The article by Rick Raymer makes interesting reading as it compares educating to game play in video games. I find this comparison amusing for two reason. Firstly, for most of our studying at home competes for time with lots of other activities, video games being one of them. Hence we are taking inspiration from one of the competitors. Secondly, I myself am a gameaholic so i could relate to almost all the terminology and scenarios that the author mentions.
Couple of ideas that I found worth using are as follows
The non linear progression of courses can provide students with flexibility and will give them more control over their learning ability.
The measurement of progress using graphics or character upgrades is something that will catch on with the students very easily and I think they would be able to relate to it better.
Couple of ideas that I found worth using are as follows
The non linear progression of courses can provide students with flexibility and will give them more control over their learning ability.
The measurement of progress using graphics or character upgrades is something that will catch on with the students very easily and I think they would be able to relate to it better.
Hi Atif,
ReplyDeleteI'm a video game addict as well. Although we can talk about copying video game strategies for engagement, I think it's best to try to understand and link to the underlying psychology. e.g. Why do character upgrades lead to more gameplay? How can we capture that same idea in our educational design?
Good post!
Dean
I think it mainly relate to the power of peer review ... we somehow tend to benchmark our progress to our peers and making such comparison visible through characters upgrades spices up the whole experience.
DeleteI also play everything from Gears of War to Halo series, Super Mario and Angry Birds. The well designed game dynamics keep me interested and "gaming on!". Although sometimes bad mechanics make me feel that the game is cheating in some way.
ReplyDeleteAtif, do you have an example how to do the non linear progression of courses? This part was for me slightly ambiguous in the text, but you seemed to find it useful. Why, and is there already an example where you are trying to implement it in your work? Would be great to hear about it!
Hi Marko
DeleteThe best example would be for students who are learning about 3D points, lines, planes and shapes. As long as they have the basic concept of what 3 dimensional space they can learn about any of these concepts in any order. For some reason the books always follow the sequence as I have written above.
Another example would be the methods for solving differential equations. Traditionally integrating methods are always taught before Laplace transforms yet the two can be swapped without any loss of understanding.
Hi Atif, I'm not a gamer myself but from my experience as a father of gamers it strikes me that whilst there are always non-linear possibilities/directions in a game the gamer is always looking to progress in a linear fashion - there's always an end point and they tend to want to get there as quickly as they can. The sideways moves / forays into other lands etc are generally an aside to the bigger plan of getting further in the game - right? As for non-linear learning that's great as long as we don't need to continually build on new learning as in the case of the 3D shapes which can be acquired in any order. Our competitive nature drives the need to benchmark ourselves against others and the character upgrades that Baraa suggests would be great fun would encourage this further though I pity the poor student who would like to be a mighty dragon but never gets past being a dwarf!!!
ReplyDelete