games, ar, vr and education
TRANSCRIPT
Games, AR, VR and Education
"Focusing on the ways that entertainment technology engages us can result in methods that we can transfer to any learning situation."
Sarah "Intellagirl" Smith-Robbin
Game Characteristics• A goal: Every game has a win condition: the
combination of events and accomplishments that players need to achieve in order to end the game. In every good game, the goal is clear, and the rest of the game is constructed to create a system in which the tools necessary to reach the goal are available. Ultimately, what's most important about the goal is that players care enough to want to accomplish it.
Obstacles: Easy games aren't much fun to play. Though the tools necessary to reach the goal should be part of the game, difficulties and challenges should be part as well. Without those obstacles, winning wouldn't mean much.
Collaboration or competition: Games come in two basic flavors: those in which winning is determined by defeating another player, and those in which winning is determined by beating the game itself. The former can create competition among players. The second encourages a player to compete against him/herself until the player beats the game.
Horizon Report 2011
Horizon Report: Expect Mobile Tech, Game-Based Learning, and Gesture-Based Computing To Be Mainstream in Academia Within Years
1. Just-in-time learning.Videogames give you just enough information that you can usefully apply. You are not given information you’ll need for level 8 at level 1, which can often be the case with schools that download files of information that are never applied. Videogames provide doable challenges that are constantly pushing the edge of a player’s competence. This is similar to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.2. Critical thinking.When you play videogames you’re entering a virtual world with only the vaguest idea of what you are supposed to do. As a result, you need to explore the physics of the game and generate a hypothesis of how to navigate it. And then test it. Because games are complex, you are continually reformulating and retesting your hypothesis — the hallmark of critical thinking.3. Increased memory retention.Cognitive science has recently discovered that memory is a residue of thought. So what you think about is what you remember. As videogames make you think, they also hold the potential to increase memory retention.4. Emotional interest.Videogames are emotionally engaging. Brain research has revealed that emotional interest helps humans learn. Basically, we don’t pay attention to boring things. The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain and also the gateway to learning.5. We learn best through images.Vision is our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources. The more visual input, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. Videogames meet this learning principle in spades as interactive visual simulations.
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/06/five-reasons-why-video-games-power-up-learning/
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