DEJ3

Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns

Sasha Barab, Michael Thomas, Tyler Dodge, Robert Carteaux and Hakan Tuzun

Some advocates of game-based learning suggest that educational video games are the only way that educators can adequately engage the "video game generation"

This is a concept that I can not completely agree with.  I agree that there is a place in the classroom for the use of game based learning but believe that there needs to be a balance of both face to face interaction and interaction with virtual worlds.  I think that there must be time for the students to share their game experiences and while this can be done via a blog when discussion takes place face to face there is a opportunity for other students to ask questions and give their experiences. 

A strategy commonly adopted by the entertainment industry involves developing participatory contexts that have elements of challenge, curiosity, play, and control. In contrast, the education and design community has developed many curricula and contexts to support learning but has not necessarily captured the interests and motivations of children.

I agree with this statement and believe that this is a challenge that every classroom teacher faces everyday.  This is why I feel so strongly about using different methods and technologies to achieve student engagement.  Our students are very comfortable using technology in their everyday lives and when content can be delivered in the for of a game the learning becomes more familiar and fun and there is a greater chance of engagement.  The commercial game designers have discovered this by the creation of many successful as well as unsuccessful games and they soon realized that the student must be invested in the game play to keep their interest.

A core challenge of design work is to avoid becoming more focused on the designed product than on the people and interactions that the design was developed to support.

I agree with this statement and think it is an important concept to keep in mind when talking about teachers designing games for their students to use or choosing a game for the students to play.  I think that as the idea of using video games in the classroom becomes a more accepted practice this will become even more important.  This is why I think that some time during a teacher prep program there needs to be not only a class on the use of technology in the classroom which should be a theme carried across all the education classes but also a class in simple game design where the student teacher could learn simple game design and also game evaluation.  I know this is a class designed to look at this issue but offered at a graduate level.  I would like to see asimilar course offered early in the undergraduate program.