Games, gaming and gamification in Education

As some of you may know I’m studying a Masters in Technology in Learning and have been focusing on Serious Games. I wanted to share my project with the community! I built a Serious Game using a platform called ThinkingWorlds to showcase the pedagogies in games and to investigate how teacher attitudes and perceptions changed before and after playing a game based learning serious game.

If you are interested you can play the serious game itself, PC only I’m afraid. Instructions for playing can be found here: http://portaldust.com/seriousgames/installation/

On the Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the center of Paris, just off the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg and just a short stroll from the Sorbonne sits the main campus of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.

The new, new MOOC

Minecraft has become a kind of anarchic massive open online course (MOOC) all on its own, without developing courseware or costly new program licenses. Part of the proliferation is due to user-created video, particularly on YouTube, where a quick search yields 7.5 million mentions. Video podcasts, recordings of building in progress and most importantly, walkthroughs, or videos of players demonstrating how to master levels or particular construction techniques, keep the global Minecraft horde digging and trying to impress or teach one another, forming a key part of the informal player-to-player education that makes the game a fascinating phenomenon to observe.

Learn throughout the year with asynchronous quests and synchronous events in environments like Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Google Hangouts and more!

We’re kicking off spring with a three week online camp for teachers and instructional designers, providing you the tools and the training to turn your class into a living game, or just a very cool place to learn! After it’s over, you’ll have a teacher dashboard and can invite your students to play their waythrough the curriculum. You choose which quest strands and synchronous events you’d like to participate in (any or all), work at your own pace, fully facilitated by our Guild Officers

3D GameLab, turn class into a game!

Our state test is multiple choice. (We are looking forward to the writing-based CCSS assessments!) To get ready for the series of tests, we took a pretest so that each student knew where his individual problem areas were. Then, I created quests for each problem area--quests that would make Chris cringe because students didn't make anything. Generally, I linked the students to multiple choice practice sites. I added fancy fonts and encouraging words--and anything else to make the drudgery of multiple choice less irksome. We all know that students need to practice in the way that they will be tested. And these students practiced, directed by the knowledge areas that they knew they needed to improve.

This group of students struggled with the state tests last year. This year, 90% of them were proficient or advanced. The students give generous credit to 3D Game Lab because it allowed them to concentrate on the places that they needed the help.

Jane McGonigal is Director of Game Research & Development at Institute for the Future and Chief Creative Officer at SuperBetter Labs. She is author of the New York Times best seller, Reality is Broken.

Ms. McGonigal spoke at this year’s The UP Experience to the topic, "How Gaming Will Change the World." She began by quoting “the number one question my friends, family, and audiences ask me,” which is: "Jane, on your deathbed, won’t you regret having spent so much time playing games?"

“The game should be a place of play and experimentation,” said Henry Jenkins, a USC professor on the forefront of game-based learning.

World of Classcraft is an educational augmented-reality multiplayer role-playing game. Played in the classroom, students play as one of three classes, gaining awesome powers, while risking a terrible death.

Students gain experience points for good actions and take damage for bad actions. As they gain experience points, students level up and gain powers that can be used in the classroom.