The Video Game Curriculum

Video games are able to motivate people to play for hours on end. Sometimes, video games can be so captivating, they would cause death. I'm sure you've heard a few stories about that during the World of Warcraft era. These same people who may spend 30-40 hours a week on a game, would not give a rats ass about school. So here's a proposal, set up the classroom like a game. There is a decent amount of research that goes into how video games motivate their players. I will allude to only a few in this blog.

Where to start...

I think the first thing is to allow students to create an identity in you classroom. In a science class, when you walk through the door you should be a scientist. You could have them put on lab aprons and prepare goggles (because wearing them every day for an hour would be annoying.) Explicitly explain to them that they are scientists and should act like one. Overall, this may be tough in many schools and the students may not play along. It's worth a try.

Structuring the course will be difficult. The first thing people are most worried about is their grade. I think a grading system that would best work is something that resembles a progress bar. There was a Ted talk I watched about how app developers love putting in an progress bar for any reason big or small. For a classroom, it give the students a visible goal, and they're able to visually see their completion and mastery of the course. The use of a progress bar would be a positive change in the current classroom norms. Most teachers believe that telling the students that they all start with A's is, in my eyes, bad practice. This tells them that your grade will only get worse. There is no room for improvement. There is only punishments for not providing perfect work. Instead, a progress bar mean that the students start at the bottom. The only way to go is to go up. You cannot get a worse grade that you have at the beginning of the school year. This process would use positive reinforcement based on the amount of effort and work put in. More work put in would result in a greater addition of points. Little work would mean some points.

A con of this practice may be that a student must always calculate the points needed on future assignments. A pro of this would be that the student must plan ahead to reach a certain goal. This brings another con which may result in students reaching a minimum goal and stop working overall. They were able to reach their minimum C so why should they come to class anymore if they passed the class. Hopefully the classroom culture developed by this gamification of the curriculum will engage and motive the students to the point where the previous con would not arise.

The curriculum should be heavily scaffolded. Great games keep you in a pleasantly frustrating experience. This would mean the units were just the right difficulty. So like the Zelda series, once link receives a new item, the game forces the player to use the new item in order to immediately proceed. Throughout the reminder of the quest (usually a dungeon) the puzzles are focused around the new item. Only until the end will the environment call for the player to integrate multiple skills and items. For the classroom, this means the basics must be met first before you can pull them together for a more challenging skill. For the class, the units will be structured as in any class but there is a strong need for feedback to know what's working and what isn't as well as the help when needed.

One of the difficult ideas is that students may need to work at their own pace. This divides the classroom environment from a community into individuals. I do not know how to challenge this dynamic other than allow collaboration for boss battles (tests). There are many schools who have moved to an online curriculum where the entire curriculum is structured and posted online for students to complete at their own pace. When I came across this, I found this to be a perfect tool for a video game structured classroom.

Finding the Cure to Supplement the Science Classroom

I played an interesting game today. It was called Caduceus. The basis of the game was that there was an epidemic of a disease. Most of the people in your prestigious school has left for safety, but you stay to fight the disease with KNOWLEDGE! So you do these puzzles in order to move on and learn about the origin of the disease to cure it.

I went through about half the game and stopped. My quick review of the game:

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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I thought the game had a great back story to it. The plot seemed fully developed and included decent animations. There was an ok sound track and non-stereotypical voice overs. The layout of the game is simple and friendly to use. There are a few discrepancies between clicking on the area for the comic vs going through the journal. I was going to the same place to do the same thing, I should have the same options. The puzzles were hard to figure out. Some of the games were not simple enough to figure out just by looking at it. There was no introduction to the game. It just popped up for you to play. There's a help button but a few of the games make you go through a dialogue between two characters to figure out the game. Although that makes the game more realistic and more developed, that's not what a player wants when he's trying to figure out the game quickly. There should be a text to accompany the audio so that the player can review pieces of the "how-to" without going through 2 minutes of talking. Many of the puzzles were quite fun and challenging, even for a 23 year-old.

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So this game had some interesting implications. For the classroom, I think the simulation of being a professional or an expert can be engaging for many of the students. Here the student would be engaging in scientific study and an investigation to uncover the origin of the epidemic. There were two puzzles that dealt with organizing "interviews" to find out the identity of 5 people and the various characteristics that went with them. This was a very useful skill to problem solve and compile bits of data into one collective summary. It would also provide a common background experience for me to refer back to for examples.

What do you know? Video games can be very useful to the classroom.

20 Questions with a twist

Have you ever played 20 questions? That's the game where you think of a person place or thing and your friends must ask 20 yes or no questions to figure out what's on your mind. I've also played it where you have a riddle and they ask 20 yes or no questions to figure out the riddle. Either way it's a staple of boring long road trips. But now, lets add a twist. You can lie twice!

Woah. Mind Blown. That just changed the entire game! It makes it so much more challenging. It's like putting Mafia together with 20 Questions. Adding in a lie makes the cognitive task of this game extremely difficult. You start to strategize and think about how you can ensure which questions are correct. You can't just assume that what ever said is true. 

In some sense, this makes it more like real life. You want to assume that people tell you the truth. When you can't trust someone, it makes life decisions more difficult. It would even be easier if you know that the person always lied. But when it's impossible to tell what is true and what isn't, nothing is certain. I guess that's why it's so important in relationships. 

But beyond that, this may be one of the first activities that I do in my classroom. It is extremely involved as it requires students to be strategic in choosing their questions, specifying their words, and critically thinking of ways to problem solve. Whether they accomplish the task or not, it shows the cognitive ability of these students. It may prove to themselves that they are able to accomplish the tough tasks of the chemistry or physics classroom. 

Never say never... to Evernote.

I've been looking for a way to organize my new professional life. I was introduced to Evernote early on this semester. It looked promising! Someone had shared their page with the group outlining all the assignments and readings in one page. It even had check boxes next to each element! Woahhh, was all I could say. Nonetheless, I went home that night and downloaded Evernote.

I had played around with it a little but after a while, it didn't appeal to me anymore. I stopped using it and it sat on my computer for a few weeks. Then in this awesome technology class I was taking, we were each assigned a program to present to our group. I had been assigned Evernote! At first I thought, "Blahh." I had already taken a look at it and it was no good. 

 

That was until I actually did the assignment. There's so many cool things to do with Evernote! First of all, it's real utility comes in the fact that there is a mobile app for it. It syncs with your online account and allows you to have all the notes and reminders you created on your computer with you at all times! Another thing is that you can capture pictures with your laptop or camera and Evernote automatically makes it searchable. That's so cool! Normally to do that I would have to find a scanner, figure out how to work the scanner, find the right program, scan the page which takes a whopping 15 seconds. With Evernote, it's snap and done! 

Evernote also has all these side applications that can cater the program to your uses and interests. There's Evernote food which is useless to me but to those who like taking pictures of their food, it's perfect. There's a free draw program for those who have tablets and can annotate their notes and pictures very easily. 

All in all, I'm glad I figured out the full uses of Evernote. I'll be using it in my teaching career for organization as well as collaboration or teaching outlines. Something like that. 

AWESOME! or not...

Take a look at this link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/pictures-that-prove-society-is-doomed

Even though I bring it to attention, I too am guilty of such actions at times. But to my credit, I'm a self diagnosed ADD person. My hands are always itching and looking for something to do. But then who am I to say that this isn't becoming the norm for most people?

Technology in the form of a smart phone puts a entire world of knowledge (and lack there of) at people's finger tips 24/7. I myself have finally found the wonders of a smartphone. I have simple games to play with at odd times of the day. I have a planner of all upcoming events and tasks to do. I have the internet and everything that goes with it. All of this in one somewhat bulky, fragile, and expensive thin box of technology and I really have yet to tap into the fullest potential of this thing.

Kids who grow up with these things, native speakers of the language of technology, should understand and become tech wizzes right?  I was recently told a story about a high school teacher stumbling on his students' twitters full of inappropriate tweets about partying and drinking. Many of the students did not know that all their tweets were public. I can't imagine getting a glimpse of their Facebook page.

What I wonder is if these kids ever stopped to think about their privacy on social media. Did they even take a look at their privacy settings on Facebook? I don't have twitter so I don't know if there is a way to make tweets private or not. Did they take their privacy for granted?

It also brought up very interesting questions of what do I do if I was in that teacher's shoes? Does those online tweets count as confessions or do they not have enough evidence to take action? Even though technology will be amazing to work with in the classroom, it may be troublesome to deal with as an authority in the community. Not that I didn't already have enough trouble trying to figure out technology as it is. *mutter* stupid macs *

Dewey on Super Powers

I recently read John Dewey's Creed and another article.

http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm

John Dewey: A Significant Contributor to the Field of Educational Technology by Peter Rich and Thomas C. Reeves (2006) 

For those of you randomly passing by my blog, John Dewey is revered as one of the coolest persons to exist in today's era. And by cool I mean influential and philosophically mind blowing especially in the field of Education. You should check out the long list of his works on the website. It's literally more than 4/5ths of the home page. Is combined works and writings fill up 37 volumes (Rich and Reeves). These just go to show you how much he has dedicated to the field. Also check out his creed which is 11 pages when copy and pasted into word.

His creed has plenty of interesting philosophies and points but the thing that stuck out most to me is his use of the word "power." Plenty of definitions and contexts arises when he used the word but the first that came to mind was a SUPER POWER! I mean it kind of makes sense. Educators are looking to allow kids to do something in the world, why not make it SUPER! So that's the framework for the rest of my reflection upon his piece.

Dewey starts off by defining what education is to him.

"I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness 

of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and 

arousing his feelings and emotions... The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction."

Fair enough. It pretty much says that super heroes are born with their innate super abilities and need to be developed. Dumping them into radioactive waste won't magically make them super and definitely won't help them learn how to control their abilities. These abilities slowly develop and start showing signs. They won't know what to do with them but they randomly appear like Harry accidentally making the glass disappear and allowing the snakes to run free. We'll call these the Interests that the students start to notice. 

In all the super hero movies and stories, how do they start to control their power? Their power is often caused by some emotion. Then the mentor says, "think about what you were feeling when it first happened accidentally" and then it works. Same thing with the kids says Dewey! You can't foster and develop their interests without relating the to some experience they have. Make the curriculum relevant to the students!

" In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all his powers."

Dewey puts special emphasis on social relationships and experiences helping foster knowledge and that schools are meant to develop these special communities. Think about it. We want the right students to bring the super power to the good side. We don't need any Sith lords' influences. 

The lines of "putting the child under existing conditions," made me think of simulations. The ideas and philosophy of Dewey paved the way for thinking of many of the games and simulations that kids use in classrooms. The idea is to bring real life experiences to them while scaffolding the difficulty of real life or else Dewey argues it would be overwhelming. You can't just throw Superman as a teenager into a battle that involves the entire Justice League! (Forget about the discrepancy in the timeline and just run with the analogy please.) Simulations have finally started to become useful and realistic with today's technology. Think about the matrix and how they used simulations to learn how to jump really far or practice martial arts. 

There's a bunch of other things that are mind opening about Dewey's works but I don't have the time to get into it all. I hope you enjoyed reading. Come back for more in a week! 

Dream Tech-ed Out Classroom

If you were able to put anything into your classroom, what would you put in it? How would you set it up? Why did you choose the things you chose?

My quick draw dream classroom. As you may notice, I am a chemist. I split my room up into two sections. One for a full classroom setting, seen on the right, and the lab section, on the left. The full classroom setting would be great for classical lecturing but I primarily would use it for full classroom discussions. The tables would be set up in a U-shape in order to best facilitate dialogue around both classroom curriculum and topics of social justice. 

The left side of the room is where I expect to spend the most of the time. Ideally there would be more lab benches but my page is only so big. Each lab bench would have a group of 2-3 students. They would share and open bench, a computer, sink, and a hood. It believe it would be ideal to have a computer at each lab bench in order to input data and analyze it immediately.

I put in two machines for use. Both of which help determine atomic structure and have high analytical capabilities. These would be ideal to help characterize compounds during a lab. Yes, they would be highly expensive. 

The modern day technology I implemented were nothing new to a classroom. From this I noticed how limited my mind is on the uses of technology. Many things that came up in discussion that I never would have thought of. Some were simple things like making sure the tables are able to roll and reconfigure the classroom. Others were more complicated and futuristic like a hologram projector (Iron Man projection as partner called it).

I can only imagine if that were possible technology today. My classroom could hold full simulations of chemical reactions without the danger of it or the costliness of reagents and solutions. That would change the face of the chemistry curriculum. Obviously, that is not completely possible at this time.

I have plenty to learn about how to fully utilize technology to engage and motivate my students. I hope I stay open-minded to future options and will be able to stay on top of the technological revolution. Hold me to it!