Changing

I started a new blog specifically for my interest in games. It is called Instructional Games in Libraries, and I have transferred a lot of relevant posts from this blog to that one. I've been thinking for a while of changing the focus of this blog to something more specific, but have decided to just start fresh and focused on a new site.



I'm not sure how much I will be posting here from now on. Instead, I will be focusing my energies on developing that one. I think we've only scratched the surface on the potential of games as instructional tools in libraries. I can't wait to attend some of the sessions on this at ACRL on this, nor can I wait to see what other schools do with these.

The day got better

I've had some good meetings today, won a t-shirt for being the last official customer at the campus cafe for the semester plus a free biscotti & orange... and the big news is I just got an e-mail saying my poster for ACRL was next on the waiting list and someone just dropped out. I think after accepting the utter disappointment yesterday, it makes it oh so much sweeter.

I'm very happy I'm getting to the conference many days in advance... that will help as I try and figure out how to get a poster across the country... I like the recent post about this on Please Be Quiet.

Library Game

I came across an e-mail on one of my listservs that pointed to Ohio State's online library game called Head Hunt, that is meant to be an introduction to incoming freshmen and their families. The game part is Brutus (the OSU mascot) is missing his head. For each part of the tutorial you complete (mostly trivia, some matching, one puzzle), you get a letter that helps you figure out where Brutus's head is.

I really like using the school's mascot as the central part of the game. That symbolically brings in the bigger picture of the campus and draws in a wider audience (what athlete or sports fan doesn't care about fixing the mascot?). While at first I was annoyed by the different uses of multimedia (it first struck me as disjointed), I later came to appreciate the variety in the activities.

My biggest complaint is that I can't figure out where the head is because I'm awful at word scrambles. That has nothing to do with library skills, and it's disappointing to someone who completed all but the last step. I really want to know where the head is.

But the more serious criticism I have for this particular game is that it doesn't encourage discovery. There are no links to outside resources to help the user figure out the answer. The crossword puzzle offers "hints" that outright give the answer. This is something I'm really working on in my own tutorial.

Overall, I thought this was a good game, I just wish I could have finished it.

Educational Game

I found a Web site that listed games with a social impact. Only one of the games is still available, and it's pretty cute. It was done by the government of Seattle to help educate people on ways to save water. It's hokey and very, very easy (it's obviously meant for a younger audience), but I'm thinking I could use something like this for the tutorial part of my games and followed up by questions, matching, etc. This could be fun.

Focus Group Heaven

Last night I organized a focus group of students to help me brainstorm ideas for developing my instructional games. In exchange for their help, I made them chicken Marbella (my favorite!), mashed potatoes, and chocolate fondue with fruit.

I had 8 or 9 students from the Creative Arts Society (CAS) show up, and it was sooo much fun. I wish every focus group could go so well. They actually enjoyed the games as they were, which amazed me. They loved the "Secret Agent" story. So here are some of the ideas and suggestions they came up with... and I did encourage them to say whatever came to mind.

• Have laser tag in the library and when you find certain library resources, you get several seconds of immunity


• If you want the students to be more active, you could have a central, physical place to get maps and other resources.


• Add "Your mission, if you choose to accept it..." message to the secret agent theme. Along that line, I think I'll add "this message will self destruct in 5 seconds" and then an explosion animation.


• Add video clips and sound clips from James Bond, Carmen Sandiego, Q (the Bond weapons guy?), or Frankenstein for the monster game


• Allow teams to choose a name


• For freshman orientation, do a themed (pirates?) scavenger hunt. Could involve points, keep score with tokens, passbook, or big board to award prizes at end.


• Again for orientation, split each cluster of students into groups, each group with a different color of handouts. Each color will be a different track, where one clue will lead to the next.


• Reminisced about the "Temple of the Hidden Monkey" where contestants had to build monkey statues while avoiding guards. In this case, library staff could be guards that deduct points if they catch students running.


• Involve having them get video clues in one of the screening rooms


• Have some kind of lock box they're working to open, which will contain small prizes like lollipops at the end (going along with the secret agent theme)


• They liked the Web evaluation part of the game, they called them "real and fake sites"


• Have the "correct site" unlock something (I don't remember the context here)


• More on databases, they wish they had known about them earlier


• They were excited about "Choose Your Own Adventure" type games. I've done simple HTML games along these lines, there is potential for more here. They particularly focused on scholarly vs. popular journals here... we went off about turning in a paper based on articles found in Vogue :)


• They really liked the idea of animating the Boolean operators sequence. Right now it's tutorial-like, but eventually I'd like to give students AND & OR buttons where pressing on those buttons will rearrange objects that fit the search (like only the spies wearing yellow coats AND red pants).


• Could make author-themed games, like Poe (ravens, grave yards, tombs by the sea, beating hearts, pendulums, etc.)


• They think we can assume students have cameras with them, esp. on cell phones. Could use those for photo scavenger hunts.


• They thought the ideas of Big Games were really cool. I told them about juxtaposing maps of campus or Williamsport with some other map and asked what map? They suggested Gotham (if it exists), Narnia, Middle Earth, or Eragon

Games I need to look at:

• "Escape from the Basement" (series of places to escape from)


• "Myst" - puzzle game where you have to click on objects in your area


• "Escape Artist"


• "Trapped" - this involves talking to characters you meet, which determines the outcome of the game


• "Oblivion" - there has already been discussion on how people could reorganize this game for their own needs. They suggested talking to a student named Ian Shepard (a.k.a. "Shade").

So you can see it was a productive night. I'm going to include the nice picture I took of them now because I liked both pictures so much and couldn't choose between the two.

Director support

It's so nice to have a director who supports you. In my new-found interest in game-based learning, my director has agreed to buy cheap speakers for me to use in the instruction classroom. Sound makes such a huge difference in the gaming experience. She also gave me $40 for groceries to make a home-cooked meal for the students who are coming in tonight for my focus group. I hope we can come up with some creative ideas for making my "games" more game-like.

BTW, our football team won their conference on Saturday and we're going to the playoffs! I'm hoping to find someone to go with if my husband goes with the team. No one could have convinced me two years ago that I'd get this happy about football.

A success

My experiments with video games in the classroom payed off yesterday. I lengthened the activity considerably and it took them about 30 minutes to complete. That left us with time to go over a few things, this time it was mostly review.

I have to write up a poster on this and get it to the printer by Monday, which is why I'm at work today. I think my poster is coming along nicely, my husband has promised to go over it with me tomorrow since he has experience presenting his biology research.

The current poster is for our regional workshop on the 31st. I really want to submit a proposal for ACRL, which is due on Monday. I don't know if this project is good enough, but I just have to get over my inferiority complex and accept that I will never get anywhere if I don't try. I really think I'm on to something great here, even if I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly enough, I don't think students mind the simplicity of the program. They genuinely seemed to have fun, and teased me about being a spy, or did James Bond impressions while finding their books and during the review.

What needs more development is the story. This seems to be more important than sophisticated technology. If it can seem less library-like and more roll-playing, I think the students will have even more fun, which means they will learn more.

I have been reading books and articles on related topics, though for a poster session I don't understand how you back up the project with past research. My brain is craving to sit down and do this so I can understand where to go next. I am excited that I have one more freshman composition class in a few weeks, so there's still time this semester to work on this, though not before the regional workshop. That's okay, I am very excited at how well the class went yesterday and think what I have is more than just "good enough."

Book Review

Title: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Author: James Paul Gee

Published in 2003

Cited by 1,088 in Google Scholar

I just finished this book last night and I highly recommend it to any librarian, whether or not you have any interest in video games. It is more about how people learn and why video games engage people more than traditional education systems do. It discusses active learning, critical learning, and is closely related to or even part of inquiry-based learning.

Gee has a background in theoretical and social linguistics. The book is heavy on theory after a lot of reading and playing games. However, even for people like me who don't always get theory, it's easy to read and there is much to learn from him. Indeed, I took eight pages of notes, but I will condense them for this post.

A "semiotic domain" is a set of practices that communicate distinctive types of meaning. You can learn facts without learning a new semiotic domain. This involves a) learning to experience the world in new ways b) potential to join this group/affiliation c) gaining resources to prepare for future learning in that and related domains. These three things make up active learning, but you can go beyond active learning to critical learning. This involves thinking about the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts, and how to innovate meanings within the domain.

Identities are very important to learning. Students bring in their identities including what type of learner they are (i.e. "I'm not good at science), you strive to make them see themselves as a type of mini-scientist or historian (etc.), and there's the relationship/transition between the two. This is like a gamer's real-world identity, the virtual identity, and the relationship between the two. This last one is called the "projective identity," and is how you project your real-world identity onto the virtual identity, or how you project your past identity onto your identity as a scientist. If the learner can get to the projective identity, they learn they have the capacity to make the virtual identity part of their real-world identity. He points out this is more magical than any video game. All learning involves taking on a new identity.

Video games are good at creating "psychosocial moratoriums," which are important to learning. They are spaces where the real-world consequences of mistakes are reduced while they learn how to move or interact with the new material. Learners must be enticed to try, put lots of effort into learning, and achieve some meaningful success. Video games offer lots of opportunities to practice, while schools don't. This practice is often repetitive, but it forces players to apply knowledge to new situations (called "transfer"), and punishes players who have a "routinized mastery." Learners should always be required to operate at the outer edge of their resources, that way the tasks will be doable, but very challenging.

Good games offer and accept multiple solutions to each problem. Players get clues, make hypotheses, test them out, then reform their hypotheses and apply them to new situations. This is how they form patterns, which is what all learning is.

Practice needs to be carefully mixed with overt telling. You can't just let the students go off on their own and expect them to learn. You can do this by periodically assessing their progress, give feedback/lecture, then let them continue.

Learning is a very social activity, just like gaming. While seeking patterns, a person asks other people, reads books, interacts with tools/technologies. They usually share what they have learned, eventually with a group. Otherwise that person has no way to know if the patterns they have formed are real. who will normalize or police their views if they deviate too far from the norm of the group. When there is a disagreement, there is a dialog (more social sharing of information). This interaction and ability to use tools is important in the real-world, yet our schools test what's in the learner's brain rather than what they can do when the use the tools.

Good video games not only allow for consuming, but producing as well. Players can modify worlds, create maps, post on online bulletin boards, and communicate tips and opinions.

Instead of saying video games are a waste of time, we should be looking into why people will spend so many hours learning how to play a game without feeling the same enthusiasm for school. In video games, "hard" is often good, while "easy" is often bad. The argument in this book isn't that good things are necessarily being learned, rather that good learning often occurs during video game playing.