, places, people, and ideas by providing process, performance, and context.

They can help us with Time, Space, and Experience, which are still considerable barriers for the classroom; with game environments we can begin bridging the gap with the potential embodiment that current game technology provides our narratives. Imagine that you can have students interact in visually rich and interactive environments where they can communicate with voice and text, as well as non-verbal communication with avatar actions and facial expression! I know it is hard, but just try to visualize it. It is possible now.

I hope you keep reading. The next few entries are going to explore how they can be used, how I have used them, and what outcomes I have observed.

For more information on games in the classroom, you can contact me:

Email: dubbe003@umn.edu

Phone: 612.747.0346

Website: http://brockdubbels.efoliomn2.com

Here is a start for what I am building on my website