What is a Game? [Part 1]

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

What is a Game?

Games are classified in many different ways and even after going round and round repeatedly, we still can’t seem to agree on what a game actually is.

Here are a few examples:

Some examples of casual (or mini) games: (posted by Clark Aldrich on seriousgames May 20, 2007

> Tips on Tap: http://www.webcourseworks.com/tipsontap/
> Binary numbers: http://forums.cisco.com/CertCom/game/binary_game.swf
> Other Cisco games: http://www.medcalf.com/games/cisco_games/

“Tips on Tap” isn’t so much a game as a contest – here the object is to see how quickly you can click the right things in the right order. The addition of scores and time constraints seems to make this into a game. I tried it – un-doing an action is difficult and frustrating.

The “Binary Game” isn’t really a game at all, in my opinion. It is an exercise – in fact, it is a worksheet. True, there is a score, and the challenge is to see how fast you can solve the problems. It appears that the introduction of scores and time keeping allows this electronic worksheet to be viewed as a game.

The “Cisco Games”, while posing more complex (and possibly interesting) problems suffer from functional complexity as well. I did not find the gameplay intuitive. Of the three groups, I’d consider these the most game-like, although I am currently at a loss to explain exactly why. If we remove the time pressure what do we have left? In many cases, what we have left is a puzzle. If we remove the score-keeping, it appears to stop being a game.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Is there a 12 step program for scientists?

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

[My name is Katrin. And I am a scientist. 😉 ]

Note:  no disrespect is meant to any of the real 12-step programs.

1.        We admitted we were powerless over science—that our lives had become uncorrelated.

2.        Came to believe that an authority better published than ourselves could restore us to our senses.

3.        Made a decision to turn our data and our labs over to the care of professors emeriti /as we understood them/.

4.        Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our notes.

5.        Admitted to social constructivists, to ourselves, and to principal investigators of related projects the exact nature of our data.

6.        Were entirely ready to have journal referees remove all these defects of our submitted papers.

7.        Humbly asked those better funded than us to remove our shortcomings.

8.        Made a list of all persons we had corrected, and became willing to cite them in all our papers.

9.        Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure their annual reports.

10.    Continued to take personal inventory and when we were found out promptly corrected it.

11.    Sought through analysis and verification to improve our conscious contact with /real data/, asking only for validity in our sample and the power to publish it.

12.  Having had a rude awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to department heads and granting agencies, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

What Teachers Want [episode 1]

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’ve been struggling with my youngest son’s school of late.

Again.

Still.

I’ve been struggling with schools, on and off since my oldest first started school – seventeen years ago in 1990. My kids are bright, creative, and independent. Schools like compliance.
I’ve also been struggling with university, on and off for thirty years. As they say, “Same S*%T, different pile.” I’m independent too, though it turns out my biggest ‘problem’ is that I have integrity. Universities like compliance too.

We have a new principal.

Nothing changes.

Almost every teacher will say they want kids to become independent and think for themselves.

What teachers really want is for kids to independently agree with them. And to stop bothering them. They especially want parents to leave the ‘teaching’ up to them.

Teachers don’t want bright kids who question authority and who expect their teachers to be willing earn their respect. Teachers also don’t want kids or parents who call them on their ‘white’ lies. [I happen to think there ARE no white lies. Only lies.]

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Chalk up another one for FaceBook

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

Thanks to the mini-feed from FaceBook, I saw this Blog from Mark Guzdial. It is a MUST READ for anyone concerned about the enrollment malaise the computer science departments continue to face.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKUURHQRKBJYSU

Here’s an excerpt: “Colin Potts, a professor here at Georgia Tech who works in software engineering, has said that the goal of software engineering is to remove all the fun out of programming. When I mention that quote to other software engineering researchers, they often agree with it. The goal of software engineering is for the creativity to appear in the design, and the actual programming should be akin to construction—a simple activity of putting together the pieces.

It seems to me that the cause of the student’s disdain for “programming” and for the decline in CS enrollment lies there. As civil engineers need armies of construction workers to build their designs, and as mechanical engineers use armies of factory workers to produce their designs, so do software engineers use armies of programmers or coders, people who are explicitly not software engineers, to produce their designs. Few students go to college to become construction or factory workers. Why should it be surprising, then, that few Western students want to go to college to be the Information Age equivalent workers?

Education historians and theorists have argued that the current US educational system was designed to produce factory workers. They say that we need to revise our system to produce knowledge workers for the future. I propose that our current undergraduate computer science programs are designed to produce coders for software engineers. We spend our time, especially in the early classes, focusing on coding standards and writing good, clean code. Rarely, and certainly not until the upper division courses, do we emphasize creativity and novel problem-solving techniques. That meshes with good engineering practice. That does not necessarily mesh with good science practice.”

Brilliant.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Chinese Fortune Cookie Advice.

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Watch your relations without people carefully, he reserved.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

More heretic stuff.

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

This time from Stephen Pinker:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/469317,CST-CONT-danger15.article

In defense of dangerous ideas

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

I am an Ed Tech heretic.

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Thank you Freeman Dyson. http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf

“In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.”

Although it’s not very popular, I question the dogmas of educational technology. More on this later.

Be the first to like.

Unlike

Take That, R.E.Clark….

Posted on by
Reply
Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

Among the points highlighted in Clark’s recent article trashing serious games are that “…the research shows no instructional advantages of games over the other instructional approaches (such as lectures)…” and that “only poorly designed studies find learning benefits from games“.

And yet, we all know that listening to lectures is quite passive while doing something with what you are learning is much more active and leads to better retention. Learning by doing beats learning by listening. This came across slashdot yesterday: “‘Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented to them passively,’ said Nate Kornell, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in psychology and lead author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science. ‘The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.'” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801161511.htm

I also found this bit interesting: “The findings were somewhat unintuitive, because passively using the hint appeared to enhance performance during the study phase of the experiment but had a deleterious effect on long-term learning,” Kornell said. Continue reading →

Be the first to like.

Unlike