As I explored topics concerning learning and video games for this course, I was amazed to find a plethora is videos about how Second Life can be used as a simulation and educational environment. The depictions of such in the videos are really quite amazing, and it is interesting to think is the Internet had never come about in it present form, then perhaps the Internet might later have arrived in an environment looking very similar to Second Life (where, if you wanted a book from Amazon, you would fly over to the Amazon store and walk in and get it... etc.). I saw a snippet from the television show The Office where one of the characters says "I created a environment in Second Life I'm calling Third Life, now my avatar has an avatar. I just wanted to get as far away as possible from my real life" (absolutely hilarious). However, forget the social aspects of Second Life, I am interested in how such an environment does such a good job of creating simulations and then bringing people from every (digital) together to ponder them. Because this has interesting applications for engineering. If you had a very interesting project you were working on, say a "smart house," you could bring engineers from all over the world to show up and ponder the simulation of your latest design (provided Second Life or some other mechanism had solved the language translation). People seem to form strange "clicks" over such projects (Linux and many Open-source projects are a good example of this). However, now you can manipulate the simulated object for all to see (move this angle over here. what happens if we place this here. etc.). The prospects for such processes across a globally wired word shows extremely interesting potential. However, is this a "game." I know many an engineer who would argue that it is a game. Say "The Creation" game, and "fun" for engineers the same way any game is fun for engineers. Engineers might find the idea fun the same way any player on World of Warcraft might find it fun to gather with their friends to take down a difficult creature (i.e. - "gather with your friends to take down an interesting or difficult problem").
Why is this not "a game" and "educational" and "fun" all at the same line. I would argue that it is. There is hidden "competition": who can be the next person to come up with a clever idea. There is "excitement in victory" anytime a important sub-problem of the overall problem is solved. The is "camaraderie" and "social" interaction same as any online game. There "challenge" and "excitement" and "joy in victory" and "agony in defeat." There is the "time pressure" of trying to be the next person to come up with a clever idea. And, perhaps most importantly, such a scenario is very similar to many projects assigned by engineering classes. These projects are designed to show the students what it is like to be an engineer out in the real world, and the projects do succeed in doing that. Such interactions in a Second Life environment could therefore be used to teach the same thing.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Video Games as Stress Relieving
When I began playing my video game, my choice of Age of Empires III was based on a hypothesis and theme very similar to the CivWorld website (though I did not know about the CivWorld website at the time, and it is actually very interesting that we where both depicting the same hypothesis for the educational value of the games, but completely independently). Here is the quote from the main page of their website: "This is a site for people interested in using Sid Meier's Civilization for learning academic content, including history, geography, or even game design. We have custom-designed game scenarios, curricula, case studies, and experts on using Civ for learning. Our goal is to help players, students, parents, and even teachers use the game at home, in after school centers and maybe even classrooms." (http://www.civworld.gameslearningsociety.org/index.php) In other words, they stole my hypothesis (not true, since their website was up and ready long before I ever came up with the idea for my project). My original theme is stated above in quotations better than I could ever have stated it myself. But then I ran into a problem: as I played through Age of Empires III, the "Campaigns" the game guides the player through (which had been so historically interesting in Age of Empires II) began to deviate from actual historical figures to "fictionalized history and meta-physics." At one point, you are battling the Persian civilization in Colonial Florida as you search for "magic ponds of water." Not good. If schools want to teach accurate information that does not mislead their students, then this is not the game for schools. So... problem. My thesis basically went out the window (at least for Age of Empires III). So I expanded my theme somewhat, venturing to play more of the "Age of ... " series I had not played before. I acquired Age of Mythology and its Expansion pack, and began to play. Here was my thesis at least partially re-realized, as Age of Mythology at lease takes the player through scenarios described in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad (perhaps useful to any high school teacher trying to teach this subject matter, just as a possibly interesting visual depiction of certain subject matter as an attempt to get students interested). However, really my overall thesis had taken a serious blow. And I began to write my papers on new ideas: subjects I knew well such as "how video games really are helpful in Computer Science education" and "how simulations and modeling used in Engineering often border on games, and are likely only needing to be classified as "fun" by their users in order to be classified as such." However, and this is the purpose of this blog post, I still continued to play the "Age of ..." games even though they weren't really helping me for the class anymore. I played well over the 50 hours required. Why is this? The real reason is, after I would finish with a large project for another class, I would pop in "Age of ..." in order to "relax" and "reward myself." My brother also finds video games "relaxing" and "stress relieving," and I know other people who feel the same way about them. Why is this? This is a strong contrast to how many of my friends felt about high school. High school stressed them out, and they could not wait to get out of there at 2pm. Video games are like a "drug" or a "therapeutic device" in this sense that they promote "relaxation." It used to be since the 1950's perhaps, that a person would come home from a stressful day and turn on the TV and just "veg out" and "relax." However, in the present age, more and more young people use a video game for the same purpose. How is it that video games are able to "change the state" of the user? Because, actually, it is my experience that the right video game is actually better at this than TV is. Perhaps it is because the TV still allows the viewers "mind to wander" more than an engrossing video game. The "stress out" user at this stage is often looking of the "mind to be distracted" for a while. So many of my friends have described this use of video games for them, that they do use video games in someway as a "drug." But what are the ramifications for learning? Since certain video games are so good at putting the user into a "relaxing" or "engrossing" state, perhaps this has some applications for education. Perhaps certain students learn better when they are placed into a relaxed state. Perhaps the admission that video games are more "engrossing" than TV is similar to an admission that video games are more engrossing than simply watching a teacher lecture. Anyway, this is a very interesting idea I would like to explore further if only I had more time.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Videogames, Learning, and Darwinism
Let’s begin with a quote from our own James Paul Gee: “I eventually finished The New Adventures of the Time Machine and move on to Deus Ex, a game I chose because it had won game of the year on many Internet game sites. Deus Ex is yet longer and harder than Time Machine. I found myself asking the following question: ‘How, in heaven’s name, do they sell many of these games when they are so long and hard?’ I soon discovered, of course, that good video games sell millions of copies.
So here we have something that is long, hard, and challenging. However, you cannot play a game if you cannot learn it. If no one plays a game, it does not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers could make the games shorter and simpler. That’s often what schools do with their curriculums. But gamers won’t accept short or easy games. So game designers keep making long and challenging games and still manage to get them learned. How?
If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its design – that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways – then it gets played and can sell well, if it is otherwise a good game. Other games can build on these principles, and perhaps, do them one step better. If a game has poor learning principles built into its design, then it won’t get learned or played and won’t sell well. In the end, then, video games represent a process – thanks to what Marx called the “creativity of capitalism” – that leads to better and better designs of good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things.” (Gee, 2007). (I would argue simulation type software such as Matlab and Mathematica share a similar economic pressure to teach users “how to use the software” within their own software package, since users are more likely to use and continue to use that software package they know best and in which they can do the most. Same with AutoCAD and IntelliCAD, who compete head-to-head in the marketplace for that matter.). John Kirriemuir has argued that the reason the world is lacking in really good educational videogames is because the “economic incentive” of a gaming company is to sell lots of copies of a game that people actually “enjoy,” not necessarily that “educate” (Kirriemuir, 2002). But here Gee has turned that principle on it’s head, as he argues that at the very beginning of a videogame this principle is working in reverse: the Darwinism of capitalism is creating games that are very successful at teaching the user how to play themselves. This goes for other software packages as well, but let’s explore Gee’s remaining questions: “How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned – learned well so that people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for is this: the theory of human learning built into video games.” (Gee, 2007).
Within my previous experience with creating an educational videogame, at least 50% of the time was spent after the videogame was already created, on educating the user as to how to play the game within the game itself. This process was actually a result of the “user testing” we did with elementary school students. The process of playing the game must be explained within the game itself, and in this way most any computer game is already a “teaching tool” (and it our case, a “double teaching tool,” since we were trying to teach elementary school students Mathematics and how to play our game at the same time.). But it was very interesting to see from our “user testing” what information we adults thought was “intuitive” and therefore taken for granted, while the elementary school students did not. To get around this issue, we decided at one point to just “explain everything.” This turned out to be a lot of work, and it at least doubled the size of our written code and creator content.
However, one of the main themes I grasped from playing the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology series, was how effectively such games instructed the user on play, especially with such a large variety of active elements within the game. Both games Age of Empires III and Age of Empires II come with very thick instruction manuals, but I have never had to touch them once. Why is this? The reason is because the game creators have managed to include most all of this information to the user within the game itself. Better yet, the instruction for how to drag the mouse and select units and select elements on the upper or lower screen bars, are much more quickly grasped from the interactive in-game “Tutorial” than in reading the book provided with the game(s). And it is this one theme that is incredibly important: what is it about the interactive in-game tutorial which makes it much more effective than the old method of simply “reading the book,” because this idea is central to how videogames may one day have an effective place in the educational system.
Certain themes for how software packages instruct the user on their own use overlap with computer videogame attempts to do the same. (1) Anytime the user places the mouse pointer over certain objects in the game (usually an object that can be manipulated by the user), unobtrusively place a text description somewhere in the screen briefly explaining this object and/or how is may be manipulated by the user. If the user is in “Tutorial mode,” then possibly vocalize this text by having it read to the user. (2) If the user is in “Tutorial mode,” use visual notifications of (usually animated) arrows or flashing of some kind or highlighting, to direct the user’s attention to the area of the play screen where the specific functionality or object described by the Tutorial narration can be located. This sort of visual representation of information has become such an expected representation to the current generation, that they have come to expect it to a certain degree (and this process is likely to get worse as we raise more and more “Digital Natives”) . Therefore, because they have come to interact in this way to a certain extent with the information they are gathering, the idea of reading a pure text description of the structure of a DNA molecule becomes more work perhaps than just plugging “DNA” into a Google Image search. But expectations are one thing, why is it this visual-with-auditory representation is more effective than the “user manuals” of the past. The briefest explanation is perhaps one of “time”: if a user is looking through the manual attempting to program the VCR, then they keep looking back and forth from the manual to the VCR; first to locate the information in the manual, and then to locate on the VCR the appropriate button, and then back and forth like this all the way through the procedure. However, if the user if constantly looking at the screen for information, there is less time and effort loss between looking at “the object being operated on” and “the instruction manual for that operation.” And this is not even to mention the amount of time that is lost when the paper manual simply says “locate the Insert button,” and you search the screen for five minutes and cannot locate that button for the life of you (a problem of the computer programmers and manual writers “assuming” what is “intuitive” to the user, as I mentioned before.). (3) Run through the “Tutorial” with the same sorts of game-play used to play the actual game. Age of Empires is very good at this, playing through the Tutorial is fun and interesting the same way the game itself is fun and interesting. Actually, it could be better stated that the game Tutorial is simply campaign-style game-play, there is simply the clear halt of game action as the narration pauses the play in order to dictate to the user all of what is going on and what functionality the user has at each point. (4) Much of the background information the user might find useful is accessible at anytime during normal game-play by simply clicking on specific icons within the menu bar. Within the computer videogame, this is analogous to clicking on the “Help” tab within most any software package these days, and searching within the index on an inquiry term. However, within Age of Empires, this drop down menu is more visual with text descriptions than simply text-based, but the ability to access background information at any time by clicking on the menu bar icon which automatically pauses the game and presents that information is indespensible. If information presented on the screen during a “Mouse over” is a way of “Real-time information gathering,” then the ability to immediately pause the game, grab the background information you need, and go immediately back, is the next closest thing. (5) The narration within the Tutorial is “interactive” in the sense that it instructs the user to click on a certain object or area of the screen, and then sits and waits for the user to do so correctly before it proceeds. This form of teaching cannot be underestimated in its importance. Imaging a 300 student lecture hall, where the professor would stop and not proceed anytime any member of the audience did not fully understand what he/she was talking about. A professor for any class that would not proceed until any individual has understood up until that point what is going on is a form of “customized” or “personalized” education for each individual user. Of course, college professors with large classes cannot do this, but what is the result of this? The result, from experience, is the student does not understand a complex topic or is unable to locate what the professor is talking about, but the professor just keeps on breezing through and so the student says “bag it” and tries to keep-up with what is currently being talked about. But the game Tutorial does not allow you to say “bag it.” In fact, the game Tutorial will not proceed until the user has clearly understood where to click on the screen up until this point. This fact alone brings something to the educational system, because “interaction” in this sense mandates a certain degree of “attention.” However, this could be used to create aspects that students hate as well. All technologies have possibly negative applications as well it seems. (6) Dynamic animations. This sounds like a mute point but it is not. Why is it so much more fun to look at a dynamic presentation on a computer screen rather than just the standard text in a book. The same reason it is so popular to watch a movie or watch TV rather than read a book (at least for most people)(forget about the “passive” part, here were are concerned with the fact that “there is just something about the visual medium.”) Perhaps it is because, biologically, the human brain and visual cortex is just attracted to visual movement. As we learned in psychology class, the brain tends to “pay attention” much better if there is movement, and this is why TV channels such as MTV tend to move around and switch visuals in such a rapid fashion. Regardless, I once heard the assertion that we should be teaching high school students “how to make movies” rather than “how to write” because “this is the communication medium of this and future generations.” I don’t know how true that is, but it is an interesting assertion.
So let’s relate these principles back to what they are telling us about models of human learning, because there is clear Darwinism in game creators ability to teach. Number one: make the information accessibly quickly and just-a-click away, I may not memorize it the first time I click-to-see that information, but because it is so easy to see I may click on it five times anytime I need it and eventually learn it (if “adults learn best by doing” as they say, then it is partially because they are not just hearing information but attempting to immediately “apply what they are learning” in the real-world, and this “immediate application” of the information very soon after they learn it is one possibility for the retention of the information)(That is, declarative knowledge becomes procedural knowledge before that declarative knowledge can be learned and lost.). Number two, the “tutorials” in games can be nearly as fun as the games themselves, and therefore “motivating.” This is information presented in an exciting way, but this problem shares similar themes as to asking why students are motivated to play games but not motivated to go to school. (If I knew the answer to this question, I would present it; but I truly don’t. The only lesson here, is that because of the Darwinism of capitalism, videogames have figured out how to be “fun” and “motivation,” while school being more of a socialist institution has not.). Number three: Make it visual. There is just something about the visual medium truly, movement focuses the attention of the mind somehow. This was a principle we learned was a proven fact in psychology class. But the question is, why can so many students I know quote extensively from movies and know “strategies for succeeding” in old videogames, but they don’t know near as much from books. If is enough to say that movies and videogames have become more of the common communication of our culture than books, which they truly have. There are really two strategies here: we can argue about how people need to read more (which doesn’t seem to be working), or we can go ahead and embrace the communication mediums of the next generation and start teaching all people who have ideas to communicate how to more effectively presents these ideas in the mediums of the present (perhaps not so possible for the “Digital Immigrants,” but perhaps for the “Digital Natives” or the children of those Natives.)(Prensky, 2001)
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul, 2007. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, NY.
Kirriemuir, John, 2002. The Relevance of Video Games and Gaming Consoles to the
Higher and Further Education Learning Experience, TSW, 02-01, April 2002.
Prensky, Marc, 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, NCB University Press, Vol. 9
No. 5, October 2001.
Simulation Use in Engineering
Simulations have been used as an instructional tool in engineering for quite some time. Simulations allow for the visualization, interaction, and comprehension of difficult or complex topics. In Computer Science, much of the interdisciplinary interaction in which Computer Scientists attempt to assist professionals in other fields, involves the use of “models.” Computer Scientists create models in an effort to allow the massive processing power of the computer to work on a problem that could never be worked out on paper. Computer Science models of the weather, for example, can involve millions of variables interacting and dynamically modifying other variables and often require a supercomputer to run large scale simulations. Models of atomic reactions run by Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs consume a great deal of their supercomputer hours as well. These models are essentially simulation environments that allow the researcher or explorer to modify a variable or multiple variables and observe the results. Is this an educational simulation type videogame? In the following paper, I put forward the argument the Coffee Shop videogame we played in class was a Computer Science “model” as well as a educational simulation-type videogame.
Computer Science models often attempt to simulate aspects of a real world scenario within the microcosm of a smaller computer created environment. Often these models cannot possibly include all of the variables present in a situation, so the computer scientist “programmer” must choose which variables to keep in, and which to leave out. The weather model is a good example: there are just too many variables to ever possibly program them all in, so the programmer of the model must pick and choose what they think are the “most important” in order to create a useful tool that will still “simulate” a certain aspect of the environment semi-accurately. Coffee Shop is an environment in the same vein. The user modifies one or more variables and observes the reaction. Observing several “runs” of this Coffee Shop model under different variable insertions, the user learns the “behavior” of the system, and which variables and “strategies” might work best under the specific situation being modeled. If the user learns to vary the price of their coffee, in search of a “optimum” revenue and customer response, then these might be useful lessons to apply for any student interested in owning their own business someday. If the user learns that $10 is a good price to charge for coffee, then this is the fault of the Computer Science modeler, not the user. There aremillions of Computer Science models out in the world that “come close” to being useful, but “are not perfect.” If the Computer Science modeler wishes to create a useful model, as close a representation to the actual real world being modeled is often required. Otherwise, your interdisciplinary co-creator, say from Biology, may have to advice you of situation in the “real world” so as to attempt to create a useful model.
However, engineering is filled with examples that blur the lines between simulation and game. For example, Mechanical Engineering students are often trained on a simulation environment called AutoCAD. This piece of software (CAD = Computer Aided Design) allow the user to create a physical object (most ME Departments have a AutoCAD machine hooked up to a metal machining tool – so the computer will actually “print out” your part, in aluminum say, if you want it to). AutoCAD allows the user to create a 3D representation of the part they are thinking of, on the computer screen, to rotate the object, add additional parts if necessary, and even see how moving gears would interact within the part. Okay, so what happens if a Mechanical Engineering student actually finds this environment “fun” (many of these students did become Mechanical Engineering majors because they want to do this for a living remember). Perhaps it stimulates their “creative juices” in the same way that Legos did for them as a kid. As Charles Cotton describe in The Game Design Reader, "Gaming is an enchanting Idleness and Averice: An inching Disease, that makes some scratch the Head, whilst others, as if they were bitten by a Tarantula, are laughing themselves to death." Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman then continue, "Games have long been hardwired to the pleasure center of a gamer's brain, turning play into an act of nearly religious devotion. Who among us has not been snared in the spell of a Tetris, Zelda, or Snood? Yet, when it comes to describing just how games make us feel, even magical words fall short. How does one describe the joy of mastering a six-finger controller scheme in less than an hour, or the thrill of spinning out of control down a virtual race track, brakes shot and the engine running wide open? What words characterize the social and strategic flow of Texas Hold'em or the feeling of envy and pride when your Starcraft clanmate bumps you down on the leader boards? How does one capture such itchy witchery?" (Salen, 2006). I include this quote because it does a excellent job of describing many of the outside readings I have found for this course. Their problem? Clear definitions are not presented easily. I will also give an example from a personal interview. My brother is very much into videogames. He plays them all the time. However, when I ask my brother why he finds the fun, he is at a loss for a clear reason (Dwight Jelinek, personal communication). It is like this is a funny question for me to ask because the answer is taken for granted: "I find games fun because they are enjoyable. Because they are entertaining." (Dwight Jelinek, personal communication). Which poses the question of what happens as this field of "videogames used in learing" becomes a more accepted academic field (which I am undoubtedly sure it will)(example: UNM already has an entire major based partly on the idea I recently learned. It's called OLIT, and the website is located here: http://www.unm.edu/~olit/olit_courses_main.html#Undergrad)(Example: "Instructional Use of Computer Simulations" is one of their course). I think in the future, it is likely to be taking for granted that videogames and Legos are "fun" and "enjoyable" the same way it is taken for granted DNA is composed of nucleotides. Has AutoCAD now become a “game”? If the user has AutoCAD open in one screen on their computer, andTetris open in another screen on their computer, and they find them both equally fun and enjoyable, then who is to say which is a game and which is not. Casti in Would-be Worlds describes a computer simulation of the game of American football called Football Pro '95 created by Sierra On-Line (Casti, 1998). Casti says the computer gamer "is effectively able to create a laboratory with which to experiment with the NFL." However, a very interesting thing about this example is that Sierra On-Line clearly created this computer program to be played as a "game." In fact, among the users of Football Pro '95, Casti is perhaps an anomaly in seeing the program from the academic point of view as a "simulation" rather than how most users likely saw it, as "simply a game" (Casti, 1998). Casti describes "FBPRO95 is an example of the kind of surrogate world that aims to explain a high-level phenomenon (the final score of a football game) by appealing to the interactions among lower-level agents (the players and coaches of the two competing teams)" (Casti, 1998). Casti goes on to describe models based on the solar system or Newton's mathematical functions for particle interactions, however, the ideas are the same. The interesting thing here is the implied definitions: Casti seems to saying a "computer model" or "simulation" is something that can be designed as a useful "tool;" while a videogame may be something that is defined as simply "fun.". (So if you think the "computer model" is "fun" to interact with and work with, then you have crossed your definitions and you have to just quit and go home). One difference often seen is that Tetris has a “running time pressure” and “points” and many engineering simulations do not. But actually this is incorrect. The “time pressure” in these simulation environments is provided by the “deadlines” established by professors, bosses, or industry. And the “points” for good or bad performance are often determined by teacher’s grades, or monetary compensation, or employment continuation in the real world. Therefore, Coffee Shop is a game that can also be considered a Computer Science “model,” and AutoCAD is an engineering tool that can also be considered an education simulation-type game. Basketball, for example, is a game with a "artificially imposed deadline." Why does the game have to end at that specific time? The choice is completely arbitrary. There is simply the agreement that the game will end on such and such a deadline. This deadline adds to the intensity of the game and to the velocity of the players. Players might play at very different speeds if they knew they had to play for three or ten years.
Other examples of simulation use in engineering and elsewhere include the following: modeling of logic circuit interactions (like AutoCAD but for Electrical Engineers. EE’s can also burn these onto real life chips with Xilinx), modeling chemicals, chemical interactions, and molecule transformations (AutoCAD for Chemical Engineers), modeling of predator-prey species interactions (love the Biologists), modeling of the solar system and universe (Astrologists create some of the coolest displays onto a “dome” shaped screen), modeling city creation, city planning, and resource managements (Construction Engineers and City Planners consult these types of simulations, but can anyone say SimCity), and modeling tragedies for reaction planning (Forrest Firefighters have been known to get with Computer Scientists to create a model of the travel of forest fires based on geography and environmental conditions. And people like the Department of Homeland Security use computer models to plan the proper evacuation of say a football stadium in the event of terrorist attacks at varying locations). Anyway, there are a million examples of these, but Tetris is a simulation type computer model if you think about it. The definition of a “game” may have to become only: that (virtual) environment the user finds “fun” and “interesting” and “stimulating” to interact with.
For engineers, describing a problem in an increasingly detailed and vivid way so as to explore the problem (possibly in the company of other engineers) is a method of “working through” a problem when no other activities to solve the problem seem readily apparent. In addition, simulations allow an engineer to test out (or at least visualize), possible solutions sometimes. AutoCAD has the advantage of rotating a “possible solution” through space and looking for flaws and additional solutions with your other engineering partners. But really, AutoCAD is like a stimulation game: it has the challenge of “fitting pieces together” and “getting them to work right” (like Tetris), but also “the challenge of creativity.” AutoCAD allows you to “explore the problem area” in a very visual way, and there are rewards of “feelings of accomplishment” when you get it right and come up with a clever solution. It’s just that in today’s world, a person can “make a living” from this videogame, making it no doubt a “serious game” because you can feed your family if you are good at it. But AutoCAD is a very complex piece of software, so how does one learn to use it? The weird part is, AutoCAD itself teaches you, which brings us to the topic of paper 3.
Casti, John L., 1998. Would-be Worlds: How Simulation is Changing the Frontiers of Science,
Wiley.
Jelinek, Dwight, personal communication (12/5/08).
Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric, 2006. The Game Design Reader, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Computer Science models often attempt to simulate aspects of a real world scenario within the microcosm of a smaller computer created environment. Often these models cannot possibly include all of the variables present in a situation, so the computer scientist “programmer” must choose which variables to keep in, and which to leave out. The weather model is a good example: there are just too many variables to ever possibly program them all in, so the programmer of the model must pick and choose what they think are the “most important” in order to create a useful tool that will still “simulate” a certain aspect of the environment semi-accurately. Coffee Shop is an environment in the same vein. The user modifies one or more variables and observes the reaction. Observing several “runs” of this Coffee Shop model under different variable insertions, the user learns the “behavior” of the system, and which variables and “strategies” might work best under the specific situation being modeled. If the user learns to vary the price of their coffee, in search of a “optimum” revenue and customer response, then these might be useful lessons to apply for any student interested in owning their own business someday. If the user learns that $10 is a good price to charge for coffee, then this is the fault of the Computer Science modeler, not the user. There aremillions of Computer Science models out in the world that “come close” to being useful, but “are not perfect.” If the Computer Science modeler wishes to create a useful model, as close a representation to the actual real world being modeled is often required. Otherwise, your interdisciplinary co-creator, say from Biology, may have to advice you of situation in the “real world” so as to attempt to create a useful model.
However, engineering is filled with examples that blur the lines between simulation and game. For example, Mechanical Engineering students are often trained on a simulation environment called AutoCAD. This piece of software (CAD = Computer Aided Design) allow the user to create a physical object (most ME Departments have a AutoCAD machine hooked up to a metal machining tool – so the computer will actually “print out” your part, in aluminum say, if you want it to). AutoCAD allows the user to create a 3D representation of the part they are thinking of, on the computer screen, to rotate the object, add additional parts if necessary, and even see how moving gears would interact within the part. Okay, so what happens if a Mechanical Engineering student actually finds this environment “fun” (many of these students did become Mechanical Engineering majors because they want to do this for a living remember). Perhaps it stimulates their “creative juices” in the same way that Legos did for them as a kid. As Charles Cotton describe in The Game Design Reader, "Gaming is an enchanting Idleness and Averice: An inching Disease, that makes some scratch the Head, whilst others, as if they were bitten by a Tarantula, are laughing themselves to death." Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman then continue, "Games have long been hardwired to the pleasure center of a gamer's brain, turning play into an act of nearly religious devotion. Who among us has not been snared in the spell of a Tetris, Zelda, or Snood? Yet, when it comes to describing just how games make us feel, even magical words fall short. How does one describe the joy of mastering a six-finger controller scheme in less than an hour, or the thrill of spinning out of control down a virtual race track, brakes shot and the engine running wide open? What words characterize the social and strategic flow of Texas Hold'em or the feeling of envy and pride when your Starcraft clanmate bumps you down on the leader boards? How does one capture such itchy witchery?" (Salen, 2006). I include this quote because it does a excellent job of describing many of the outside readings I have found for this course. Their problem? Clear definitions are not presented easily. I will also give an example from a personal interview. My brother is very much into videogames. He plays them all the time. However, when I ask my brother why he finds the fun, he is at a loss for a clear reason (Dwight Jelinek, personal communication). It is like this is a funny question for me to ask because the answer is taken for granted: "I find games fun because they are enjoyable. Because they are entertaining." (Dwight Jelinek, personal communication). Which poses the question of what happens as this field of "videogames used in learing" becomes a more accepted academic field (which I am undoubtedly sure it will)(example: UNM already has an entire major based partly on the idea I recently learned. It's called OLIT, and the website is located here: http://www.unm.edu/~olit/olit_courses_main.html#Undergrad)(Example: "Instructional Use of Computer Simulations" is one of their course). I think in the future, it is likely to be taking for granted that videogames and Legos are "fun" and "enjoyable" the same way it is taken for granted DNA is composed of nucleotides. Has AutoCAD now become a “game”? If the user has AutoCAD open in one screen on their computer, andTetris open in another screen on their computer, and they find them both equally fun and enjoyable, then who is to say which is a game and which is not. Casti in Would-be Worlds describes a computer simulation of the game of American football called Football Pro '95 created by Sierra On-Line (Casti, 1998). Casti says the computer gamer "is effectively able to create a laboratory with which to experiment with the NFL." However, a very interesting thing about this example is that Sierra On-Line clearly created this computer program to be played as a "game." In fact, among the users of Football Pro '95, Casti is perhaps an anomaly in seeing the program from the academic point of view as a "simulation" rather than how most users likely saw it, as "simply a game" (Casti, 1998). Casti describes "FBPRO95 is an example of the kind of surrogate world that aims to explain a high-level phenomenon (the final score of a football game) by appealing to the interactions among lower-level agents (the players and coaches of the two competing teams)" (Casti, 1998). Casti goes on to describe models based on the solar system or Newton's mathematical functions for particle interactions, however, the ideas are the same. The interesting thing here is the implied definitions: Casti seems to saying a "computer model" or "simulation" is something that can be designed as a useful "tool;" while a videogame may be something that is defined as simply "fun.". (So if you think the "computer model" is "fun" to interact with and work with, then you have crossed your definitions and you have to just quit and go home). One difference often seen is that Tetris has a “running time pressure” and “points” and many engineering simulations do not. But actually this is incorrect. The “time pressure” in these simulation environments is provided by the “deadlines” established by professors, bosses, or industry. And the “points” for good or bad performance are often determined by teacher’s grades, or monetary compensation, or employment continuation in the real world. Therefore, Coffee Shop is a game that can also be considered a Computer Science “model,” and AutoCAD is an engineering tool that can also be considered an education simulation-type game. Basketball, for example, is a game with a "artificially imposed deadline." Why does the game have to end at that specific time? The choice is completely arbitrary. There is simply the agreement that the game will end on such and such a deadline. This deadline adds to the intensity of the game and to the velocity of the players. Players might play at very different speeds if they knew they had to play for three or ten years.
Other examples of simulation use in engineering and elsewhere include the following: modeling of logic circuit interactions (like AutoCAD but for Electrical Engineers. EE’s can also burn these onto real life chips with Xilinx), modeling chemicals, chemical interactions, and molecule transformations (AutoCAD for Chemical Engineers), modeling of predator-prey species interactions (love the Biologists), modeling of the solar system and universe (Astrologists create some of the coolest displays onto a “dome” shaped screen), modeling city creation, city planning, and resource managements (Construction Engineers and City Planners consult these types of simulations, but can anyone say SimCity), and modeling tragedies for reaction planning (Forrest Firefighters have been known to get with Computer Scientists to create a model of the travel of forest fires based on geography and environmental conditions. And people like the Department of Homeland Security use computer models to plan the proper evacuation of say a football stadium in the event of terrorist attacks at varying locations). Anyway, there are a million examples of these, but Tetris is a simulation type computer model if you think about it. The definition of a “game” may have to become only: that (virtual) environment the user finds “fun” and “interesting” and “stimulating” to interact with.
For engineers, describing a problem in an increasingly detailed and vivid way so as to explore the problem (possibly in the company of other engineers) is a method of “working through” a problem when no other activities to solve the problem seem readily apparent. In addition, simulations allow an engineer to test out (or at least visualize), possible solutions sometimes. AutoCAD has the advantage of rotating a “possible solution” through space and looking for flaws and additional solutions with your other engineering partners. But really, AutoCAD is like a stimulation game: it has the challenge of “fitting pieces together” and “getting them to work right” (like Tetris), but also “the challenge of creativity.” AutoCAD allows you to “explore the problem area” in a very visual way, and there are rewards of “feelings of accomplishment” when you get it right and come up with a clever solution. It’s just that in today’s world, a person can “make a living” from this videogame, making it no doubt a “serious game” because you can feed your family if you are good at it. But AutoCAD is a very complex piece of software, so how does one learn to use it? The weird part is, AutoCAD itself teaches you, which brings us to the topic of paper 3.
Works Cited
Casti, John L., 1998. Would-be Worlds: How Simulation is Changing the Frontiers of Science,
Wiley.
Jelinek, Dwight, personal communication (12/5/08).
Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric, 2006. The Game Design Reader, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Video Game Use in Education
Just thought I would make these public. Okay, I have broken down and decided to take on the concept of what it means to learn anything. After all, how can anyone ever make the assertion “video games can be helpful in learning” without actually defining what learning is and “how videogames can be helpful in learning.” Within the following paper, however, I will be restricting myself to a specific area of videogames in which I am intimately involved: how videogames are used in engineering education. As such, and I didn’t want to do this, but I will have to take on the dreaded Interactive Cognitive Complexity (ICC) learning model (Tennyson & Breuer, 2002). Specifically, the following quote: “The knowledge base of a ICC model is the repository for all previously acquired declarative, procedural, and contextual knowledge. Declarative knowledge includes concepts, rules, and principles, i.e. – knowing that. Procedural knowledge is the use of declarative knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems, i.e. – knowing how. Contextual knowledge is knowing why, when, and where to use declarative and procedural knowledge. Tennyson and Breuer (1997) see the structure of the knowledge base as complex networks of concepts and propositions (domains) that are organized into meaningful associations (schemata).” (O’Neil, 2008).
Okay, before we get lost in the language, let’s try cutting this down to size a little by separating it out into pieces and tackling one piece at a time (in computer science, we call this the “divide-and-conquer” approach). Let’s start in the middle: “Procedural knowledge is the use of declarative knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems, i.e. – knowing how.” But what happens in Computer Science, say, if the student lacks the appropriate “declarative knowledge” to begin with (this often happens in Computer Science). After all, there is an awful lot to know, and a CS professor’s main struggle sometimes is how to deal with the fact that each student knows a “whole lot,” but all about different subject areas. How to keep them from getting bored? Well, one solution Computer Science professors have come up with, is to use videogames. Videogames are “fun,” and most computer science students I know enjoy both playing them and designing them. But the fact that videogames are “fun” and “motivating” is really all the CS professor cares about. After all, so much of Computer Science learning is about actually sitting at the computer and “tinkering” and seeing what works and what doesn’t. So a CS professor has got to come up with something, if they want their students not to minimize that homework window and “ALT-TAB” back into World of Warcraft (competition is a rough thing, I feel sorry for the teachers these days).
So how does a CS professor deal with the following situation: one student understands Linux top to bottom because they worked under a Linux Administrator all through high school, another student understands web-design because that is what they do for extra cash, and another student understands C++ very well and every time another language comes up they say “do you mind if I do this in C++.” And they would all rather be playing World of Warcraft. The UNM CS Department is “Java-based,” so let’s say this professor is trying to teach Java. Nobody wants to learn Java because they all have “employable skills” and they are just here for “the piece of paper.” Plus, the real reason they don’t want to learn Java is because they could already do the program the professor is describing in the language they already know in 5 minutes, verses doing it in Java which might take 3 hours. These students lack the “declarative knowledge” of Java and they aren’t too keen on learning it (plus, learning a new language often has a “steep learning curve,” and they aren’t interested in going through the “excruciating pain” of learning a new language in one semester since it took them 5 years to learn C++).
Answer: compete with World of Warcraft by competing for some of the same “reward centers” of the brain that World of Warcraft stimulates. World of Warcraft provides a “feeling of accomplishment” anytime a “small battle” is won, and subsequent “advancement” of the player’s avatar. So choose a “program a videogame assignment” but construct the overall assignment very precisely: so that the students get a “feeling of accomplishment” from completing each of say 12-subproblems that were well within their grasp (“small battles”), and then integrating them all together (another type of sub-problem really). Half the time in Computer Science is spent on now tweaking and cleaning up what you’ve just created so it runs right, so make the assignment a videogame so that the “testing” phase is to actually play a videogame and fix what is wrong with it (i.e. – “fun,” let’s get away from the drudgery of just staring at a screen all the time). Interesting what some teachers do to try to get away from the drudgery of teaching methods these students have already seen and become bored with for the past 12 years: trying anything new may be harder on the teachers (“peer pressure from other teachers” and “rules” may be the enemies of this type of “innovation”), but I know these efforts are greatly appreciated by the students. Plus, videogames are “fun.” Here is a programming project that is much more interesting than programming the fibonacci sequence for the fifth time. Plus, here’s a result you can actually show your friends and family that is actually somewhat “cool.” Little kids might actually enjoy playing it, making you the hero of your nephew. Plus it is always nice when a friend will take over the “testing” for a second and tell you what is wrong with it.
So Strategy #1: steal the students away from World of Warcraft by competing for the same “reward centers” in the brain. Strategy #2 – in Computer Science, these types of games really really really make you learn, and let’s take a closer look as to why. (But first, a quick aside: CS professors often refer to getting the free-time to sit down and program for no particular reason as “hacking,” and by this term they mean “playing.” When you ask a CS professor how they are doing, they will often say: “Good, but classes have been busy and I haven’t had any time to sit down and do some hacking.” By this they mean “playing around” and “advancing their skills” by “exploring what the computer can do.” So it is best to take a step back and look at the entire problem set: (1) The computer is the entire videogame, (2) anytime you figure out something you can do, you get a “sense of accomplishment” and you “advance the skills of your avatar,” and (3) you explore around this world just like you would explore around the world in World of Warcraft, looking for “small battles” you can win in order to accomplish 2 above. Because computer technology keeps advancing and the Internet keeps growing, the world for you to explore keeps growing and growing. You can chat with other players by finding like-minded CS people through IRC or email or Instant Messenger. And if your skills advance to the level of Level 80 Warlock, you can actually get a job where someone will pay you for those skills in the real world, and/or you can get a job as a CS professor.).
So why are these games so effective as a teaching method in Computer Science. The answer from the quote above is actually contained in these two lines: “Procedural knowledge is the use of declarative knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems, i.e. – knowing how. Contextual knowledge is knowing why, when, and where to use declarative and procedural knowledge.” The quote above defines “declarative knowledge” as “including concepts, rules, and principles.” But really, this kind of information is very difficult to learn. I will give an example from mathematics. I must say, the only way I ever learned which derivative equated to what (e.g. dx/dt ln x = 1/x, dx/dt tan x = sec2 x) was through repetitively working out homework problems. Likewise, I can tell the non-computer-minded people I work for the 15 steps it takes to package up their entire website, upload it to the server, and then make it visible to the world; but I do not expect them to immediately know it anymore than I would expect them to memorize a 15 digit alphanumeric password I had just given them. The answer for how to sit down at the computer and fly through those 15 steps in 0.5 seconds comes through practice and repetition. There is so much information in the computer world, that you might hear that “chmod 755 *.*” changes the permissions on your files on the Linux server, but that might go in-one-ear-and-out-the-other (“information overload” is a common problem in computer science and elsewhere). However, if you end up performing this procedure over and over and over again as you attempt to make your “modified” Java Applet videogame visible over the internet after each “tweak” and “correction” you’ve performed; after about 3 weeks, you might memorize this line “chmod 755 *.*” and add it to the arsenal of your skillset. Therefore, it is not the fact that “declarative knowledge” existed in these situations or that “procedural knowledge” was given a single time that was important, but that the repetitive implementation of these above two in “contextual knowledge” (in order to play or modify the game) over and over until you learned it.
Richard Vigilante, a Computer Science professor from New York University, defines it this way: “Declarative knowledge represents the concepts of the field and is readily learned from faculty lectures and presentations. Procedural knowledge represents the processes inherent in the field and is best acquired by doing, through faculty/student discussions and collaborations” (Brown, 2000). Vigilante defined the process when his course lost it’s interactive component, “…the result was a course that instructionally reduced the key procedural concepts to declarative how-to lists” (Brown, 2000). Videogames are extremely important in Computer Science and are used as a “teaching vehicle.” Right now they are one of the best “teaching vehicles” in Computer Science because they “enhance the motivation of the students.” However, who is to say what a “game” is? Perhaps Tetris is about “problem solving in pursuit of a goal” the same way building and modifying a computer game is about “problem solving in pursuit of a goal.” If they both stimulate the same “reward centers” of the brain and excitement levels in the individual, then who is to say. Computer Science proves repeatedly the similarity between teaching the “procedural knowledge” required to get Mario to the end of a level, and the “procedural knowledge required to accomplish certain things on your computer.” However, much of interdisciplinary Computer Science also involves the creation of “models” for situations not easily worked out on paper. The difference between these “models” and simulations in general are often very thin. Which brings me to paper 2...
Okay, before we get lost in the language, let’s try cutting this down to size a little by separating it out into pieces and tackling one piece at a time (in computer science, we call this the “divide-and-conquer” approach). Let’s start in the middle: “Procedural knowledge is the use of declarative knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems, i.e. – knowing how.” But what happens in Computer Science, say, if the student lacks the appropriate “declarative knowledge” to begin with (this often happens in Computer Science). After all, there is an awful lot to know, and a CS professor’s main struggle sometimes is how to deal with the fact that each student knows a “whole lot,” but all about different subject areas. How to keep them from getting bored? Well, one solution Computer Science professors have come up with, is to use videogames. Videogames are “fun,” and most computer science students I know enjoy both playing them and designing them. But the fact that videogames are “fun” and “motivating” is really all the CS professor cares about. After all, so much of Computer Science learning is about actually sitting at the computer and “tinkering” and seeing what works and what doesn’t. So a CS professor has got to come up with something, if they want their students not to minimize that homework window and “ALT-TAB” back into World of Warcraft (competition is a rough thing, I feel sorry for the teachers these days).
So how does a CS professor deal with the following situation: one student understands Linux top to bottom because they worked under a Linux Administrator all through high school, another student understands web-design because that is what they do for extra cash, and another student understands C++ very well and every time another language comes up they say “do you mind if I do this in C++.” And they would all rather be playing World of Warcraft. The UNM CS Department is “Java-based,” so let’s say this professor is trying to teach Java. Nobody wants to learn Java because they all have “employable skills” and they are just here for “the piece of paper.” Plus, the real reason they don’t want to learn Java is because they could already do the program the professor is describing in the language they already know in 5 minutes, verses doing it in Java which might take 3 hours. These students lack the “declarative knowledge” of Java and they aren’t too keen on learning it (plus, learning a new language often has a “steep learning curve,” and they aren’t interested in going through the “excruciating pain” of learning a new language in one semester since it took them 5 years to learn C++).
Answer: compete with World of Warcraft by competing for some of the same “reward centers” of the brain that World of Warcraft stimulates. World of Warcraft provides a “feeling of accomplishment” anytime a “small battle” is won, and subsequent “advancement” of the player’s avatar. So choose a “program a videogame assignment” but construct the overall assignment very precisely: so that the students get a “feeling of accomplishment” from completing each of say 12-subproblems that were well within their grasp (“small battles”), and then integrating them all together (another type of sub-problem really). Half the time in Computer Science is spent on now tweaking and cleaning up what you’ve just created so it runs right, so make the assignment a videogame so that the “testing” phase is to actually play a videogame and fix what is wrong with it (i.e. – “fun,” let’s get away from the drudgery of just staring at a screen all the time). Interesting what some teachers do to try to get away from the drudgery of teaching methods these students have already seen and become bored with for the past 12 years: trying anything new may be harder on the teachers (“peer pressure from other teachers” and “rules” may be the enemies of this type of “innovation”), but I know these efforts are greatly appreciated by the students. Plus, videogames are “fun.” Here is a programming project that is much more interesting than programming the fibonacci sequence for the fifth time. Plus, here’s a result you can actually show your friends and family that is actually somewhat “cool.” Little kids might actually enjoy playing it, making you the hero of your nephew. Plus it is always nice when a friend will take over the “testing” for a second and tell you what is wrong with it.
So Strategy #1: steal the students away from World of Warcraft by competing for the same “reward centers” in the brain. Strategy #2 – in Computer Science, these types of games really really really make you learn, and let’s take a closer look as to why. (But first, a quick aside: CS professors often refer to getting the free-time to sit down and program for no particular reason as “hacking,” and by this term they mean “playing.” When you ask a CS professor how they are doing, they will often say: “Good, but classes have been busy and I haven’t had any time to sit down and do some hacking.” By this they mean “playing around” and “advancing their skills” by “exploring what the computer can do.” So it is best to take a step back and look at the entire problem set: (1) The computer is the entire videogame, (2) anytime you figure out something you can do, you get a “sense of accomplishment” and you “advance the skills of your avatar,” and (3) you explore around this world just like you would explore around the world in World of Warcraft, looking for “small battles” you can win in order to accomplish 2 above. Because computer technology keeps advancing and the Internet keeps growing, the world for you to explore keeps growing and growing. You can chat with other players by finding like-minded CS people through IRC or email or Instant Messenger. And if your skills advance to the level of Level 80 Warlock, you can actually get a job where someone will pay you for those skills in the real world, and/or you can get a job as a CS professor.).
So why are these games so effective as a teaching method in Computer Science. The answer from the quote above is actually contained in these two lines: “Procedural knowledge is the use of declarative knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems, i.e. – knowing how. Contextual knowledge is knowing why, when, and where to use declarative and procedural knowledge.” The quote above defines “declarative knowledge” as “including concepts, rules, and principles.” But really, this kind of information is very difficult to learn. I will give an example from mathematics. I must say, the only way I ever learned which derivative equated to what (e.g. dx/dt ln x = 1/x, dx/dt tan x = sec2 x) was through repetitively working out homework problems. Likewise, I can tell the non-computer-minded people I work for the 15 steps it takes to package up their entire website, upload it to the server, and then make it visible to the world; but I do not expect them to immediately know it anymore than I would expect them to memorize a 15 digit alphanumeric password I had just given them. The answer for how to sit down at the computer and fly through those 15 steps in 0.5 seconds comes through practice and repetition. There is so much information in the computer world, that you might hear that “chmod 755 *.*” changes the permissions on your files on the Linux server, but that might go in-one-ear-and-out-the-other (“information overload” is a common problem in computer science and elsewhere). However, if you end up performing this procedure over and over and over again as you attempt to make your “modified” Java Applet videogame visible over the internet after each “tweak” and “correction” you’ve performed; after about 3 weeks, you might memorize this line “chmod 755 *.*” and add it to the arsenal of your skillset. Therefore, it is not the fact that “declarative knowledge” existed in these situations or that “procedural knowledge” was given a single time that was important, but that the repetitive implementation of these above two in “contextual knowledge” (in order to play or modify the game) over and over until you learned it.
Richard Vigilante, a Computer Science professor from New York University, defines it this way: “Declarative knowledge represents the concepts of the field and is readily learned from faculty lectures and presentations. Procedural knowledge represents the processes inherent in the field and is best acquired by doing, through faculty/student discussions and collaborations” (Brown, 2000). Vigilante defined the process when his course lost it’s interactive component, “…the result was a course that instructionally reduced the key procedural concepts to declarative how-to lists” (Brown, 2000). Videogames are extremely important in Computer Science and are used as a “teaching vehicle.” Right now they are one of the best “teaching vehicles” in Computer Science because they “enhance the motivation of the students.” However, who is to say what a “game” is? Perhaps Tetris is about “problem solving in pursuit of a goal” the same way building and modifying a computer game is about “problem solving in pursuit of a goal.” If they both stimulate the same “reward centers” of the brain and excitement levels in the individual, then who is to say. Computer Science proves repeatedly the similarity between teaching the “procedural knowledge” required to get Mario to the end of a level, and the “procedural knowledge required to accomplish certain things on your computer.” However, much of interdisciplinary Computer Science also involves the creation of “models” for situations not easily worked out on paper. The difference between these “models” and simulations in general are often very thin. Which brings me to paper 2...
Works Cited
Brown, David G., Editor, 2000. Interactive Learning: Vignettes from America’s Most
Wired Campuses, Anker Publishing Company, Inc., Boston, MA, p. 75-78.
O’Neil, Harold F., and Perez, Ray S., editors, 2008. Computer Games and Team and Individual
Learning, Elsevier Publishing, New York, NY, p. 5-16.
Wired Campuses, Anker Publishing Company, Inc., Boston, MA, p. 75-78.
O’Neil, Harold F., and Perez, Ray S., editors, 2008. Computer Games and Team and Individual
Learning, Elsevier Publishing, New York, NY, p. 5-16.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The Digital Transfer of Information
Alright, I have been doing some exploring based on my reading of articles for my final papers. From the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering point of view, the "myriad offshoots of digital technology innovations" has not only been responsible for the economic boom started basically in the 1990's, buy digital technologies are creating an explosion in different forms for "the transfer of information, communications, and teaching" (of which, videogames in any digital form, are just a particular "sub-category"). In order to get a sense for how this is happing, an individual can take the following test: using only a computer connected to the internet, try to learn as much as you can with the following restriction: on any given webpage, you can only read one or two sentences from that particular webpage (be they title sentences, or otherwise). In other words, the user must gather the vast majority of what they wish to learn about in flash-animations and videos. Is this possible in the present day? How long ago was this not possible on any topic? (A gauge of the rate of change of these types of digital technologies perhaps?). The idea is to provide a mode for learning that expands on but will likely never eliminate the traditional "reading and writing" methods. In this sense, I took the following test: I wish to learn about "videogames and learning," I already found many books on this topic at the library so there is no shortage of written materials, but can we apply such a three term search phrase to the "digital acid test" described above.
The following lists only those findings I thought would be valuable to other members of the class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNSjBHlI7m4
Discusses the use of videogames in the training of engineering students. In this case, specifically mechanical engineers. In engineering, one often sees small videogames designed by someone in order to teach a small set of specific ideas (either through simulation or otherwise: engineers must have a persistent instinct for trying to make complex ideas "visual" so they can sit around a digital projection and analyze it slowly with their other engineering buddies. And slowly tweak it. Seriously, most engineers I know can't tell you what they had for dinner unless there is a chalkboard in the room (sad but true).). Anyway, with some many simulation and instructional types of videogames being made by engineering departments in colleges throughout the world, it is inevitable that some of them will rise to the top as actually good games, and actually be adopted by others (thankfully, since most universities are publicly funded in some way, most of these games are given away as "open source" for other people to try, along with their source-code (at least in Computer Science).).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkkl3LucxTY&NR=1
This video is much closer to home. It shows how one or a number of software engineers designed a videogame setting to try to teach others how to become better software engineers. Funny how this profession is full of people trying very hard to train their competition (but it is). It is perhaps no great mystery that the highest number of "amateur videogame tutorials" are designed by software programmers (this would only make sense, writing a piece a code and writing a videogame requires the exact same set of skills these days). In fact, software programmers are so busy flooding the internet with information, you can take any computer class and then go to your professor's office hours and ask a question: and the first words out of their mouth are often "Did you google it?..." (True. The assertion is not that the information was "easy" to find on the internet, but that the information really was out there on the internet "somewhere". ).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfo_wKf8rA8
"Reading on the internet hurts my eyes eventually." Or so asserts one of my friends. Maybe it has something to do with the frequency of the screen or the intensity of the bulbs, but after a few hours of reading text online, certain people are known to attain really sore eyes and sometimes a nasty headache. Researching online for a while can cause a person to eventually be "begging for the paper form." Funny that the same society that use to tell children not to sit too close to the TV set because it could hurt their eyes, now places people one foot away from a computer screen for hours, eyes scanning text for so long that it can create an eye-sore like no other. So I ask the question: is reading text endlessly on the internet the only way to learn a topic online? Hopefully not. Videos, and flash-tutorials (and eventually more flash videogames in my opinion), give the user a chance to learn about a topic while potentially resting their eyes for a second ("what a godsend"). The above video is one of 12, showing a recording of a panel of several academics talking in a very serious way about the potential use of videogames in learning and videogames in education. I watched all 12, and I must say, there were some very interesting ideas offered (and it didn't hurt my eyes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stYcw3cdb1Y&feature=related
This link is to the second video of the 12. I place it up here, because out of the 12, this one video was the most valuable in my opinion (if you want to watch just one segment). The famous Jim Gee is even referenced. This video also hits on one of the major problems in this subject matter as well: If the videogame taught you a million small things, then how do you quantize what it actually taught you. Videogames have figured out one thing over school though: a majority of videogame players are highly motivated to play videogames, but going to school and "learning" lacks anywhere close to the same motivation-level for almost all attendees. This fact alone hints at a possible use of videogames in education. (or just shove the education into the videogames perhaps).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd1URORsoE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INhOB9gWPiA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnh9q_cQcUE&feature=related
Ah the famous Jim Gee. I am not surprised that foundations and government agencies in the US, UK, and Europe would put such large about amounts of money into researching how videogames could be used in education; I almost take the fact that videogames will someday be used in education for granted. However, apparently Jim Gee is working for the "MacArthur Foundation's $50 million initiative to explore how technology is changing kids and learning" here. And Professor Gee is "exploring how games may be used for learning." Jim Gee is smart in the sense that he chose a really cool topic for his job, in my opinion. The second clip is Henry Jenkins from MIT working on a similar project (but what he has to say is incredibly valuable about how kids today live in two separate environments: the digital environment of home, and the completely separate paper-and-pencil environment of school). And the third video listed does a good job of depicting this point in my opinion (as well as something else incredibly important for this topic: I once heard it said that "movies are the present form of communication for today's high school students, so we should be teaching them how to make movies (not write books), so that they can express themselves in the medium." Watch the third video and consider it's production values. This is a really compelling way to keep the audience awake and alive and listening to your ideas, and some people have figured that out.).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJTzNSV8pb0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnPYhSbSABA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmtd4wm1RI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X_lBHmkzdU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOFU9oUF2HA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jY4UkPbAc&feature=related
There are a ton of videos on the potentials for learning and education in a vehicle like Second Life (though I must say, "Second Life" is a completely arbitrary simulation media, there are a TON of other options). The great thing about this environment concerns the same reason engineers want to make complex problems "visible": you can walk around the visualization of the complex problem, walk around it, zoom-in and zoom-out, poke at it, get an idea of scale and size and dimensions (even scaling by factors of 10 or even exponential), manipulate and change (often), and most importantly -> stand around it with your other engineering friends and change and discuss the best way to go about approaching the problem. I listed only the videos on Second Life learning I thought were worth viewing right off, but there are a ton of other ones out there. The third one down is of a simulation to teach Medical School students correct interactions and practices, which I included because I knew someone who went to work on a videogame creation from scratch to produce a simulation based on a similar principle for Medical Schools. These are interesting videos, because Second Life is nothing more than a simulation environment, it is the users who are providing all of the educational content. Also interesting, there are a ton of videos on youtube showing how to run the software programming to create objects in Second Life (produced by amateurs, similar to other areas of software programming and usage).
The following lists only those findings I thought would be valuable to other members of the class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Discusses the use of videogames in the training of engineering students. In this case, specifically mechanical engineers. In engineering, one often sees small videogames designed by someone in order to teach a small set of specific ideas (either through simulation or otherwise: engineers must have a persistent instinct for trying to make complex ideas "visual" so they can sit around a digital projection and analyze it slowly with their other engineering buddies. And slowly tweak it. Seriously, most engineers I know can't tell you what they had for dinner unless there is a chalkboard in the room (sad but true).). Anyway, with some many simulation and instructional types of videogames being made by engineering departments in colleges throughout the world, it is inevitable that some of them will rise to the top as actually good games, and actually be adopted by others (thankfully, since most universities are publicly funded in some way, most of these games are given away as "open source" for other people to try, along with their source-code (at least in Computer Science).).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkkl3LucxTY&NR=1
This video is much closer to home. It shows how one or a number of software engineers designed a videogame setting to try to teach others how to become better software engineers. Funny how this profession is full of people trying very hard to train their competition (but it is). It is perhaps no great mystery that the highest number of "amateur videogame tutorials" are designed by software programmers (this would only make sense, writing a piece a code and writing a videogame requires the exact same set of skills these days). In fact, software programmers are so busy flooding the internet with information, you can take any computer class and then go to your professor's office hours and ask a question: and the first words out of their mouth are often "Did you google it?..." (True. The assertion is not that the information was "easy" to find on the internet, but that the information really was out there on the internet "somewhere". ).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfo_wKf8rA8
"Reading on the internet hurts my eyes eventually." Or so asserts one of my friends. Maybe it has something to do with the frequency of the screen or the intensity of the bulbs, but after a few hours of reading text online, certain people are known to attain really sore eyes and sometimes a nasty headache. Researching online for a while can cause a person to eventually be "begging for the paper form." Funny that the same society that use to tell children not to sit too close to the TV set because it could hurt their eyes, now places people one foot away from a computer screen for hours, eyes scanning text for so long that it can create an eye-sore like no other. So I ask the question: is reading text endlessly on the internet the only way to learn a topic online? Hopefully not. Videos, and flash-tutorials (and eventually more flash videogames in my opinion), give the user a chance to learn about a topic while potentially resting their eyes for a second ("what a godsend"). The above video is one of 12, showing a recording of a panel of several academics talking in a very serious way about the potential use of videogames in learning and videogames in education. I watched all 12, and I must say, there were some very interesting ideas offered (and it didn't hurt my eyes).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
This link is to the second video of the 12. I place it up here, because out of the 12, this one video was the most valuable in my opinion (if you want to watch just one segment). The famous Jim Gee is even referenced. This video also hits on one of the major problems in this subject matter as well: If the videogame taught you a million small things, then how do you quantize what it actually taught you. Videogames have figured out one thing over school though: a majority of videogame players are highly motivated to play videogames, but going to school and "learning" lacks anywhere close to the same motivation-level for almost all attendees. This fact alone hints at a possible use of videogames in education. (or just shove the education into the videogames perhaps).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Ah the famous Jim Gee. I am not surprised that foundations and government agencies in the US, UK, and Europe would put such large about amounts of money into researching how videogames could be used in education; I almost take the fact that videogames will someday be used in education for granted. However, apparently Jim Gee is working for the "MacArthur Foundation's $50 million initiative to explore how technology is changing kids and learning" here. And Professor Gee is "exploring how games may be used for learning." Jim Gee is smart in the sense that he chose a really cool topic for his job, in my opinion. The second clip is Henry Jenkins from MIT working on a similar project (but what he has to say is incredibly valuable about how kids today live in two separate environments: the digital environment of home, and the completely separate paper-and-pencil environment of school). And the third video listed does a good job of depicting this point in my opinion (as well as something else incredibly important for this topic: I once heard it said that "movies are the present form of communication for today's high school students, so we should be teaching them how to make movies (not write books), so that they can express themselves in the medium." Watch the third video and consider it's production values. This is a really compelling way to keep the audience awake and alive and listening to your ideas, and some people have figured that out.).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJTzNSV8pb0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnPYhSbSABA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmtd4wm1RI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X_lBHmkzdU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOFU9oUF2HA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jY4UkPbAc&feature=related
There are a ton of videos on the potentials for learning and education in a vehicle like Second Life (though I must say, "Second Life" is a completely arbitrary simulation media, there are a TON of other options). The great thing about this environment concerns the same reason engineers want to make complex problems "visible": you can walk around the visualization of the complex problem, walk around it, zoom-in and zoom-out, poke at it, get an idea of scale and size and dimensions (even scaling by factors of 10 or even exponential), manipulate and change (often), and most importantly -> stand around it with your other engineering friends and change and discuss the best way to go about approaching the problem. I listed only the videos on Second Life learning I thought were worth viewing right off, but there are a ton of other ones out there. The third one down is of a simulation to teach Medical School students correct interactions and practices, which I included because I knew someone who went to work on a videogame creation from scratch to produce a simulation based on a similar principle for Medical Schools. These are interesting videos, because Second Life is nothing more than a simulation environment, it is the users who are providing all of the educational content. Also interesting, there are a ton of videos on youtube showing how to run the software programming to create objects in Second Life (produced by amateurs, similar to other areas of software programming and usage).
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Living and Learning on the Holodeck
Okay, I finally got this technology figured out. And thus begins my blog on the potential use of Video Games in Education (Or I should say, the transfer of my blog onto the internet, as I have been producing it in written form since I began the play of Age of Empires III). However, within this blog, I will not be restricting myself to “Education” only in the classroom definition, as videogame simulation environments have become popular in the training of military and medical personnel (as I will show), as well as in other areas. In addition, I will not be restricting myself to the present environment, as the “potential” use of videogames in the near future is a much more interesting topic. However, this is not a stretch: if we consider how the Internet has changed certain behaviors in all of our lives, and the internet is only (realistically) say 40 years old.
There is always the potential that a new innovation could come along and change the way we approach education (afterall, a person wishing to begin with Matlab or Excel can quickly find a “how to” on YouTube and receive a Audio/Visual walk through; whereas, even 5 years ago, a person would have to find a web page “how to” on the Internet and actually READ THE PAGE (“…the Horror. the Horror” I know).
Regardless, I will now begin listing some of my notes taken in my discovery of Age of Empires III; with the preface that I will expand this blog to encompass the larger topic of the potential use of videogames in educational goals in letter blog posts:
8/31/08 – Testing out Age of Empires III as a potential game choice
Hypothesis behind game choice: “AoE III allows a player to embody a real life character from History, and through simulations based in a historical context, allows the player to learn about history in an entertaining way.” (this hypothesis turned out to be wrong for this game, but I will get to that in later blog posts).
Game Introduction: vivid, nice graphics, lots of work on sound elements, impelling story.
Game Tutorial: the game tutorial is absolutely excellent! Seriously, as I go through the walk-through I am thinking I could write my entire paper on just the “Game Tutorial” part of games: afterall, this is where the player is begin “taught” how to play the game (and it works successfully in this case, even without ever having looked at a “game manual.” If VCR’s came with this kind of Audio/Video Tutorial built in, a great deal more people would know how to program them and they wouldn’t flash “12:00” all the time.). And if you think about it, a videogame is a very complex thing to teach, there is an AWFUL LOT going on to learn how to play well.
In this case, a female voice reads instructions to the user that are also repeated in text formal in a corner of the screen (just incase you misunderstood a part, you can reread it).
This instruction happens in an interactive way: that is, the player must click with the right-or-left mouse-click on the appropriate areas of the screen as dictated by the female instructor (in order for the Tutorial to proceed forward step by step). In other words, the tutorial is interactive, and the player cannot reach the end without having followed the instruction and processed the information enough to follow along. From a Computer Science point of view, it would be very easy to set a software marker as to whether the player (or “student”) made it to the end of the Tutorial. However, in this case, the player is very “motivated” to pay attention and get through the tutorial because he or she really wants to play the game. The idea that the student would not be “motivated” to go through the Tutorial in order to play the game, just means that wasn’t a very good videogame.
Regardless, the player learns the following skills in the Tutorial in a very short period of time (and a very straightforward and non-time-wasting way, I might add): how to select your characters or buildings with a left-mouse click (or dragging mouse movement to select multiple characters), how simply moving the mouse pointer over an item displays additional instructions in the corner of the screen (an additional but seamless form of “in game” learning that also deserves mentioning), how to execute an action with a right-mouse click upon the object which is intended to receive the action, how the screen is divided into three sections (with “game action” taking place in the middle section, and the upper and lower section intended mainly to provide information for the player), and finally, what different colored icons mean. This last part is very important as well: if the game is like a map, the Tutorial can be thought of as the “Map Key,” providing interpretation for symbols and colors that have no obvious meaning otherwise. It is interesting to think that the Computer may have been the first device that could roll complexity into Audio/Visual Tutorials of how to interpret and unravel that complexity, effectively.
There is always the potential that a new innovation could come along and change the way we approach education (afterall, a person wishing to begin with Matlab or Excel can quickly find a “how to” on YouTube and receive a Audio/Visual walk through; whereas, even 5 years ago, a person would have to find a web page “how to” on the Internet and actually READ THE PAGE (“…the Horror. the Horror” I know).
Regardless, I will now begin listing some of my notes taken in my discovery of Age of Empires III; with the preface that I will expand this blog to encompass the larger topic of the potential use of videogames in educational goals in letter blog posts:
8/31/08 – Testing out Age of Empires III as a potential game choice
Hypothesis behind game choice: “AoE III allows a player to embody a real life character from History, and through simulations based in a historical context, allows the player to learn about history in an entertaining way.” (this hypothesis turned out to be wrong for this game, but I will get to that in later blog posts).
Game Introduction: vivid, nice graphics, lots of work on sound elements, impelling story.
Game Tutorial: the game tutorial is absolutely excellent! Seriously, as I go through the walk-through I am thinking I could write my entire paper on just the “Game Tutorial” part of games: afterall, this is where the player is begin “taught” how to play the game (and it works successfully in this case, even without ever having looked at a “game manual.” If VCR’s came with this kind of Audio/Video Tutorial built in, a great deal more people would know how to program them and they wouldn’t flash “12:00” all the time.). And if you think about it, a videogame is a very complex thing to teach, there is an AWFUL LOT going on to learn how to play well.
In this case, a female voice reads instructions to the user that are also repeated in text formal in a corner of the screen (just incase you misunderstood a part, you can reread it).
This instruction happens in an interactive way: that is, the player must click with the right-or-left mouse-click on the appropriate areas of the screen as dictated by the female instructor (in order for the Tutorial to proceed forward step by step). In other words, the tutorial is interactive, and the player cannot reach the end without having followed the instruction and processed the information enough to follow along. From a Computer Science point of view, it would be very easy to set a software marker as to whether the player (or “student”) made it to the end of the Tutorial. However, in this case, the player is very “motivated” to pay attention and get through the tutorial because he or she really wants to play the game. The idea that the student would not be “motivated” to go through the Tutorial in order to play the game, just means that wasn’t a very good videogame.
Regardless, the player learns the following skills in the Tutorial in a very short period of time (and a very straightforward and non-time-wasting way, I might add): how to select your characters or buildings with a left-mouse click (or dragging mouse movement to select multiple characters), how simply moving the mouse pointer over an item displays additional instructions in the corner of the screen (an additional but seamless form of “in game” learning that also deserves mentioning), how to execute an action with a right-mouse click upon the object which is intended to receive the action, how the screen is divided into three sections (with “game action” taking place in the middle section, and the upper and lower section intended mainly to provide information for the player), and finally, what different colored icons mean. This last part is very important as well: if the game is like a map, the Tutorial can be thought of as the “Map Key,” providing interpretation for symbols and colors that have no obvious meaning otherwise. It is interesting to think that the Computer may have been the first device that could roll complexity into Audio/Visual Tutorials of how to interpret and unravel that complexity, effectively.
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