An interesting report by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon published by www.demos.co.uk

[Description reproduced from their website]

“Their Space: Education for a digital generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.

Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy.”

Very nice interactive interface that let you explore a report prepared for KnowledgeWorks Foundation.Check out the introductory page or go directly to the interactive map. A PDF version is also available from the introductory page.The map lists 3 key elements:Trend: represents major shifts, new phenomena and concepts, and driving forces that will shape the future context of education. Some trends listed are personalized learning plans, participatory pedagogy, serious games, do-it yourself kits, etc.Hotspot: Hotposts are trends that are thought to have a broad impact on education and make good starting points for exploring the map. Examples are: explosion of learning agents, media-rich pervasive learning, deep personalization, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) communities.Dilemna: Problems that can’t be solved and won’t go away. They require new strategies that go beyond either-or thinking. An example of dilemna listed on the map is achieving standards and personalization.The map plots these different trends according to two dimensions.

• The horizontal axis groups the impact areas: Family & Community, Markets, Institutions, Educators & Learning, Tools & Practices.
• The vertical axis groups the drivers: the end of cyberspace (from physical vs digital to seamlessly physical and digital), urban wilderness (from predominantly rural to predominantly urban spaces), sick herd (from improving quality of life to increasing signs of distress), strong opinions (from a global media culture to a splintered fundamentalism), smart networking (from informed citizens to engaged networkers), assorted economics (from economies of scale to economies of groups).

I attended a seminar a few months back on the theme of serious gaming.Serious Game @ wikipedia.fr — this article is in French only.Presenters were Olivier Rampnoux, Julien Alvarez, Jean-Pierre Jessel. All members of the European Center of children products.Very nice talk. Covered

1. Why using video games
2. Classification
3. What kind of objectives
4. Girl Gaming

Some information that came across.1) Why be interested in games?- Commercial domain. Market study show that nowadays kids spend more time in front of a console or computer connected to the web than in front of a television. Apparently they spend 3 hours in front of a screen. That’s good news for advertising as this means that they have a chance to target a large public at a lower price (TV advertising is really pricey) and with less resistance (TV advertising is not that successful). The concept to check out there is the one of advergaming Advergaming @ wikipedia, Advergaming Catches On- Education domain. Studies show that students need more interactivity. The good old system whereby they sit and listen to a lecturer doesn’t work well with them anymore. They get bored and they don’t take much information in. Then the 1 hour format doesn’t work well either as their attention span tends to be shorter. In contrast, studies show that positive emotions, like the ones you get when playing help with more efficient memory encoding. Hence the notion of Education Arcade, introduced by the MIT.2,3) Classification. They have done some *very* nice work there. They created a database to store information about up to 1000 games. They then analysed them to try to understand the different dimensions that characterise a game. What they mentioned during the talk was their analysis of objectives and goals within the game. They came up with 10 major rules, where rules are defined by what you have to do to be allowed to move to the next level. These rules are Answer | Manage | Have luck | shoot | create | block (maintain) | destroy (collect) | position | avoid | move | time | score. Then using these low level rules, they define bigger bricks of metarules. A game that would mix move and avoid as objectives would make up a DRIVER game. A game that would mix shoot and destroy would make a KILLER game, one that would mix manage and create would make a GOD game. Of course, games can count more than one brick. If you take the good old space invader, then you have both the driver and killer components included.4) Girl Gaming. The big problem, you see is that games then to be written by boys and be most successful with boys. All good when you try to sell to a leisure market. Problem is when you try to do advergaming, failing to engage 50% of your customers is not so good. Then in education, having a product that works only with 50% of the class is not great.There was a bit of discussion on this topic. Apparently, girls and boys don’t use a game in the same way. I go for cliche description now. Girls tend to do as told and carefully, and with a lot of attention, engage in the game. They read every single box of text that appears and they have at heart to do well. They play once. They get a quite high score. Boys just want to have fun. They rush through. Then they discover that they have a score lower than their neighbour, so they get back to the game and try to increase their score.Girls seem to prefer to play games where they have to think about games. They want to be involved with the game. They also expect to get something out of the game, to be taught something, to acquire some knowledge. They expect content. Boys are more after some direct and simple stimulation. That’s more about having fun and then get a score that let you know how well you did.Another reason of the lack of success of traditional games with girls is the complex devices and set of key combinations being used. Games where controls are a lot simpler (like the last wii console) and where dexterity is not that important seem to have a better success with girls. Some also say to prefer black and white graphics over these new 3D all fancy graphics.

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Learning, Edutainment, serious games.

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