Clark Quinn has written a well considered review of a new book on Gamification. It’s nice to see more people getting past all the superficial gamification hype. There’s some good stuff here.
Learnlets » Kapp’s Gamification for Learning and Instruction.
The ugly underbelly of coder culture | Application Development – InfoWorld
Today’s developers are overwhelmingly young and male, and they’re barring the door from a more diverse workforce
This is a discussion that recently started on one of the LinkedIn lists I’m on. It’s a really good question, but one without a simple answer.
Suggested answers have included:
Here’s my response:
When dealing with a game intended for use in formal settings (schools, etc.) there are a few external things that are crucial:
As much as it pains me to say, I would even go so far as to say these things are more important to the “success” of a game (i.e. selling it) than whether or not the game itself is any good.
It is really (REALLY) important to remember that edugames are targeted at two, often very different audiences:
The first group care more about whether or not it’s a good game. The second, about whether it will fit into the curriculum.
There’s an old adage (about spacecraft design) that goes “A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually, but a good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.”
This applies to games too. If a game is to be taken up in formal settings it has to have the elements that will make it possible to ‘drop’ it into an existing (albeit largely broken) system.
This applies to games too. If a game is to be taken up in formal settings it has to have the elements that will make it possible to ‘drop’ it into an existing (albeit largely broken) system. Whether we like it or not, most schools need to justify time spent in class by highlighting an activity’s relevance to the official standards. Teachers need to be able to get information out of the game that they can easily translate into assessments for reports and administrators. Finally, most teachers have neither the time nor the experience to develop lesson plans using games. They do not have time to play the game and figure out how best to use it. They need ‘canned lessons’, at least in the beginning.
That’s not to say the the game must contain all these things; I am saying that these things must be included as part of the materials that come with the game.
Without this, even most good edugames (take note – there are precious few of those) won’t get a second look.
Changing the educational system is going to be accomplished in small steps, not landslides.
What Professors Make – Labor & Work-Life Issues – The Chronicle of Higher Education
2012 Faculty Salary Survey
Gamasutra – Features – Gamification: Framing The Discussion
[As a prelude to a full-on examination of gamification, Badgeville’s Tony Ventrice digs deep into what makes games games, using work that’s come before as a basis to explore this new tool — the first of his ongoing series of articles on gamification.]
Gamasutra – Features – Understanding User Research: It’s Not QA or Marketing!
[There is often some confusion among developers with regard to the terminology used by user researchers. Just what is focus testing, what’s user testing, and how do the goals and methods of the two differ? The IGDA Special Interest Group for Games User Research (GUR-SIG) would like to clarify the matter once and for all.]
Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ – NYTimes.com
Programming vs. “Technology” April 9, 2012, 8:00 am By Robert Talbert
Dumbing Down : Stager-to-Go. Friday, April 6, 2012 By Gary Stager
When Luerhmann coined the term, “computer literacy,” he intended it to mean computer programming the intellectual pursuit of agency over the computer and a means for solving problems.
Don’t believe me? Read this 1980 paper transcribed from a 1972 talk.
…
Things sped downhill when we removed “computing” from our lexicon and replaced it with “technology” (like a Pez dispenser or Thermos). We quickly degraded that meaningless term, technology, further by modifying it with IT and ICT. Once computing was officially erased from the education of young people, teachers could focus on keyboarding, chatting, looking stuff up, labeling the parts of the computer and making PowerPoint presentations about topics you don’t care about for an audience you will never meet. […]
What kids do get to do with computers tends to be trivial and inservice of the educational status quo. Gone are the days when educational computing conference programs were home to the most progressive thinkers and revolutionary ideas in education. Teachers were considered thought leaders and scholars who were required to write peer-reviewed papers in order to present at such events. Today one merely has to promise 75 quick and easy things to do in 37 minutes with the hottest product being peddled to schools. Another popular topic is incessantly about how your colleagues won’t or can’t use the latest fad.
I hadn’t thought about this this way before. I used to teach a “Computer Literacy” course. I first taught it in 1982 and taught it quite regularly until about 2000. We used to do several weeks on programming. My department, like so many others, ultimately removed that part. Part of the reason was that non-majors hated it and couldn’t see why it was useful. I suspect another part of the reason is that “IT guys” consider themselves the Elite and really don’t like it when someone else knows what they know.
The first ‘excuse’ could have been addressed by letting the students work on more interesting problems. This is a perpetual problem in CS – many of them just don’t understand what might be interesting to someone who isn’t an Über-geek. For that matter, many of them don’t understand what might be interesting to their own students either (hence the decline in student numbers).
That same problem could also have been addressed by explaining why learning to program can be useful even if you will never need to write a program.
These days, everyone should know how to program. Everyone. But ESPECIALLY the teachers.
Why all our kids should be taught how to code: m.guardian.co.uk.
I’m just sayin’ ……
almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products.
This is true in Canada too. Once again, Teacher Ed programs have gotten it wrong. Unfortunately, most Educational Technologists can’t help… they don’t know any more either. True, they may be encouraging their pre-service teachers to mess around with the “latest and greatest”, but unless they actually know something about how those apps work, they aren’t doing any more than training drivers.
We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children.
….
There will be lots of interesting discussions about the key concepts that students will need to understand, but here’s one possible list for starters. Kids need to know about: algorithms (the mathematical recipes that make up programs); cryptography (how confidential information is protected on the net); machine intelligence (how services such as YouTube, NetFlix, Google and Amazon predict your preferences); computational biology (how the genetic code works); search (how we find needles in a billion haystacks); recursion (a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem); and heuristics (experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery).
I ESPECIALLY like this last paragraph:
The biggest justification for change is not economic but moral. It is that if we don’t act now we will be short-changing our children. They live in a world that is shaped by physics, chemistry, biology and history, and so we – rightly – want them to understand these things. But their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don’t have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind.
Of course not.
So why do people believe that they “know” about computers simply because they can use Word, or iTunes, or some other app? (Or even a lot of apps…)
It is high time that we accept the fact that “technology” is here to stay and that we have become as reliant on computers as we are on electricity.
Does that mean everyone needs to know what I know about computing (I have 2 degrees in CS and taught it for 25+ years)? Hardly.
Does it mean everyone should know something about how this stuff actually works? You bet it does!
Here’s a great reason: You need to learn enough so that you are no longer at the mercy of IT people who try and tell you what is and is not possible or reasonable.
A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet – NYTimes.com.
“We know that we’re not going to turn the 99 percent of people interested in learning to code into the 1 percent who are really good at it,” said Mr. Sims of Codecademy. “There’s a big difference between being code-literate and being a good programmer.”
You are fooling yourself if you think knowing how to use other people’s apps makes you literate. It’s like believing you know about cars simply because you can drive.
