The Becker Blog

• Nostalgia Gaming: Frogger Helps Teach Kids Computer Science | KUNC

  tags: nostalgia gaming teach kids computer science

• Next Time, Fail Better – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.

  I decided that as I sat in on a colleague’s computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I’ve been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It’s built into the process, and they take it in stride.

  tags: failure learning chronicle CS

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• The Ups and Downs of Game-Based Learning | MindShift

  Games have shown great promise for learning, but it’s not always easy to figure out the logistics of how to use them in class. Every student and teacher’s experience is unique and it takes time to calibrate and tinker to get the best out of the experience.

  What’s more, using games might lead to something neither students or teacher anticipated — more work.

  tags: learning games games-in-learning education

• A number of environmental factors can affect the incidence of hip dysplasia in dogs – NVH

  Hip dysplasia (HD) in dogs is affected to a larger degree than previously believed by the environment in which puppies grow up.

  It is particularly during the period from birth to three months that various environmental factors appear to influence the development of this disease. During the puppy stage, preventive measures can therefore be recommended with a view to giving dogs disposed to the condition a better quality of life.

  tags: environmental dogs hip

• New Survey: Half of Teachers Use Digital Games in Class | MindShift

  No longer relegated to experimental programs, digital games are becoming much more commonly used in classrooms across the country, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released today.

  Half of the 505 K-8 teachers surveyed said they use digital games with their students two or more days a week, and 18 percent use them daily.

  There will be further, more in-depth coverage of this report in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, some more statistics from the study:

  Nearly 70 percent said that “lower-performing students engage more with subject content with use of digital games.”
  Three-fifths reported “increased attention to specific tasks and improved collaborations among all students.”
  Sixty percent said using digital games “helps personalize instruction and better assess student knowledge and learning.”
  Though most use Apple or PC computers, 25 percent said their students use iPads or tablet computers, and less than 10 percent use other mobile devices or video game consoles.
  62% said games make it easier to level lessons and effectively teach the range of learners in their class.

  tags: survey teachers ganmes edugames

• Can You Make Yourself Smarter? – NYTimes.com

  What is surprising is what else it improved. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.

  tags: nytimes intelligence game

• Dual NBack Application

  tags: memory learning game brain intelligence

• Brenda Brathwaite: Gaming for understanding | Video on TED.com

  It’s never easy to get across the magnitude of complex tragedies — so when Brenda Brathwite’s daughter came home from school asking about slavery, she did what she does for a living — she designed a game. At TEDxPhoenix she describes the surprising effectiveness of this game, and others, in helping the player really understand the story.

  Brenda Brathwaite designs games that turn some of history’s most tragic lessons into interactive, emotional experiences.

  tags: gaming understanding video ted

• Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong | Video on TED.com

  Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility.

  tags: TED wrong failure learning talk

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• Why “Clear and Easy to Understand” can be bad | Usable Learning

  So, as an instructional designer, part of my job is to make things clear and easy to understand, right?

  Well, it turns out that’s not necessarily the best option.

  tags: e-learning learning errors being_wrong

• Non-gamers, here’s why you should care about games | VentureBeat

  As an early investor in social gaming, I’m often speaking on panels to audiences of gamers, investors, and game company execs. At one such event — the Future of Media conference hosted by Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — the opening question was why gaming is relevant to people who are not gamers. The panelists — folks from IGN, Activision, GaiKai, and Riot Games as well as myself — gave some interesting reasons for why non-gamers should care about the game market:

  tags: games gamification social_gaming gamers

• What’s the Secret Sauce to a Great Educational Game? | MindShift

  Chocolate-covered broccoli. That’s what designers of educational games call digital products that drape dull academic instruction in the superficially appealing disguise of a game. Instead of placing the fun of discovery and mastery at the heart of the game, these imposters use the trappings of games “as a sugar coating” for their otherwise unappetizing content, note Jacob Habgood and Shaaron Ainsworth.

  The two researchers, from the University of Nottingham in England, recently decided to find out whether children could detect such subterfuge, and whether they benefited more from lessons that masquerade as games—or from games that make learning an end in itself.

  tags: gamification motivation games-in-learning

• Thinking about expression and ways of thought, and what happens to those who don’t C « Computing Education Blog

  In his wonderful essay on Alan Perlis’ 1961 Sloan School lecture, Michael Mateas points out that Perlis explicitly saw programming as a medium.

  Here Perlis makes it clear that programming is a medium, in fact the medium peculiarly suited for describing processes, and as such, a fundamental component of cultural literacy, and a fundamental skill required of new media practitioners and theorists.

  I’ve always loved the idea of programming as a form of expression, and most CS departments used to teach different paradigms of programming as different ways of thinking about problems. Google searching, you’ll find that “Computation/programming as an expressive medium” is being taught out there — but not to computer scientists. Film students, digital media theorists, even social scientists are being taught about programming as a medium. But for the most part, not computer scientists.

  tags: mark_guzdial programming computing education blog

• University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm. – Forbes

  Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

  tags: computer_science via:packrati.us university science

• Gamasutra – Features – Making Lean Startup Tactics Work for Games

  If you’re involved in the startup community or even just follow Hacker News, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about “lean startups” or the “lean startup method.” In his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries outlines a framework for small, innovative teams to more efficiently find product/market fit for new products. At its core is a focus on evaluating product design decisions based on user data gathered from scientific experiments. Eric argues that by making “validated learning” your key goal, you shortcut your time to building a wildly successful mass market product.

  tags: games business startup game_design

• For Pygmies, Size May Not Matter – Percolator – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  From the outside, evolution sometimes seems fairly obvious: Finch beaks got bigger to crack harder nuts, dolphins and sharks developed shapes that let them move smoothly through the water. A peek under the skin and into the genes, however, can yield surprises. Pygmies have just gotten such a close look. And being short–their most obvious feature–may actually be a sort of evolutionary side effect: What they really needed were genes that confer resistance to disease, and those same genes happened to disrupt growth.

  tags: matter chronicle higher genetics pygmies disease_resistance

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