Course description
Gaming is poised to become the dominant form of media in the twenty-first century, overtaking the film, television, and music industries. Unsurprisingly, there has been a newfound respect and increased enthusiasm for educational games. However, the curious problem with much of the academic discourse around educational games is that they are still viewed as mere content-delivery mechanisms from the lens of formal schooling environments. On the other hand, the corporate-technology world is also having a profound influence on the discourse of educational games with newly coined buzzwords such as gamification permeating through all sorts of informal learning environments. To make matters worse, there has been a constellation of new and emerging technologies that are constantly shifting what it means to learn. What is most curious, however, is that while modern schools have only been around for a few hundred years and various forms of digital edutainment for even less, games and play are thousands of years old. If we instead shift our mindset to understanding games and play as a sort of natural literacy—as tools for thinking, discovery, reflection, and expression—we might better understand how to design educational games in the twenty-first century. Instead of calling them video games, we consider how gaming technologies afford new possibilities for representing learning. To take full advantage of these affordances, we embark on thoughtful critiques of traditional ideas of learning that come from formal environments and also parse through some of the outlandish claims of tech companies. We explore alternative pedagogies, alternative ways of measurement, and the best lessons learned from informal learning environments. At the same time, all these alternatives are still very much steeped in research-backed findings from the learning sciences. While we explore much of the research in the learning sciences, this course is less interested in debating the particulars of the research findings and more interested in distilling and creatively translating these findings into playful design in a variety of learning contexts.
