The Acagamic

It is crys­tal ball time again. This time we are talk­ing about the future of edu­ca­tion. The claim: Game design­ers = Teachers. The pre­sen­ter: Tim Hart. An instruc­tional or learn­ing tech­nol­o­gist at the University of Maine in the USA. His pre­sen­ta­tion (with the title prob­a­bly some­what inspired by Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Good is Bad for You”) is about the poten­tial of dig­i­tal games for learn­ing and edu­ca­tion. It is partly a rant, partly vision­ary. I find it well-crafted and com­pre­hen­sive. He begins by out­lin­ing a num­ber of good resources on his topic and starts talk­ing about the gen­er­a­tion V (the cur­rently 5-year-olds) and their expec­ta­tion of the future edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Kids that will live and breathe Microsoft Project Natal, browser games, the Zii (or Cii, Bii, Oii, Yii as it is spec­u­lated), min­gle with friends in the next Facebook and PlayStation Home, and expect all movies to have the level of sophis­ti­ca­tion that Avatar is cur­rently show­ing. On slide 30, he has a car­toon ques­tion­ing whether we should be teach­ing our kids the old-fashioned way it is often still done.

He goes on and cov­ers recent tech­ni­cal devel­op­ments like aug­mented real­ity con­tact lenses, the Emotiv head­set, and Sparkle in light of Moore’s law. He presents a bit of infor­ma­tion on the aver­age gamer from the ESA and makes his point of the finan­cial (and with that cul­tural) sig­nif­i­cance dig­i­tal games have. Then, he con­sid­ers our moti­va­tion to play games. As we have seen in other pre­sen­ta­tions dur­ing this Advent spe­cial, this is one of the key points of games to under­stand, the com­pelling power that they have and how to use this to improve our lives (in this case our edu­ca­tion). He also gives a nod to John von Neumann and the fact that one essen­tial idea behind games is strat­egy build­ing (which is the focus of game the­ory). A num­ber of his own projects show how he is work­ing with the idea of games for learn­ing. And now on to his slides.

More Links

Resources on Edutainment and Serious Games from his slides

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens (Picture)

Virtual Maine Wiki

Serious Games in Ning

It’s Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: The Role of Virtual Worlds in Education

Six Wonderful Things About Games

Readers Who Liked This Post Also Read

• 19 – What Can We Learn From Computer Games?
• 15 – Epic Win: Why Games Are The Future of Learning
• 13 – Gaming it: What User Experience Designers can learn from Game Designers
• Reward antic­i­pa­tion – A pow­er­ful tool for game design