Challenges for Teachers: Games R us - do kids learn anything from computer games?

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Challenges for Teachers Games R us- do kids
learn anything from computer games?

• ADGC 2004
• Catherine Beavis
• cathxx_at_deakin.edu.au

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Why should games matter to literacy educators?

• Computers and the new media are increasingly
  central to the lives of today's children and
  youth ... their participation in global popular
  media culture, including online culture, has
  become integrally bound up with children's and
  teenagers' affiliations, identities and pleasures
  This kind of social participation is integrally
  bound up with the ways in which symbolic meanings
  are made, negotiated and contested, and is
  therefore of central concern to literacy
  research.
• Nixon, H.(2003) 'New research literacies for
  contemporary research into literacy and new
  media? Reading Research Quarterly 38(3)

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Questions

• How do games teach players so effectively?
• What are players learning about learning?
• What are players learning about literacy?
• What are players learning about relationships?
• What are players learning about the
  representation of self?
• What are players learning about negotiation?
• What are players learning about the way the world
  works?

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Games as text

• A shift from narrative to spectacle
• A reliance on intertextual referencing
• A remediation of older forms
• A mix of first, second and third person forms of
  address
• A shift from print to multimodal forms of literacy

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Gees Learning Principles

• Active Critical Learning Principle
• All aspects of the learning environment
  (including the ways in which the semiotic domain
  is designed and presented) are set up to
  encourage active and critical, not passive
  learning
• Design Principle
• Learning about and coming to appreciate design
  and design principles is core to the learning
  experience

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Gees Learning Principles

• Semiotic Principle
• Learning about and coming to appreciate
  interrelations within and across multiple sign
  systems (images, words, actions, symbols,
  artefacts etc) as a complex system is core to the
  learning experience
• Semiotic Domains Principle
• Learning involves mastering, at some level,
  semiotic domains, and being able to participate,
  at some level, in the affinity group or groups
  connected to them

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Gees Learning Principles

• Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains
• Learning involves active and critical
  thinking about the relationships of the semiotic
  domain being learned to other semiotic domains
• James Gee (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach
  Us About Learning and Literacy

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Multiplayer Games

• Human partners/opponents
• More challenging game play
• Participation in a community
• The presentation of self
• Establishing authority
• Maintaining relationships
• Interpreting others
• Regulation and boundary riding

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Human partners/opponents

• The difference with online games is youre
  playing against a human opponent whereas when
  youre playing against computers its not as
  challenging and can get a bit repetitive. Whereas
  online its also a novelty that you can play
  with anyone from around the world, anywhere, and
  be playing against human opponents. (Alan)

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Human partners/opponents

• You can work with people you cant see face to
  face. If you play online you can talk to people
  but you dont have to deal with them quite as
  much. Also theres more teamwork. With single
  player youre in control of all the characters
  and you dont have to talk to people, share, in
  as much as you know exactly where everything is.
  With multiplayer you might be in control of only
  one character, and you need to rely on other
  characters more for healing or spells or
  whatever.
• (Anna)

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Challenging game play

• Firstly, the tactics they use are completely
  different. In multiplayer youre using all the
  scope and yet inventing new tactics just on the
  hop, as you go along, trying to counter what your
  enemy is doing. And in the single player versions
  theyre just doing the set something their
  attacks and responses are all pre-programmed in.
  The way they build their bases and defenses are
  pretty much pre-programmed in, so its easier to
  just get around it.
• (Pete)

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Participation in a community

• What I try to do is I try to get within a group
  with people who I know are more influential and
  powerful within the gaming community than I am,
  and by getting in with them I can get in with
  others and it sort of goes on, pretty much the
  same as a new school situation.
• (James)

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Presentation of self

• Youve got to have some knowledge of the game
  itself and how to play it and the tricks there,
  which is why I spend time playing with the single
  play so I know what to expect. Then I will jump
  straight in and multiplayer I think if you can
  work it so that youre playing in a way which is
  something that they your opponents enjoy doing,
  that challenges them or convinces them that
  theyre doing stuff right as well, then thats a
  way to get in with them. And, of course, if you
  can show the same type of ideals as them,
  whether it be within the game or within just
  chatting before or after the gaming sessions then
  that will also help you as well. (James)

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Interpreting others

• Sometimes you can tell if a persons going to be
  an easy win or not. The sort of people who are
  just like, fresh new people full of energy, but
  theyre not very good, and theyre playing it
  just for an hour. Theyll chat a whole lot to you
  and then you can sort of tell, oh yeah, its
  going to be an easy win, if theyre really
  chatty, so most people dont chat much during
  the game.
• (Pete)

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Maintaining relationships

• A lot of the time that I spend when Im online is
  Im just sort of cruising around talking to
  people that I know. And by talking to those
  people I can sort of patch up the friendships
  that may have been destroyed when this guy, you
  know, didnt do something right, and so you can
  do it like that. Or, if you before the game,
  talk about what youre going to do, and how much
  you enjoyed the last nights session and what you
  think could be improved, just sort of like
  debriefing sessions. And I think that is one of
  the best things about it, because you can
  approach everything from a really tactical point
  of view and you can put into practice all of
  these strategies you thought ... Well, if I had
  someone else who was there, who was thinking the
  same thing as me, I could have done this, and
  thats one of the things that I find (James)

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Implications for schools

• Purpose
• Identity
• Practice
• Ongoing learning
• Situated meaning
• Distributed knowledge
• Developing competence
• Discovery learning
• Insider experience

• Community
• Peer culture
• Risk taking
• Control
• Exploration
• Authority
• Real world engagement
• Imagination
• Flow

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Computer Games and Curriculum

• We need to learn from how computer games help
  young people to learn
• We need to find ways to engage our students with
  other texts and learning that will similarly
  allow them to be immersed, challenged and
  entranced.
• We need to find ways to incorporate multimodal
  texts such as computer game into the curriculum
  as objects of study in their own right

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Computer games and curriculum

• We need to recognise the social and purposeful
  dimensions of multiplayer gaming, and the ways in
  which knowledge and learning is spread and
  shared.
• We need to recognise the fluidity of on and
  offline literacy practices in and around the game
  rather than seeing sharp divisions between on and
  off line texts and worlds.

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Computer games and curriculum

• We need to recognise that the literacies and
  learning entailed in playing computer games
  reside as much if not more in the practices
  surrounding the games as in any game software
  intrinsically in itself.
• We need to recognise the deep investment in
  identity and peer culture tied up in
  participation in games playing, and seek ways to
  bring such purposeful connectedness into school
  curriculum and classroom activities