TEA Posting

The New York Times Magazine for September 19 has a lengthy article about New York City’s Quest to Learn school, an experimental public secondary school that organizes learning around games and other 21st century literacies. The school was founded by our colleague Katie Salen of the New School’s Parson School of Design. (Katie is one of the co-authors of the Ed Arcade’s Moving Learning Games Forward, available here.)

The headline in the January 12th New York Times read, At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard. The article described how introductory physics lectures have been replaced by the TEAL (Technology-Enhanced Active Learning) program, in which students work in clusters around workstations in a lab setting, engaged in hands-on, interactive collaboration. The story—which reports that TEAL has resulted in higher attendance and lower failure rates among students—must have hit a responsive chord, as it remained one of the Times most e-mailed articles for a week.

I am now embarking on a research journey to adapt Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo to a digital game under the steady guiding hand of The Education Arcade's Creative Director, Scot Osterweil. When Scot and I first discussed possible topics for a directed research project that I would undertake over the course of this academic year, I immediately thought of this idea, which had been floating around in my head for the past year. Monte Cristo is an incredibly rich and fascinating story full of adventure, mystery, and revenge. It has been my favorite novel since childhood, which adds a very personal dimension, and it is also one of Dumas’ longest and most complex works.

Prior to coming to MIT to study with the Comparative Media Studies program and to be a research assistant with the Education Arcade, I worked with the Games, Learning, and Society program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research was driven by my interest in how the athletes at the University of Wisconsin were using commercial games to enhance their training. I wanted to point out some reasons why sport video games have many qualities that make them ideally suited for learners.

Working on games like Labyrinth and Caduceus has forced me to think a great deal about what constitutes a compelling game world. Both of these worlds are wildly fantastic in their respective ways. The former is an underground cavern where monsters from another dimension run a pet food factory for nefarious purposes. The latter is a Victorian, “Age of Sail” fantasy where locomotives and dirigibles are powered by magic. In each case, the world is vivid enough to constitute its own character. And as with any character we create, it behooves us as designers to respect the coherence and internal consistency of our worlds.

The appearance of a story on Ted Castranova's Arden: The World of William Shakespeare in last month's issue of WIRED began a discussion around The Education Arcade about academia's role in game creation and specifically in creating educational games (since that's what we do). This post by Ed. Arcade Creative Director Scot Osterweil continues a series of posts we'll run on the topic. We hope to begin a discussion in the educational game community about their best practices, so please comment with links to some of your own thoughts and best practices!

The appearance of a story on Ted Castranova's Arden: The World of William Shakespeare in last month's issue of WIRED began a discussion around The Education Arcade about academia's role in game creation and specifically in creating educational games (since that's what we do). This post by Ed. Arcade head honcho Eric Klopfer is the first in a series of posts we'll run on the topic. We hope to begin a discussion in the educational game community about their best practices, so please comment with links to some of your own thoughts and best practices!

Before coming to MIT to study with the Comparative Media Studies program and to apprentice with the Education Arcade, I worked in public health. My research was primarily policy-driven, trying to understand consumer needs and desires through qualitative methods. One of my areas of interest was information technology, specifically “new media,” and its potential as a communication tool.

Returning to the same well twice, learning.now blogger Andy Carvin has an interesting new post up about a panel at this year's South by Southwest Interactive (Disclosures: Ed Arcade Advisor and CMS big cheese Henry Jenkins was one of the keynote speakers at SXSWi this year and writes about it here. Less relevantly, I helped program the narrative shorts and features for the 2001 and 2002 SXSW Film festivals.).

The Game Developer's Conference, GDC for short, is the annual meeting of the entire video games industry: from studio executives to indie developer to academics, just about everyone who works with games for a living either attends or follows the proceedings. Last year I covered some of the more interesting presentations; this year I'll discuss some of the prevalent themes to come out of the conference.