Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Notes:

Someone just turned on the lights in room 8. People groaned. @pistachio: Yes, this is definitely the 8am college class.

Karen Lin: I think that video games can offer a new opportunity to learn. My AP classes are like 30 pages of reading a night, small print.

Lin: And if anyone gave me an opportunity to learn but not have to read, I would take it.

Mike Anderson: Imagine sitting in a class, you're inside a game & actually living it. And you're making decisions & seeing the ramifications

Anderson: Instead of taking a 100 question multiple choice test, you've leveled up.

Anderson: And instead of asking your instructor for answers, you ask your fellow gamers.

Anderson: Imagine having a game about how to not start wars, rather than starting battles.

Gold: NASA recently put out an RFP for the creation MMORPGs that teach math and science.

Eliza Gold: As engaging as videogames are, it makes sense to apply some of it to schools and learning.

Gold: Part of what makes it hard for students to be motivated is because what's taught is taught out of context...

Gold: It's harder to learn material than way than when it's applied in an actual real-world situation.

Gold: Trig is much more interesting when you're trying to build a bridge.

Gold: It's possible that videogames could be used to help people learn curriculum in a real world sort of way.

Gold: The only thing that's standing in the way is attitudes. The structure of teaching methods hasn't really changed since medieval times.

NASA MMORPG RFP. @geosteph, were you involved in this? http://tinyurl.com/29d7xk

McShaffry: I recognized how games changed my behavior in the real world.

McShaffry: Kids playing Guitar Hero now have an appreciation for classic rock and now have a connection to you as parents.

McShaffry: College is going to be around for a long time. If they're lucky they'll incorporate games but games will _never_ replace them.

Anderson: Sometimes the learning is going on with the players in the game, not with the faculty. How will universities react?

Gold: They won't react well because that's not how universities are set up. But change is coming.

Gold: It's becoming less about what we have in our heads & more about who we know, & how we go about using our networks to find information.

High school student Karen on faculty talking like gamers: I don't think it'll be creepy. I'd be shocked at first.

Karen: Are they really trying to incorporate something fun into the curric?

Karen: I think people who are skeptical about using games in education it would spark something in them.

McShaffry: Games puts something into a fun and engaging environment. It may be quirky, but it's not stupid and annoying.

McShaffry: It actually functions as a learning piece.

McShaffry: And that's the big mistake that often in edusoftware: they try to force a square peg into a round hole...

McShaffry: and kids say that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, so you've just wasted a lot of everyone's time.

Gold: Creating games that aren't about achieving points but interacting with the environment and having to pry info from it and other users.

Anderson: if we've got content access in Wikipedia etc, we need to be teaching kids about how to evaluate that content...

rather than teaching just the content itself.

This is a really great panel. Anderson's moderating it well...

Anderson: Games don't punish you for playing. McShaffry: Ultima certainly did. LOL

McS: You want to feel that it's just beyond your skill but that you can make it.

McS: In big classes, not everyone learns at the same pace; just the thin slice of kids in the middle.

McS: That's why our education system fails, because we don't have a system for kids to learn at their right level.

McS: But that's where games help, because they can measure a person's skill level and adjust accordingly.

Gold: A potentially huge advantage of games is their scale. A Halo multiplayer context.

Gold: Not necessarily 500 students to one teacher, but small groups of students working together within multiple instances of the same game.

Gold: One of the challenges, though, is the assessment of learning. That's a big part of school, and it's a big part of instruction.

Gold: How do you know that the student's you've taught have learned anything. The whole NCLB movement was about that.

Gold: Video games, of course, address that by assessing players as they play the game...

...but it's boiled down to pretty simple behaviors in the game, and that might be more akin to a multiple choice test.

Gold: So it's still out there as a challenge to develop interactive games that are more subtle, complex and rich.

Gold: When I talk to middle school students, do you learn anything from playing these games?

Gold: In their minds, they're like, well, yeah, I can play the game better, race better...

Gold: In their minds they weren't seeing the underlining skills that they were picking up in the game.

Gold: I think that that's another aspect of our challenge. When you teach someone, you want them to know that they've learned it.

Anderson: I think if they learned but didn't realize it, that'd be okay. It took me a year at NewsCorp to realize I didn't know anything.

Gold quotes Twain: Don't let school get in the way of your education.

McS: The only serious game that I ever got to work on was a navy game called 24 Blue, an aircraft carrier sim.

McS: They flew us out to the USS Truman, and we got to land on the carrier, spend four days there during flight ops.

McS: The Discovery Channel doesn't do it justice.

McS: When you feel the heat of the F-15 tomcat on your face and someone pulls you down and saves your life, that's when it hits you.

We were developing a game to capture the physical size and space, the hand signals used, who does what. It was all critical to human life.

McS: Can playing the game replace the experience? No, it's different....

McS: But it can show you more about what's going there so when you get there, you brain won't be as frazzled and terrified.

McS: If I'd played the game before going I would have known what to expect.

Gold: Games have a set of rules in order to win. Sims are more like a toy, a set of processes you can interact with.

Gold: There are rules, of course, but there isn't necessarily a way to win the simulation.

Gold: Games can be complex systems, and sims make that complexity a bit more transparent and available for the user.

Gold: Sims can help learners understand better complex systems, like running a city.

I'm so glad Anderson had a high school student on the panel offering perspectives with the game designers.

McS: In a few decades, we won't be interacting with hardware anymore, we're just gonna jack in, be in a virtual world ourselves.

McS: At that point, it becomes a matter of the sim industry being at a point where you can scan something in a matter of seconds...

...and having it become an instant simulation.

McS: That particular environment may mean you can learn and fail without horrific consequences.

McS: Guitar hero - one string, five frets. Can you learn guitar on it? No, but it teaches you something about the music.

Just asked a question about when students will be able to create their own games/sims in the classroom.

McS said the opening of MS's XNA game studio will democratize game development and distribution.