Category Archives: Blog

Games in Education: September issue of NITLE’s Transformations

302394_300 NITLE, the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, has started a new platform called Transformations for articles and case studies of pedagogy and technology. The September 2013 issue of Transformations is on Games in Education, and features five great articles on incorporating games into higher education, as well as two interviews: one with Anastasia Salter of the University of Baltimore (and plenary panelist at the CUNY Games Festival on January 17, 2014!), and the other with CUNY Games Network member and City Tech library faculty member Maura Smale. The entire issue is fantastic, so do check it out!

Not Everyone Owned a Cotton Gin

Cotton_gin_harpersEric Zimmerman recently posted a manifesto on what he calls the Ludic Century as a prelude to his forthcoming book “The Gameful World.” The manifesto predicts that our increasingly data driven culture will be largely accessed through user interfaces inspired by digital games.

Abe Stein, a research affiliate with the MIT Game Lab, thoughtfully expressed concerns that the Ludic Century is biased toward Western Culture. Stein faults Zimmerman’s manifesto for failing to acknowledge that a large portion of the world does not consume games or digital technology.

While we cannot deny the statistics on global Internet usage or that access to digital technology is restricted in much of the world, there are several studies that indicate these trends are changing. As American audiences continue to grow, so does the proportion of global Internet users. Pew Internet indicates that over 90% of American Adults own cell phones. Meeker and Wu estimate global Internet at only 34%, but they demonstrate that global usage has grown 8% since last year and exponential growth is predicted for the future. This growth rate has been confirmed by The World Bank.

The changing technological landscape can also be witnessed by the trends in game development. Digital technology is becoming more affordable every year, and digital games are migrating rapidly to mobile platforms. Developers who produce and publish to mobile platforms have a broader audience. Consequently, more of the world will have access to games this century.

In his book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Jared Diamond illustrated how the smallest shift in the tide between cultures can have profound consequences. The introduction of a few guns to the Maori natives of the Cheatham Islands led to the slaughter of the Moriori in New Zealand. While games may not be ubiquitous, the availability of mobile technology will put games in the hands of a significant number of users. Democratization does not equate with ubiquity, but there will be enough users to influence other aspects of culture.

The cotton gin revolutionized production in America, which had far reaching consequences for the world. I use the word “revolutionized” judiciously because the cotton gin is viewed as creating a demand for slavery in the American South, which eventually led to the American Civil War. Similarly, one need not be a direct consumer of digital games to be profoundly influenced by their design principles.

Originally posted on TransformativeGames.org

How Meta: A Review of Games that Teach Programming

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Learning to program in Logo

There is clearly a need to infuse programming literacy into the Common Core. Disciplines that traditionally reside outside of the domain of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are slowly becoming more technical as the conduit between practitioner and audience migrates to the Internet and mobile devices. Within STEM, those who acquire programming skills are at advantage now that datasets are growing more complicated (e.g., The Brain Initiative). As a case study, consider one of my friends, a postdoctoral fellow studying parasites at Rockefeller University. She spent her evenings this summer steeped in a Python programming language course so that she could learn how to integrate the many software bundles that are now required for her to analyze data. Another friend is a full time programmer for a molecular biology lab at Columbia University. And yet another is a programmer working as a technical designer for the fashion industry. Few of us have to look far to find an acquaintance that is a programmer or had to learn to code to support a non-technical field.

Learning to code is currently a long and difficult path, but it doesn’t have to be. With proper instruction and good tools, programming should be no more complicated than learning a language. What if the act of learning to program was a game itself? Rob Lockhart reviews the current state of affairs in teaching kids to program using games. He also touches on the other tools that teach programming to kids, but the list is not intended to be comprehensive.

Originally posted in TransformativeGames.org