ST 21 CENTURY LANGUAGE AND LITERACY IN GAMESTAR MECHANIC: MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ APPROPRIATION THROUGH PLAY OF THE DISCOURSE OF COMPUTER GAME DESIGNERS by Ivan A. Games Doctoral Candidate A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Curriculum and Instruction) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2009 © 2009 Ivan Alejandro Games All Rights Reserved i For Sarah, Arturo and Nicolas, may that all forms of knowledge be respected in your lifetime And for mom, smile your knowing smile, wherever you are ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................................iii PREFACE......................................................................................................................................... iv PERSONAL ENTRY TO THIS RESEARCH…..…..…………….............................................................xi CHAPTER I: VIDEOGAME DESIGN AND 21ST CENTURY LANGUAGE AND LITERACY EDUCATION.....................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER II: LEARNING INTERVENTIONS BASED ON GAME DESIGN: A REVIEW OF CURRENT SOFTWARE AND LITERATURE.........................................................................................................23 CHAPTER III: DESIGN-RESEARCHING GAMESTAR MECHANIC: INTEGRATING SOUND LEARNING THEORY INTO A GAME ABOUT GAME DESIGN.................................................................................65 CHAPTER IV: THREE DIALOGS, A TEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK TO STUDY 21st CENTURY LANGUAGE AND LITERACY IN GAMESTAR MECHANIC............................................133 CHAPTER V: BUG OR FEATURE? COMPLEX DESIGN PROBLEM SOLVING AND SYSTEMIC MEANING ARTICULATION THROUGH A MATERIAL DIALOG WITH GAMESTAR MECHANIC...........................178 CHAPTER VI: TELLING STORIES THROUGH GAME DESIGN: FROM NARRATIVE TO IDENTITY PLAY THROUGH AN IDEAL PLAYER DIALOG WITH GAMESTAR MECHANIC…………………................216 CHAPTER VII: ENTERING FLUENCY WITH THE DISCOURSE OF GAME DESIGN THROUGH A REAL PLAYER DIALOG WITHIN GAMESTAR MECHANIC. ……………………………………………………...…….…245 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CLOSING REMARKS........................................................................281 APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY OF GAMESTAR MECHANIC CREATURES.................................................288 REFERENCES CITED.....................................................................................................................289 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ________________________________________________________________________________________ I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to all the people that made this work possible. To my family, for all their loving support, advise and critique during the long nights and days that it took to complete my degree and finish the dissertation. To Jim Gee, Elisabeth Hayes and Kurt Squire, who believed in me when I was just a beginning graduate student in Texas, and invited me to become part of the Games, Learning and Society Group. To all the faculty members and students in the group, for their support, patience, and generosity, I’ve learned tremendously from them. To Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, for their enormous generosity and kind advise throughout the years. To Jason, Dan, Greg, Eric, Sharon and Gary, for their game design advice and valuable time informing and participating in this project. To the National Academy of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for their support of this dissertation through the Adolescent Literacy Predoctoral Fellowship. And finally to the Macarthur Foundation, for their longstanding support and funding of the research and development of the Gamestar Mechanic project over the last three years. iv PREFACE _________________________________________________________________________________ _______ The following dissertation is based on a collection of articles of studies resulting from a three- year design research agenda for Gamestar Mechanic, a novel game-based learning environment aimed at fostering the appropriation of 21st century language and literacy skills by instructing them on key principles of game design. Given that in some cases abridged versions of these articles have been published in conference proceedings and journals, where pertinent this dissertation will present their full versions adapted to the chapter format. Given that in a project like Gamestar Mechanic learning theory research and the development of an educational intervention that applies such research are tightly intertwined, the central thesis in this work consists of two complementary parts. First, Gamestar Mechanic facilitates children’s learning of important language and literacy skills for the 21st century germane to a designer identity, by teaching them to become fluent in the language of games, conceived as an amalgam of multiple modes of meaning representation. Second, understanding how children communicate using this language can help instructional designers create more effective game-based learning environments and assessments. Gamestar Mechanic is intended to introduce children to a dialect of the specialist “language of games”, with the purpose of helping them think of and express sophisticated ideas, in ways attuned to the academic, social and work demands of 21st century life. At this point however, most educators and researchers know less about how the language of games works during the interpretation and communication of meaning than many students do, given that many of these v students have grown up with games as an integral part of their lives. This is an issue that we as educational researchers must address before we can harness the promise of games as effective learning environments. The research reported in this dissertation represents a step toward understanding the nature and uses of the language of games, by exploring their use by players in the context of Gamestar Mechanic. In addition, it will be an experiment in using the insights of such exploration toward the development and assessment of a learning environment that fosters real learning outcomes for disadvantaged children. With these two goals in mind, this research consists of a series of focused studies conducted following a three-year design experiment agenda, an applied research method that relies on sequential cycles of learning environment design, implementation, and assessment aimed at producing effective learning environments supported by robust learning theories. The studies are organized in a top-down manner, beginning with an overall examination of Gamestar Mechanic as a learning environment, and its evolution across the last three years of research. It gradually narrows down the scope of the research to give multiple perspectives of the learners’ experiences in the game, first at a group level and then at an individual level. Through these studies, it hopes to provide a detailed multi-perspective narrative of the overall ecology of the game at different stages of development, and a robust theory of the way in which children learn and use the language of games for meaningful communication within it. Chapter I of the dissertation is a synthesis of two pieces entitled “Design Thinking in Gamestar Mechanic: The role of gamer experience on the appropriation of the Discourse practices of Game vi Designers”, presented at the 2008 International Conference for the Learning Sciences, and “The Appropriation Through Play of an Expert Game Designer Discourse: Implications for the Development of Language and Literacy Skills by Disadvantaged Middle School Students”, presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Education. It presents an argument for game design as a set of activities that can require learners to enact language and literacy practices characterized by a designer mindset, that recruits cognitive skills such as systems-level thinking, strategic problem-solving and evidence-based reasoning, widely recognized as necessary for 21st century learners. It argues for the use of Gee´s “Big D” Discourse as a useful construct through which to understand the nuance and sophistication of the language of games, as well as to unpack the specific literacy and cognitive skills that may be learned through game play and design. It concludes by out a set of research questions that serve as the central guides for the studies reported in the rest of the chapters. Chapter II is based on the article titled “Making Computer Games & Design Thinking: A Review of Current Software And Strategies”, that I co-wrote and published with Elisabeth Hayes in the Games and Culture Journal. This article presents a thorough review of the literature concerning research on learning environments that use game design as pedagogy, as well as on the software infrastructures that have been used as their cornerstones. The review is organized according to the main learning objectives that the learning environments were designed around. It makes the argument that in most of these cases, the goal of teaching students how to program a computer has been overemphasized, while design has only be addressed with a very limited scope (e.g. vii solely as construction of software). It then makes a call for research that explore the activity of design more fully, and of the learning benefits of using it as the actual context for instruction. Chapter III builds on