Extra Credit List of Games for Education

The team at Extra Credit, a web video series dedicated to games and game culture, have compiled a very useful list of games they deem suitable for educational purposes in the online store Steam. Check it out!

shameless plug: narRITives project space

Andrea and I have begun working with Brian Larson in CIAS to develop narRITives, an interdisciplinary project to develop and curate digital stories from RIT. See here.

Andrea and I will talk about this project when we meet up in March (after the February meeting focusing on GBL with Trent). We will also discuss each of our approaches to project-based and problem-based learning. More information forthcoming!

Next meeting: 2/29/16 for dinner and conversation

I finally found a use for this image—love it! Juilee

 

For 2/29 Trent has asked us to:
1) read two articles
2) play one game  "Aviti: The Cost of Life"& 
3) take a stab at designing an assignment, unit, or course that takes advantage of some game or game-based principle.

When we meet, we will discuss the readings and workshop ideas and plans.
See you at 5:45!
(photo credit: See https://mathsimulationtechnology.wordpress.com/game)

Before you head to U of R, begin at RIT for talk on gameplay & iterations

When:    Friday, February 5, 2016
Where:   Golisano College 70-1455
Time:     11:00 am
Experimental Gameplay and the Iterative Process
Presentation by
Ian Schreiber

PhD Research Colloquium in Computing and Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology

Lecture @ U of R: “Video Games & Learning”

Friday, February 5, 2016

Introduction: Andrea Hickerson, Journalism

I teach a variety of traditional journalism courses including Law & Ethics of the Press and the History of Journalism, but I also teach project-based courses like the "Digital Journalism Incubator" and Interviewing.

At this point in my career I'm looking for more creative and engaging in-class activities. I'm particularly concerned that students don't push themselves enough in interpersonal interactions with peers and sources for journalism stories.  I have an idea to partner with an improv group for an activity about "difficult interviewees" for my interviewing class, but I'm not sure how to structure it. Furthermore, I'm keen to try game-based learning in my History and Law courses. The former is particularly challenging for students, and I'm sure there is a way to make case law fun...I just haven't figured it out yet. 

I'm also interested in critical game theory.  Integrating games and journalism - or the idea of doing so - is a hot topic. However, I'm hard pressed to think of an organization that has done it well. I'm interested in exploring how good and thoughtful uses of games can be integrated into the journalism process without seeming forced or tacked on to a more traditional form of storytelling.

Introduction: Michael Brown, History and Museum Studies

One strand of my research looks at debates about the role of intellectuals in American political culture after World War II.  I am interested in the anxieties and hopes aroused by the presence of intellectuals in public life, as well as the way in which the role of the intellectual was constructed and reconstructed in relation to those anxieties and hopes.  A second strand of my scholarship addresses the public history of the Rochester region.  In particular, I am interested in the prospects of a “usable past” at the local level—a public engagement with history that may nourish civic, cultural, and economic renewal.   An overriding concern with modes of intervention by academics in American democratic culture weaves together the two strands of my research agenda.  I think often about the overlap between the “public historian” and the “public intellectual.”

I am intrigued by GBL/PBL as both a teacher and a scholar.  As a teacher, I am on the lookout for new ways of enhancing students’ learning.  I regularly use projects as culminating assignments in my classes, and my sense is that I could extend project-based learning from a solo endeavor at the end of the semester to a class-wide mode of learning throughout the semester.  In particular, I would like to identify student projects that not only result in students’ learning but also in a tangible piece of public engagement.  Could student projects, for example, make significant contributions to local public history?  This question intersects with my interest in civically engaged scholarship.  To what extent can projects that we do within the academy become sites for dialogue and partnership with the community?

I often make analogies to popular computer games in my lectures, and these moments seem to pique student interest.  As someone concerned with how students learn about history, I recognize that these games are frequently young people’s first and most intensive engagement with historical content.  A critical approach to historical games—understanding how game dynamics can both represent and distort historical conditions—might be a helpful prelude to projects in which students not only play such games but design them as pedagogical tools for helping others learn about history.  I am also interested in how games can map onto historical landscapes, like the re-creation of 1920s Rochester by Trent’s class.  To what extent can games recover historical spaces and, through games that require students to move through those spaces (virtually or “IRL”), foster historical preservation and ultimately a “sense of place”?