Thesis Statement

Classrooms traditionally try and teach subjects without getting the learner situated in the right context for that learning to occur properly, this can lead to student boredom and a lack of class participation. Using James Paul Gee’s new literacy theories of Situated cognition and Semiotic domains to create a game with built in tools that bring the identity from the game into the classroom, we can improve student motivation and participation.

Abstract

Good video games allow for the player to take on a new identity. This new identity encourages and motivates them to participate in social spaces for that game. By bringing this sense of new identity and contextualized social spaces to classrooms, students will feel greater motivation and interest towards the subject at hand or tangential ones. The paper will test video games as learning material for a college level game design class. A prototype game focused on level design will be played and tested by various students and professors. Their feedback will evaluate the viability of this proposal

Proposal

Video games offer two major advantages when it comes to learning. They can provide a good simulation of the subject matter along with timely feedback and extrinsic motivations (points, achievements). This gives the player a space to practice while they learn and helps towards mastery of the “mechanics”.

The other major advantage, and possibly the more important one is that good video games help the player take on a new identity and interact with experiences from that new lens. Good games form good communities that can self-structure, organize and have large productive discussions. In a classroom setting this new identity and community can provide learners a safe space to fail, test out new ideas and play with new identities. This can help improve both their motivation and help them find their comfortable space in the semiotic domain.

Right now different commercial video games aid education in various ways. Games provide a deeper feedback loop as educators can see more clearly where points of struggle are. Professional industries use video games for training. The two biggest simulation markets currently are Military and aviation. Games like “LockHeedmartin’s P3D” (https://www.prepar3d.com/) and “Command modern Ops” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command:_Modern_Air_Naval_Operations) are used by pilots and the military respectively to teach and train as they provide above mentioned benefits of learning. If you read the manuals to them, they come across as software more than games but they have affordances to “play” for fun. (such as missions , scores , levels , ect..).

As a casual consumer you can still have a lot of fun playing these simulations and participate in a wider community that lets you learn content and actually practice it within the game. For example mature flying enthusiasts play P3D as part of a virtual airliner. This is a meta-game where you flight for a virtual airline, following procedures and schedules. Players are organized into different roles such as air control traffic, different tiers of pilots, planners and company owners (http://qvirtual.com.au/).

For schools, students and teachers have a few options. MinecraftEdu (https://education.minecraft.net/) offers lesson plans with custom made levels and is best supplemented with other learning material. Teacher gaming (https://store.teachergaming.com/) offers a more broad scope. It uses many different games and has different lessons associated with each. It has lessons in biology, math, languages, astronomy etc… Each lesson, similar to MinecraftEdu offers supplementary reading material to help you get up to speed on the concept. Both Minecraft and teacher gaming, according to the websites are best played with instructors there to help and actually teach the concepts while the games just re-enforce it. The games help practice concepts but are useless without the structure of the lesson and productive reflection.

Using James Paul Jee theory of the situated learning matrix which proposes that we learn better if we first learn to take on an “Identity” whatever that may be (Pilot, physicist, ect..), we learn the goals/norms of that identity (Jargon,tools used, ect..) and how they do what they do, through that lens learners can learn the content of the subject.

Video games as a simulation are a good base for learning as they provide among many things

  1. Psychosocial Moratorium (A simulated world in which to fail)
  2. Active control.
  3. Amplification of input.
  4. Principle of discovery.
  5. Immediate and appropriate feedback.

Using these benefits and creating a game that also provides in-build feedback/community tools that are tailored to the classroom we can take advantage of both the simulation power and community power that playing with these identities afford. This paper will test a prototype game made for a college level game design course and will focus on level design. Testing will be on qualitative interviews from learners and teachers about the subject before and after play to gauge their current interest and future interests. This will be compared with simple analytics such as time played, levels complete to gather insight into the success of this proposal.