Science Games By Marjee

BYOL JASON Project

Hello!
Below are the videos and slides used during the Chmiel/ Harrison talk at ISTE 2010 during the Bring your own laptop session on Wednesday, June 30.

Gaming across the curriculum: Finding and evaluating educational games.

This post shares resources from Trevor and my games workshop at ISTE 2010.

We kicked the workshop off with a brief talk. Here are the slides for that short presentation.

Integrating Games in Instruction

•    Remember there are a lot of ways to introduce games in your classroom, you can start by simply recommending them to families, media resource leaders, or special educators
•    Make sure learning objectives can be met within the amount of time you have dedicated in the classroom period
•    When evaluating a game, consider how the game helps you meet learning objectives more effectively (more engaging? Better visual explanation? More efficient?)
•    Have a student volunteer help you evaluate games you consider.
•    Make sure you know the source of the game. Games on dedicated educational website from a familiar place are less likely to have unwelcome pop-ups or comments.

Learning Games Directories

Playing History:      Open directory of history and civics games
Playing Science:     Open directory of science games
Games for Change:     Directory of social issue games
Super Smart Games Wide range of free and commercial
PBS Kids Games:     Great  set of early childhood k-6 games
**NOTE: Many of these directories link out to external sites. Over time links may break and we have no control over the content of external sites.

Game Recommendations

Marjee Recommends
Coaster Creator
Students learn about potential and kinetic energy in order to build a successful roller coaster that provides riders with lots of thrills, but brings them to the end platform safely!

Gravitee 2
A “casual game” meant for entertainment but is an “addictive” and fun way to examine satellite/ falling body behavior.

Trevor Recommends
Do I Have A Right
From Justice Sandra Day O’Conner’s iCivics project, Do I Have A Right, does a great job helping students explore and understand the Bill of Rights.

The Jamestown Online Adventure Game
In this alternative history game students chose different strategies for the Jamestown pioneers. The Jamestown Online Adventure Game does a nice job helping students develop a sense of both what happened and why it happened.

We won CODIEs!

We submitted our 3 energy unit games as one packet of games to the Software and Information Industry Association’s award for Best Educational Game.

This is very much an “its just nice to be nominated” situation. Winning was highly unexpected and a huge honor. I’m really proud of our energy suite of games as it highlights the most important learning objectives in a middle school energy unit using a variety of game mechanics that are all engage and all privilege engagement, learning, and classroom usability.

Check them out!

Best Educational Game 2010

Classroom constraints & the pass-back effect: Games designed to transcend generational divides

I am excited to be giving a talk today with Nina Walia as part of Games for Learning: Research and Design Innovation at NYU. It’s a quick talk, but I wanted to make sure those interested could take a look at our slides and dig into some of the links to games from our presentation.

Play the Games I Mentioned Right Now:

Operation Resilient Planet, Mentioned on Slide 4: It is a big, 6 hr game. We also allow teachers to pick small 20-25 min experiences from the game to use in classrooms.
Transform-It and Energy City: Mentioned on slide 5: Free browser based flash games that provide a range of different challenges. Both have something you can do in 20 minutes in a class but provide hours of play later at home.
Coaster Creator and Eco Defenders. Mentioned on Slide 6: Both of these games provide spaces for direct classroom objectives, but also provide deeper experiences for players to try to best their own scores.
Here is an example of how videos model practices for classroom teachers. Mentioned in Slide 10:

You can log into the Jason Mission Center to browse some of these supporting classroom materials. Mentioned in Slide 11.

Dads who know better and the powerlessness of pink

A few weeks ago, the Pharyngula blog had a post about the powerlessness of pink. A toy catalog advertised microscopes and telescopes for kids and they included “special” pink ones “for” girls. The best part, of course, is that the pink ’scopes were not as powerful as the regular microscopes (600x magnification vs. 900 or 1200x and 90x vs. 250 or 525x).

This is of course, lame for so many reasons and it carries various absurd implications, etc., but it isn’t all that unfamiliar for anyone who has reviewed the types of video games that are designed specifically for girls. For the most part, video games for girls are insipid. Check out the screen grab from the Tinkerbell DS game: outfits and material possessions. Really? Just about every/any game that has ever been designed for the pink ghetto has a clothing/ outfit fetish.

Oh good, this game has outfits in it! Phew! AmIRight?

I can say a lot on this topic, but for now I just want to focus on one thing. Why stop at “outfits”? Why not go the next level?

What annoys me most about the girl-game outfit fetish isn’t necessarily that 1) all little girls don’t really care about outfits (and the second a video game box goes pink, I promise you outfits are involved, if not for your avatar than for a horse or puppy/kitty)  or that 2) the idea of having content revolve around outfits paralyzes any hope of designing a cognitively captivating game. Rather, what bothers me is that this interest some girls have in fashion or styling can link into some legitimately challenging and fascinating problem spaces, and this never seems to be taken advantage of. Fashion design, as Tim Gunn has shown us, is tricky business. It requires serious spacial intelligence, design thinking, and problem solving. Looking at two-dimensional patterns and fabrics and cutting and stitching them to fit onto a 3D person is an engineering feat if ever there was one. So why stop at just “outfits”?

In the more male-dominated game universes of racing games or god-game strategy games, successful titles frequently have sequels, and those sequels Continue Reading…

Designing games as Vernier Probes

Many moons ago when Jim Gee first published What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he painted a portrait of a gamer engaged in an immersive world where the gamer is lost, for hours, in meaningful play as a soldier in WW2 or a Greek god.

Probes help teachers do what they were all ready doing, but a little bit better

What Gee was talking about  is that schools should rethink their design to be more akin to games. What if curricular design had as much depth as the design of major commercial video games? For the most part, this topic was never explored. Instead, media and foundations alike concentrated on funding the development of educational games. Fair enough. I certainly won’t complain because this is my passion and livelihood. In our excitement, however, some critical ideas were confused…

…Here is the problem. Gee argues that games, unlike schools, offer deep, meaningful, and somewhat inefficient learning experiences. This is in contrast to schools, where we go for shallow and aim for efficiency. Standards, for instance, are all about efficiently know which kids will know what key information by when.

So realistically, what does that mean about the games we design for schools? If schools won’t dedicate 40 hours a week to history or science, why design games that demand just that? This is where the original funding for games in education started to head: trying to recapture the magic of best-selling commercial platform games. Continue Reading…

Scientists? We don’t need no scientists….

…if you happened to be at a huge-land-grant institution in the past 7 years or so, you’ve heard some mutterings about a very secret situation.  Science graduate students… highly trained, highly skilled, highly smart and highly unable to find a good job.  The kind of job they were promised they’d have if only, if only, they were really smart, studied hard, eschewed the typical pleasures of high school and college life to embrace the glamorous, secure life of a scientists. This was whispered about on campuses and in publications directed at scientists.

Image from Retrotyoys.com

Weird huh?  How did this happen?  Are we graduating incompetent people?  Hardly.  But somehow, we keep hearing from politicians, educations, and folks in the business community that we need scientists and engineers.  There is a dearth of talent.  We need to improve science education!  We need to inspire kids!

Looks like the main stream  message is finally starting to catch up the the reality:  We don’t have jobs for all our scientists.  Got that? We can stop the mea culpa about not having enough scientists.  We have too many, and we can’t give these people the jobs they’ve been preparing for for 10-14 years.

This doesn’t diminish the role of science education by a long shot, but it should make us reconsider what science education is for and why it is important.  The key focus should be science literacy for citizens.  There is of course, nothing new about this, but it is a good time to reflect on our priorities.  Do we need another unemployed nuclear scientsits, or do we want to have an informed citizenry that avoids ghosts, gouls, and the alignment of stars in making policy decisions?

Science Game Review: Shape it Up

Several months ago I had been researching geology games to inspire me with some ideas for our upcoming curriculum over we are working on.  Searching for free educational games online is a painful process (but I’m working on it….more on that later) and finding anything interactive was hard enough, much less something I’d call a game.

Recently, I came across  Shape it Up, which is my favorite geology interactive so far.   Players try to make one landscape look like another by choosing a force of nature (volcano, wind, water, glacier) and choosing a time period.

This is a wonderful game for young kids.  There are several components that I think can be added or modified in order to make the game more sophisticated for middle school kids. Continue Reading…

No student every needs to dissect anything, ever

Image originally from www.digitalfrog.com

My blood was a’ boiling this morning after reading an article on  edweek about an investigation done by the College Board:

… can a student get the same level of experience from a virtual dissection online, without actually smelling the formaldehyde or making a cut?

In recent years, the College Board, which authorizes AP classes and offers college-level material to high school students, has been trying to determine whether simulated labs in some science courses can take the place of real-world experiments. It’s a debate that online science providers and hands-on teachers are grappling with as well.

Continue Reading…

The trouble with games in schools

Do parents start to disengage with their children's learning at adolescence?

At the EdubloggerCon Unconference this year, I ran into a woman who had a great insight for me.  I told her a little bit about what I did (produce  core science games for middle schoolers) and my ambitions for the conference (thinking about design consideration that will ease game implementation in the classroom, and she quickly said,  “Parents. You have to get it to the parents, make them put pressure on the schools.  That is the only way it is going to happen.”

It’s a compelling point and it made me reflect on some of the awards Operation: Resilient Planet Game was up for this year, awards we ultimately  didn’t win.  Many of our fellow finalists, and the ultimate winners, were targeted toward elementary school math and reading.  The games were designed to give parent’s progress reports, thus demonstrating a core understanding of a certain thriving market.

So these winners kind of figured some stuff out.  Parents have the tenacity and desire to get their kids playing games in order to learn.  And perhaps, as these types of efforts gain popularity among involved parents, schools receive pressure to bring these technologies into schools.

But what about those of us who are making games aimed for older kids?  Games with core, but challenging content?  Will we ever capture parents?  Will parents ever sign on to learn how their kids are doing on acquiring science content?  Tweens start to get a little scary for parents.  Parents back off.  Parents are less involved with their kids learning.  And besides, science is still seen as being periphery to skills like math and reading.  Will we even accomplish the first step towards getting parents to think about games for kids out of elementary school?

This is still a nascent field, but it was certainly odd to find our game about trophic models and ecological population counting methods going toe-to-toe with games where fairies and cowboys hold your hand as you master short and long “a” sounds.

At any rate, I think the unconference-goer I mentioned at the start of this post is on to something, and I think I see her poignant observation playing out with younger students.  I just really hope that despite my hunch, parents do remain interested advocates of their kid’s education beyond  2nd grade. It may not be the only way to get quality educational games into the classroom, but it is certainly vital.