Game programming, the Computer Game Design, Programming, Multimedia and Mathematics Cluster Tony Forster ASISTM Computer Game Design, Programming, Multimedia and Mathematics Cluster.
ABSTRACT The Computer Game Design, Programming, Multimedia and Mathematics Cluster consists of 6 schools and 2 organizations which were early adopters of game programming. This paper discusses the underlying pedagogy of game programming and the experiences of the Cluster
THE BEGINNINGS
The computer games project had its genesis around 2002 when a number of teachers independently recognised the power of the freeware programming language Gamemaker for promoting literacy and numeracy for younger students and for providing a motivating pathway to computer programming for older students.
By 2003, there were Gamemaker projects at Woodville High, Newtown High, Newman College, Glenelg School and Haileybury College. These schools were operating largely in isolation unaware of each others existence. In June 2004, a discussion forum was set up, which sustained a growing community of Gamemaker teachers.
With the granting of Commonwealth Australian School Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM) funding in 2005, the cluster formally came into existence. The Cluster is a geographically dispersed cluster of 6 schools and 2 other organisations in 3 states of Australia.
The aim of the Cluster is to draw on the motivating power of computer games to improve outcomes in design, programming, multimedia and mathematics. A range of versatile programming tools including Gamemaker, and Klik&Play are used to motivate and engage students.
The Cluster is outwards looking. It aims to engage the wider educational community in games programming through professional development courses, web resources, game programming competitions and case studies.
ACTIVITIES
Web resources Web based communications are a major component in our strategy to promote the educational use of computer game programming. Being geographically dispersed, web based communications are important for intra cluster communication. The Cluster has made use of discussion forums, email, chat and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) applications such as Skype. The Cluster has made teaching resources available to the public through their websites.
Conferences & Professional Development The inaugural Australian Game Programming in Schools Conference was held on Friday Sep 9, 2005, at Swinburne University. The conference attracted 53 registrants from 4 states of Australia.
The cluster has held pre-service and in-service professional development for teachers on game programming. There have been over fourteen sessions held in Victoria, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and Queensland. Cluster member, Margaret Meijers has run two online professional development courses in game programming. One to a group of about 20 Tasmanian teachers in Klik&Play and the other to 35 Tasmanian teachers on Gamemaker.
The Cluster arranged for international game based learning experts, Marc Prensky to speak in Melbourne on 28 Feb 2006 and for James Gee to speak in Melbourne on 20 August 2006.
Game Programming Competition The Cluster, in partnership with member, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, has held a national Game programming Competition as part of ScreenIt,. Winners and finalists were announced and screened on 7 March 2006 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Melbourne.
ScreenIt 2006 http://www.acmi.net.au/screenit.htm will have 3 age categories, primary, 7-10 and 11- 12. This year the theme is 'water'.
Research The cluster has engaged Dr. Bernard Holkner of Monash University to produce a research report on the work of the cluster.
Award Winning Teachers Two cluster members have received awards, partly for their contributions to the Cluster.
Margaret Meijers is one of two Australian recipients of the Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award, which includes an invitation to visit the "School of the Future" in the United States. Margaret Meijers has been awarded another award. The National Awards for Quality Schooling Best National Achievement by a Teacher.
Al Upton is South Australian Computer Educator of the Year. Al's work in ICT education including game making was recognised by the Computers in Education Group of South Australia.
THE CHANGES IN EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF CHILDREN
The unprecedented growth in the power of computing and the internet raises challenges in the planning of the education of today's children. The total body of human knowledge is growing and the ability to access it from any computer is growing. Google now indexes 20,000,000,000 pages and this body of knowledge is available to anybody with web access. The changing nature of the knowledge base and its ease of access has deep implications for the roles of schools and teachers.
The kinds of things which can be done with computers is also changing, the skills which today's children will require have not yet been thought of. According to Prensky (2005), today’s children will be adults in a world where computers may be 1,000,000,000 times more powerful than today
As a result of these changes, we are less able to teach simple facts and skills which will stay relevant. There is less need to teach facts and lower order skills than the higher order cognitive and metacognitive skills that will allow children to access the facts and skills that they will need to use in the future. Games can be a powerful tool for learning in this way. The move from fact retrieval to higher order skills is recognised in the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS).
PEDAGOGY Constructivism The Cluster activities are not the result of a research project or a learning theory. They result from the experiences of practical classroom teachers doing what works for them. It is, however, worth noting that these practices are firmly grounded in learning theory.
The idea that students learn best in the context of an authentic and relevant task is not new, nor is the idea that deep understanding is more important than the rote memorisation of facts. It was well put by Plutarch (46 - 127) when he said ‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled’. Learning is not a one way transfer of information to the learner, the ‘chalk and talk’ that has characterised schools. A passion for learning is essential.
For Dewey (1933/1998), education depended on action. Knowledge and ideas emerged only from a situation in which learners had to draw them out of experiences that had meaning and importance to them . These situations had to occur in a social context, such as a classroom, where students joined in manipulating materials and, thus, created a community of learners who built their knowledge together.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980), believed that learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past knowledge. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.
He said: ‘To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition’ .
Constructionism The term Constructionism, (Papert 1991), was coined by Seymour Papert of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Constructionism, the N word as opposed to the V word, shares constructivism's connotation of learning as "building knowledge structures" irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.
Papert recognised the importance of computer games as a relevant and authentic context for learning:
‘Literature on school improvement is full of exhortations to make the content of instruction "relevant." …….. But if one does belong to a culture in which video games are important, transforming oneself from a consumer to a producer of games may well be an even more powerful way for some children to find importance in what they are doing.’ (Papert 1995)
Or as stated by Crawford (1982) ‘Games are thus the most ancient and time-honored vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one, having received the seal of approval of natural selection.’
Papert's beliefs are rooted very firmly in Piaget's findings about children's learning. Papert worked with Piaget for 5 years, applying his own expertise in maths to help build Piaget's theories.
Two points from Piaget stand out:
Children build or construct their own intellectual structures. Children build on what they know. Piaget's term for children's continual balancing of existing cognitive structures with new experiences is equilibration.
Piaget found that incredible amounts of learning occur without formal teaching. In his work, Papert tries to discover and promote the factors that are causing this "hidden" learning and also asks: Why is it that learning often does not occur with formal teaching and often does occur without formal teaching? (Kerr 1991)
From the above ideas, it flows that:
children learn by processing information through their own cognitive structures engagement is the key tasks have to be relevant and meaningful publishing of student work is important rote learning of content is less important than developing higher order cognitive skills learners should engage with the wider community it is not just publishing that is important, it is the interactive ongoing conversation in a wider environment than just the school / educational community
There are dissenting voices on the issue of Constructionism. Kirschner et al. (2006) believe that direct instruction is preferable to minimally guided instruction. They believe that the ‘advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance.’
Kirschner et al. are refuted by Kerr et al. (2006), ‘all good teachers use a variety of methods, ranging from constructivist / inquiry based at one end of the spectrum to instructionist / behaviourist / didactic at the other end of the spectrum’.
Pea and Kurland (1984), held that a child’s “attention is typically so riveted to simply getting a program to work that any appreciation for more general cognitive strategies is lost.” Programming tools have improved considerably since 1984. With the advent of drag and drop languages, children are liberated from concerns of syntax and can spend their time on higher order tasks.
COMPUTER-GAMES
Game playing Several reviews of the literature on gaming over the last forty years, including some studies that use rigorous statistical procedures to analyse findings from multiple studies (meta-analyses), have consistently found that games promote learning and/or reduce instructional time across multiple disciplines and ages. (Van Eck 2006), (Mitchell and Savill-Smith, 2004), (Rauterberg 2006), (Kirriemuir and McFarlane, 2004), ( Rauterberg 2004).
Game making Games programming can be justified on three grounds, transferable cognitive skills, metacogitive skills and affective benefits:
The idea behind transferable cognitive skills is that students are learning skills in areas such as mathematics and literacy while programming games and that these skills will transfer to the more traditional areas with measurable outcomes. Metacognitive skills are the self management skills we employ when we are learning. Affective benefits refers to our attitudes to school, teachers and classrooms. If students enjoy going to school, they will learn better.
The following skills can be learnt through game programming.
Cartesian coordinates Negative number Position, speed, acceleration Algebraic variables Relative & absolute value Estimation Chance A programming language similar to Visual Basic New unidentified skills for a digital age?
Penning a cartoon is more than the technical aspects of writing, it includes elements of artwork, plot and story. Similarly, making a computer game is more than just writing a software program. The assembly draws upon many different subjects or disciplines. Whilst most games are programmed in C+, this should not imply that teaching about programming games should use the same software tool. With software tools such as GameMaker, students can integrate and build upon their graphical, audio, logical and mathematics skills, even within the span of a single lesson and without the horrors of debugging minor, unforgiving program code errors.
Programming computer games can engage a student with an environment that they can easily use to directly create, test, modify and evaluate their programming solutions. This may inspire some to continue with their studies to learn a higher order programming language. At the very least, they may better come to understand the commercial software and edutainment offerings that they consume.
The power of games programming is its power to motivate. Game programming requires mathematical and logical skills. Good games also have a storyline, graphics and music. Good games are created by a team of creators working co-operatively.
Game programming could be a framework within which team skills, music, art, drama, maths, history, geography or almost anything could be learned. The important feature of the game is its power to motivate. Motivation leads to learning.
‘The computer is a medium of human expression and if it has not yet had its Shakespeares, its Michelangelos or its Einsteins, it will. …. We have scarcely begun to grasp its human and social implications.’ (Papert 1990)
Learning Difficulties Computer game programming has been found to be most beneficial in a case study involving Asperger’s disorder (Meijers 2005). Computer game playing may also be useful, (Harpur et al. 2004), ( Falk-Ross et al. 2004).
TWO WAY WEB
The web is a read/write medium, or a two way medium. This is development is sometimes called web 2.0. It is now possible for ordinary users to publish on the web through a variety of technologies including:
webpage Wiki, blog, podcast, videocast, Skypecast, Teamspeak, Ventrilo Flickr Google Video
The development of a two way web is significant for educators because
learners benefit from publication of their endeavours learning is a social process, it thrives in a community teachers learn from their peers schools should engage with their communities
The publication of student work is an important educational aid. Public performance is long recognised as a motivating factor for students and is well established with school sports, concerts and plays. MIT recognised it in the 80's in the context of ICT and coined the term Constructionism which is based on the idea of "Constructivism" but includes the idea that learning is especially strong where the "learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe".
Student motivation is important not only for what learning may be happening in an ICT class but in creating positive attitudes to school in general. Students who find their ICT class meaningful and motivating will like that activity, but they will also like their school.
FILTERING Schools filter a range of inappropriate web material for a number of reasons:
sexual material racist and other offensive material violence gambling illegal activities
Often game sites are blocked because they are perceived to be "bad" for children. Computer games are no more "bad" than are free reading, chess or outdoor games. They are inappropriate things to be playing when other work needs to be done but they are no more deserving of banning than free reading, chess or outdoor games.
It seems that in the order of 20% of inappropriate sites slip through filters and in the order of 20% of benign sites are blocked. It seems that internet filtering is driven by the need for schools to be seen to be doing something rather than by the benefits it gives.
Filtering is anti-educational because it prevents students from accessing certain materials that they might find important, interesting, and relevant to their learning.
Filtering is anti-democratic, schools should treat students with the respect they expect them to show others
Students should learn the skills where they can evaluate the merits and dangers of internet content. They can not do this on a sanitised internet.
The effective use of the internet and searching requires that web pages become the stepping stones to further pages “When one door is closed, entire hallways of further doors may be closed off as well"
(Pownell and Bailey), (Finkelstein 2006) Social skills A commonly held view is that computers are detrimental to the development of children’s social skills. Though some children will retreat to computer games when they have problems at home or at school, gamers are often the most social and high achievers in their class.
MMORPG games require the coordination of a large number of players. Some War of Warcraft "instances" require a team of 40 players. Tasks include:
creation, recruiting and administration of guilds recruiting parties with the appropriate skills for a raid preparation of spells and items prior to the raid assigning roles and strategies prior to a battle cooperative play during a battle, responding to changed circumstances post battle analysis which feeds back to the beginning of the loop
It has been shown (Minneapolis Department of Health and Family Support, 2002) that participation in extracurricular activity has almost the same positive outcome as participation in school sports, this should hold true of game playing too. School sport has been long promoted for its benefits on socialisation.
Violence Despite many decades of research and hundreds of studies, the connections between people's consumption of the mass media and their subsequent behaviour have remained persistently elusive (Gauntlett 2006).
Lt. Col David Grossman, who blames computer games for one of those horrible school yard massacres, that occurred in his hometown. He tours America giving lectures about this. However, it turns out that Grossman could not name the video game that the young killer was playing. Benger (undated) then went to the trouble of finding a psychiatrist who had interviewed the killer who contradicted Grossman's interpretation.
Attitudes to games Computer games are treated in the same way as all new forms of expression have been as they have arisen as a result of technological change. A familiar pattern follows from written language, the novel, comics, film, radio and TV.
Negative attitudes to games will obviously affect the benefits from game programming. Enthusiastic programmers can spend many hours programming for each contact hour. The attitudes of teachers, other students and parents affect the time that the student wants to spend or is allowed to spend programming, whether students are encouraged or allowed to program at the school during lunchtime, after school or at home
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