marjee

February 9, 2010

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 “Dads who know better and the powerlessness of pink”

January 9, 2010

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 “Designing games as Vernier Probes”

July 14, 2009

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.

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?

July 11, 2009

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.

volcano 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 “Science Game Review: Shape it Up”