Morrell's Project

Sorry for my absence on the blog for the month of August. A lot of personal stuff went down but I think I'm back on track. Posts the the blogs will be incoming this weekend.  Anyways here is what I'm going to be doing to get myself ready for the project and the execution of the project.

Like stated earlier I want the students to create a known plate boundary for each of the three types of boundaries using Google SketchUp. To do this I feel that I need to be more of an "expert" at SketchUp than I am or previously was during the STI2011 week. I'm going through more of the tutorials, even more than once so I have an idea of the questions that might be asked of me. I will more than likely respond with "What have you tried?" and "Have you asked your partner?" before leading them down the right path. Near the beginning we will all learn Google SketchUp together much like we did at the conference.

I still haven't decided on whether or not to use my school site that is already up and running or create some sort of blog or other website to house this. Pictures and videos that I take of the students during this process could become unruly in FirstClass as I don't have much space on the server. However the website, regardless of where it is hosted, will include a run down of what's going on in the class as well as pictures and video to be used as examples of the written descriptions. Finally when everyone is done their final product will be screen captured so I can upload it as a picture instead of a document.

Grading will be group based as well as individual. They will have a group grade on how well they completed the requirements and an individual grade for how much they contributed to the final product. I think I'm going to have it be a 70/30 split between individual and group. Not sure about that part yet.

What I need to do right away considering it's the beginning of school (finally! Two days closed because of Irene) is to send home a photo permission slip to parents. Other than that I think it'll be a trial by fire as the project progresses.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: Chapter 6

Image retrieved from: http://www.news.wisc.edu/13331


Chapter 6 The future: Urban Science

    In chapter 6, Shaffer highlights a game called Urban Science, where players take on the role of urban planners. In some ways, it is similar to SimCity. Many elements of designing a city are the same. However, Shaffer refers to SimCity as a “God” game because players can basically do whatever they want within the game. They can build or tear down at their pleasure. There is no real accountability for their actions nor any collaboration required as part of the game structure. As a result, SimCity does not provide any opportunity for an authentic learning experience or explore what it means to really be an urban planner. Urban Science on the other hand, is designed to replicate as much as possible an urban planning training practicum. Players are asked to view the virtual world through the epistemic frame of an urban planer. Just as in the previous chapters, Shaffer examines how this game allows players to develop skills, knowledge, identities, values, and epistemology that urban planner use to think in innovative ways in order to create a comprehensive plan for the virtual community. The hope of course, is that if players can learn to think like an innovative professional and solve problems in the virtual game world, that they will learn to be able to think like an innovative professional and solve problems in the real world.

    The rest of the chapter, Shaffer talks about his hopes for the future and the role that epistemic games will play in education. For the immediate future, he sees them being utilized in “third” spaces, such as summer camps, learning resource centers or after school programs- basically a place outside of a formal instruction, but also not just “free play”. The focus should be just on learning and not selling games or trying to get students to meet standards. Shaffer feels that as more of these epistemic games are developed, they will demonstrate what happens when you “think outside of the box” and will put pressure on schools to make needed changes to how they approach teaching.

    My final thoughts on this chapter is that Shaffer makes a very compelling case for looking to games as a way to help students prepare to become innovative professionals in the future. My only concern is that all the games that he discusses in the book still don’t seem to be widely available yet, which raises some questions since the first addition of the book was written in 2006. He does talk about commercial games that are available, but then points out all they are not really epistemic games. In all the case studies, he talks about the dramatic and measurable improvement that the participants seem to have after playing the games. So if the games are proven to be this effective, why are they not available yet?  My guess is that the games weren’t ready for market yet. They probably had a ton of bugs and didn’t have the look or feel of commercial games. In order to get the games ready for market, Epistemic Games probably needed to raise a boat load of capital. Now the investors probably want a return on investment, so when the games do become available, they will probably become commercial games. It seems the best way to test the games is to have a huge number of people play the games. If it were me, I would put then up on the internet and make them free for everyone.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: Chapter 5

    A good majority of this chapter focuses on professional identity and how thinking and working like a innovative professional can help youngsters prepare for being successful as adults. To explore this topic, Shaffer discusses his experience of teaching a journalism practicum to a group of undergrads and grad students and goes into quite a lot of detail about what it means to be a professional journalist. He breaks down several key aspects of journalistic professionalism in regards to areas such as identity, skills, knowledge, epistemology and values. The big question raised in the chapter is how does a journalist become a “smart” journalist? Shaffer first discusses a schema-based view where developing a particular set of skills, values, and knowledge are used to solve problems. As he says, “learn the right facts and rules and belief, and then apply them in the right place” (p 140).  Another aspect he discusses is situated cognition, where “newcomers learn a community’s common ways of solving problems...by doing things that members of the community do”(p. 141). Basically, he is saying that another way journalists learn to be journalists is by acting like journalists and from learning from more experienced journalists. Becoming a member of a professional community helps to develop a strong sense of professional identity. New journalists can learn to solve problems by seeing how more experienced journalists solve them. While these aspects are important, they alone won’t make a “smart” journalist. The final aspect that Shaffer raises is needing an epistemic frame to tie everything together. As he explains, “epistemic frames are about setting the terms by which actions, decisions, and claims are judged and justified”(p. 163). The final step is learning to think like a professional is  being able to make smart decisions and justify actions. It is about applying knowledge in order to solve problems, essentially thinking like a professional.  
    Science.net is a game based on the successes of this journalism practicum. It is an epistemic game aimed at middle school students, where players are asked to take on the role of a journalist and create a series of science related news stories for an online newsmagazine. The game revolves around developing the same key elements as the journalism practicum: identity, skills, knowledge, epistemology and values. So much of journalism is about following a set of rules- both stylistic and formulaic. The game uses these rules as a framework. The game also explores how to be a journalist in the following ways: how to follow a lead, writing to formula, writing as a watchdog, writing for story, reflecting on action through war stories, news meeting, and copy editing. It also focuses on values important to journalism ethics, such as verifying sources and being objective in the writing. By the end of each of the case studies, both the journalism and middle school students developed a strong identity of being a journalist, which continued long after the case studies. Shaffer makes the point that when they act and feel like journalists, they end up thinking like journalist. As he concludes, “the point is not to train young people to be professionals, but to train them to be the kind of people  who can think like professionals when they want and need to be” (p. 165).
    My thoughts on this game is that it is probably the one game mentioned in the book that I probably wouldn’t be excited to play. Namely because a large amount of it focuses on writing. I hated writing more than anything else when I was in middle school.  Like the debate game, I think science.net can be done without actually having the software. When I was in eighth grade, we did a month long journalism project where as a class we made a newspaper. I am sure it was not nearly as in depth as in science.net, but we did all the same things as in the game. We developed a variety of stories and did copy editing, worked on layout and printing. My teacher used to be a journalist for many years and was known for her journalism unit. She also was the advisor for the school paper. The point I am making is that the concept of thinking and working like a professional that Shaffer makes in this chapter doesn’t seem to be as tied to the technology as in other chapters. Since he doesn’t go into much detail about the actual game interface, it is hard to know for sure, but I feel any student who works on the school paper would get the same experience as playing this game.

Computer Games Chapter 4

The Pandora Project

 

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/category/games/negotiation/

There are more and more subjects that students need to learn each year.  Whether or not the education system is responsible for teaching values has been debated for years but the bottom line is that students learn values in school from teachers whether intentional or not.  Having students participate in a game that helps them see more than one side of a situation is a definite life skill.  They learn what professionals think of as "important, interesting and meaningful"(105)

This game is based on a medical controversy where there are five different view points all vying to get everything their way.  The game players have to think globally and be aware of the risks and benefits of complex science based public health issues.  As I see it, the main objective of this "game" is for students to realize that in the real world you have to give a little to get what you want.  They learn to negotiate to achieve each groups "best alternative to a negotiate agreement".  They have to learn to research to see what each viewpoint's needs will be and, as in debating, they need to come up with alternatives to what other groups want as well as to what they are willing to accept as compromises.  This game was only  played for nine hours in the classroom but was motivating enough that group members spent outside time researching and debating talking points.  They learned to prioritize issues and debrief afterwards to discuss and reflect on the results.

I see the benefits of this game being the group members learning to see more than one side, to weigh the options and think about the repercussions of political actions.  The chapter pointed out how some students opinions on decisions changed after playing the game and seeing how others might view the situations.  One player said, "In order to do it right, you had to look at everything from everybody's point of view."(123)  You couldn't just have your own opinion,  you had to understand all the other opinions in order to get what was best for your group.  This educational experience wanted students to develop and understand values as well as learn the skills and knowledge to communicate and understand others values.

This was about more than just values, it was about getting learners involved in the learning and motivated to learn.  There is a big difference between this and having students pick a view point, research and then write a paper on a controversial issue.  When you can get students involved in a discussion about a topic they are interested in, they will spend more time researching and thinking and less time writing.  It isn't about the knowledge, it's about the process.  This is a more motivating process.

Chapter 3 - ZPD and Frustration

I just finished reading chapter 3. Again I, I don't really deny that games can help students learn. The research that has been presented so far are in fixed environments with controlled settings - perhaps even "special" that lends itself to different behaviors. Is this feasible in the general school setting? Would Natalie have been successful with the presence of the boys she usually flirts with? My point is not to downplay the effectiveness of these techniques as much as to say that isolated solutions don' t help the general problem that Shaffer acknowledges, "Most schools [and a lot of teachers] in the United States today celebrate declarative knowledge over procedural knowledge." Addressing this problem does not require isolating students from each other or special programs. ' Schaffer left out a component of ZPD, which is frustration. When people are presented with tasks that are too hard, or beyond their ZPD, they experience frustration and potentially give up.

In the first chapter I was really glad to see mention of the game Civilization, which was one of my favorites going through high school and college. I skimmed ahead to find something I could apply to Civics and found Chapter 6 which discusses SimCity and Urban Science. I'm now disappointed because while the chapter goes into detail about the deficits of SimCity and touts Urban Science, the latter is not available. I wound up on the Epistemic Games website to find that these monument games "were designed to be tested not distributed." So, fantastic...there is isolated research on the effectiveness of video games that only exist for the purpose of that isolated research.

Computer Games Chapter Three: Escher's World

Chapter three focuses on how kids can use game situations to participate in complex tasks that adults accomplish after years of study and practice.  The author looked at Escher’s World, a game that he created in which middle school students who had not had geometry instruction used a program called Geometer’s Sketchpad to create images based on mathematical principals far beyond their classroom knowledge.  The kids went through a four week course where they were treated like young architecture students, and were expected to be as independent as possible, with minimal adult interference. 

One of the interesting things about this chapter was the math problem example at the beginning.  It was a basic geometry problem followed by an in-depth explanation of how to find the answer.  The explanation was dry, difficult to follow, and it was supposed to be.  This was followed by a story of a girl who participated in Escher’s World, and came to the answer of the problem via a completely different route, yet still understanding the basic principles that make it true.   We found this whole example somewhat ironic, considering the author does this to us to a small degree when he goes off on his long-winded descriptions of the Oxford Studio, an architecture studio course at MIT after which parts of Escher’s World were modeled.  We both had the same reaction: confusion as to which program we were discussing here and there, followed by an “aha” when we figured out we were experiencing some of what “Melanie” from the chapter had.

Escher’s World shows how you can definitely take certain games and use their structure to teach a separate instructional concept in a real-world situation.  There are other examples that discuss some of the other Escher’s World participants, but they mainly get the same points across: a.  You do not need to directly instruct about a concept to teach it.  Using games to teach concepts is just (if not more) effective, like using Roller Coaster Tycoon to teach business concepts or using Bridge Builder to teach Physics.  b.  Teaching this way helps kids internalize their skills so that they will be able to use them again in separate situations.  c.  Innovation can not and should not be standardized.  If you want a kid to be creative, you can not tell him or her how to do it.  


Mike and Erin

Kennedy Project Proposal

I apologize for this being late, but I've just had the last of my house guests leave and then my computer died and I had to buy a new one. I am loving my new Mac Mini though!

I've gone back and forth several times for my project, and I'm still not clear on the expectations at my new job and what my schedule will be like so it has been hard to really get into something, but I think I have at least the start of something that I will see through.

I would like to have the students do current events on their own. I don't think we will have time to really go in depth about them during regular class time so I will have them create their own current events virtual notebook. They can create it in Google, iWeb, Noteshare, etc. We will determine the requirements and the grading together as a class. They will have to find the required articles on their own and comment on them based on the requirements we set up. They will be on their own to determine how to present the information and will have to troubleshoot their own issues within whichever platform they choose. I will have periodic check-ins as the trimester goes and then the entire product will be due at the end of the trimester. If it works well, I will do it again for the next trimester.

For the transparency part of the project I plan on keeping a class blog and website so that parents can see what we are doing in both social studies and ELA classes.

So that's that!