From the Teaching Effectiveness Program: Video Games in Higher Education

Friday, April 25, 2008

3:00-4:30 pm, Proctor 41, Knight Library

http://tep.uoregon.edu/workshops/events/year07-08/spring/videogames.html

If video games are long, hard, and complex, why do people pay to

play them?

From the keynote “Libraries, Gaming, and the New Equity Crisis” at the TechSource Gaming Symposium

James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University

• 1. Lower the consequences of failure

• 2. Performance before competence (with support and help)

• 3. Players high on the agency tree (their choices matter)

• 4. Problems are well ordered• 5. Cycles of challenge,

consolidation, and new challenge (expertise)

• 6. Stay within, but at the outer edge, of a player’s “regime of competence” (confidence)

• 7. Encourage to think about systems instead of facts

• 8. Empathy for a complex system (you’re in it and a part of it)

• 9. Give verbal information, just in time and on demand

• 10. Situate meanings of words and symbols

• 11. Modding attitude (you can add to it and make it your own)

• 12. Assessment (graphs/charts at the end of a mission help with self-evaluation)

Uses in education:Elsewhere:• Hacking the Wii remote for physics class

• Inspired by Wii, professors create a virtual dance space

• ‘Wii’ bit of technology aids medical education

• Video Game in Mechanical Engineering Education

www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/coller

• Teaching math disguised as video game

Uses in education:Video games mapping to information literacy indicators

http://researchquest.blogspot.com/2008/01/acrl-info-lit-indicators-and-video.html

http://researchquest.blogspot.com/2008/04/vs-mode-gta-iv-round-2.html

Uses in education:At UO:• Human Physiology - Anatomy class exercise based on a video

game• Music - use Wii remotes in a performance• Teaching Effectiveness Program• Math - for non-math folks• Environmental Studies - simulation - proposed• Literature - especially new media courses• Computer Science - video game programming course

In the classroom

For an anatomy class, driven by professor’s desire for a more useful student activity, the Center for Educational Technologies Interactive Media has been developing this module:

The bicep

http://uoregon.edu/~dwight/CET/arm/

The characters:

Libraries contain stories

Have you seen how much text these have?

Try them yourself!

• In the library search for “video games” as a genre.

• Our collection and policies are on Scholar’s Bank:https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/handle/1794/5456