JonBro
posted about 1 month ago
cool! I like this trend of applying video-game pedagogy to actual life. When I was in Costa Rica, visiting my cousin, I accompanied him to the University of Peace where he works. We sat in on a lecture on video games for peace. As you guys probably know there are a number of games for social change (personally, the term "serious games" sounds like such a turnoff). During the lecture, the speaker, Nick Martin, mentioned how the games were problematic, often because of their tenuous connection actually doing something about the issue. It seems like social games that, like foursquare or EpicWin, actual make you do things in the real world could really be interesting.
I'll just copy + paste my email (of a few minutes ago) sent to a Daedalus discussion list...
Last Thursday, I spoke with a game designer from (Pittsburgh company) Etcetera Edutainment named Eben Myers. He gave a presentation to IxDA Pgh about using gaming techniques to motivate people to learn on-the-job safety measures at places like Alcoa. Whereas people malign a paper-and-pencil test and may refuse to return to it after failing once (unpleasant high school flashbacks?), they instead develop a plucky attitude and re-take the test until they ace it when it's presented in the form of a video game. Not too surprising a result (though I give them much credit for revealing it) but it is interesting that the business/industrial world is now starting to embrace games -- once ridiculed as child's play -- for serious purposes, or at least reluctantly admitting their effectiveness. Maybe the military's much-publicized use of gaming techniques is influencing this.
I don't know if there's any data on long-term knowledge retention rates following a video game test versus a paper test.
Sorry I missed that last week, Bill.
Loosely related, this:
Basically it's a co-op disaster response scenario set on a hypothetical (...or is it?!) moon base that's been struck by an asteroid. Players are rewarded for fixing various issues vs. an overall time limit using limited resources. I'm probably just being optimistic, but I saw this less as PR (or training) for NASA and more of a crowd-sourced testing ground for different tools and solutions NASA will (might)have in the future.
I dig the Wall-E like robot
Wolfquest gives you on-the-job training too, provided you are training to be a wolf.
Oh man, so if I beat wolfquest, I'm a certified wolf??!
ur already a certified wolf.
you must login to post