Week 13 Ideas for Literature Review

I have decided to address the question: How can classrooms be transformed to motivate students they way games do?

I will answer this question with research I am using for another class  - with multimedia lectures. Many dry subjects can become interesting with full use of multimedia. Video, pictures and games both can keep the attention span of an audience and provide a second reinforcement of the lecture material.

I have already done some reading into this subject and here are my sources:

Almassizadeh, Farshad, falseWhitnell, Robert M, Fernandes, Eric A, Love, John J et al.
   “Multimedia chemistry lectures.” Journal of Chemical Education 71.9 (Sep 1994): 
   721.

Bauer, Wolfgang, Kortemeyer, Gred. “Multimedia collaborative content creation 
   (mc3): The MSU lecture Online system.” Journal of Engineering Education; 
   Oct 1999; 88, 4; ProQuest Central pg. 421.

Briggerman, Brian C., Boyer Tracy A., Norwood, F. Bailey. “Demand for Multimedia
   in the Classroom.” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics. 41.3 
   (Dec 2009) p791-808.

Duits, Linda. “The importance of popular media in everyday girl culture.” European 
   Journal of Communication. Sep2010, Vol. 25 Issue 3, p243-257, 15p

Hug, Theo. “Visual Competence, Media Literacy and "New Literacies" - Conceptual    

   Considerations in a Plural Discursive Landscape.” Seminar.Net: Media, 
   Technology & Life-Long Learning, 2011, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p1-17, 17p

Meadors, Todd. “Using multimedia in lab-based online classes.” Distance Learning. 
    9.1(Jan.2012): p36.

Moore, Helen A., Pippert, Timothy D. “Multiple perspectives on multimedia in the large

      lecture.” Teaching Sociology. 27.2 (Apr 1999); 92

Week 12

Here is the link to the final version of my project:


Scratch | Project | 4CFinal


I really wanted to do voice acting so I poorly threw my voice for the introduction section. Enjoy!

1. What: What is your project? How does it work? How did you come up with the idea?

Change Creator Cathie's Cubicle or 4C for short. Cathie interacts with her co-workers to make change for the office's vending machines. I know that math can be boring but money seems to spark the interest of my nephews so I use it as a lure in a math based game.

2. So What: What was your process for developing the project? What was interesting, surprising, or challenging? Why? What did you learn?

I knew that I wanted to use money in math problems going into the project. I have seen people of all ages having trouble making change so that got me to a change making design. I felt that office workers mingling would be informal so that completed the chain of design ideas. 

The first design problem I had was that Scratch rounds up .25 to .3. So I had to do away with the decimal point. I had many issues with getting the story to roll correctly, but a few hours of trials, errors, and duplicating commands I knew worked got the game to work. I had a blast putting in voice acting for the introduction of the characters after the fact.

3. Now What: What are you the most proud of about your project? What would your change? What do you want to create next? Why?

I had to juggle a bunch of variables  and expressions around so I am happy that I got them to all play nice. I would perhaps add background music and voice acting to the game version. My next creation would have movement rather than characters flashing in and out. I didn't really use these commands because of the need to get the project done. I also would add requests for different amounts of change on the characters. They randomly ask for 1 of 2 requests and 3 or 4 would make it more random.

4. Principles of Good Games and Good Learning: Provide explicit examples of the principles of good games and learning you applied in your game design. Then provide explicit examples of the  principles of good games and good learning you could apply if you had more time and better Scratching skills. 

I have a good bit of interaction between my characters throughout my game. The completion of a game day results in the production of new items for Cathie's cube. I believe that the problems of the game are well-ordered because I left the instructions with the prompts. I made the character's requests for money to be random so the game can be pleasantly frustrating if a user wants to try to memorize the answers. There is a bit of risk taking too, because if a player takes away too many coins of a type I reset the variables rather than let the coins go negative. I would definitely put in more principles such as Agency and Customization of a full version game with the right time and resources to develop this game more.

Double Entry Journal #11

Quote:

"Business leaders and policy makers, noting that teamwork is more important in today’s workplace than ever before, have encouraged schools to put more emphasis on collaboration to help prepare students for their future jobs." (Resnick, 4)

I completely agree with this quote from the author. I was not involved in many structured group projects until I was in college. This is completely different than how the professional world works. All major projects completed professionally are done in teams to ensure that work is divided up, quality is assured by other team members and management  reviews of the work and accountability does not rest on individual team members that are subject to promotions, transfers, lay-offs and illness.

I did a website search on education teamwork and found this interesting site with teamwork quotes: http://quotations.about.com/cs/inspirationquotes/a/Teamwork1.htm

Enjoy!

Reference:
Resnick, Mitchel. "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How
   Children Learn) in Kindergarten" MIT Media Lab. Cambridge, MA.

Week 11

I expanded upon my original idea and have a completed introduction to my game created. It can be viewed at: Scratch | Project | 4C2nd

I added the 4 other characters for the game and the mental calculator that Cathie will use to make change.

Double Entry Journal #10

Quote: "playing to learn is perhaps more in line with a cognitive approach to thinking and reasoning (Bransford, 1979; Gardner, 1985). According to such a view, cognition is conceived as something that happens in the mind. Learning then, is about the development of mental structures and processes."(Arnseth, 2006)

Reflection: I just completed an Educational Psychology course last semester so this quote sparked my interest. I strongly agree that the study of games in education follow a cognitive model of educational psychology. Matching up games to the level of cognitive development of a student will aid in the successful transfer of knowledge between student and game.

Other quotes I found interesting:

"The basic thrust of the more positively laden arguments are that, since computer gaming seems to be such a motivating and rewarding experience, games might be a way of making learning more fun and pleasurable, and, by the same token, more effective and relevant (Kirriemuir & Mcfarlane, 2004). What is more, since games give the player an opportunity to act in a multimodal and interactive environment, games might foster active learning, or learning by doing." (Arnseth, 2006)

Concluding remark: "By paying serious attention to how players make sense of what they do, including the resources they draw on in the process, I believe that we as educational researchers can provide more realistic accounts of what computer gaming is about, how computer games might be used in order to facilitate learning in schools, and what, in fact, people learn when engaged in activities of computer game play." (Arnseth, 2006)

Link: http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/39414787.pdf

I did a web search on cognitive learning with video games and found this article. It is relevant to our current studies and provides a look at some of the numbers the author found.

Reference:
Arnseth, Hans Christian. "Learning to Play or Playing to Learn - A Critical Account of the Models of 
   Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay." International Journal of 
   Computer Game Research. Vol.6.1 Dec 2006.