Games can be designed to enable players to step into different roles, confront a problem, fail safely, make meaningful choices, and explore the consequences.
The Arizona State University (ASU) Center for Games & Impact (CGI) has been awarded a grant with Educational Testing Service (ETS) to explore the affordances of game-based assessments, with a focus on informing future design and development of interactive computer tasks for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments.
“In our project, we will build a new game-based assessment item using Unity3D technology to engage learners within in a 3D role-playing game scenario that they are invested. Here, they will be demonstrating what they are able to do by working through a game scenario in which they are making decisions, receiving scenario-based feedback, and having opportunity to optimize their decision.” said Sasha Barab, Professor and Pinnacle West Presidential Chair in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, and Director of the ASU Center for Games & Impact.
Student learner navigating 3D environment.
The game-based assessment system proposed would reveal more than an individual’s ability to identify a right answer; instead, it would provide data on the individual’s ability to use what they know to solve a problem in which they are invested, as well as their ability to leverage and optimize their performance using consequential feedback from the scenario. This will allow learners to reveal a greater range of ability, at the same time making the test-tasking situation a positive experience for all.
“The Center’s hope is that this is the first stage of an initial set of game-based strategies focused on enhancing the quality, meaning, and enjoyment of large-scale assessments,” added Barab.
Project development will begin in late spring and will continue through 2015.
The Center for Games & Impact (CGI) mission is to investigate, innovate, and cultivate game-infused solutions to society’s biggest challenges with the goal of unleashing the unique power of videogames to create sustainable solutions for society’s biggest social, cultural, scientific, economic and educational challenges.
RSVP below to join us to hear Professor Reed Stevens talk, “Cyborg learning: How our increasingly mobile and networked lives transform the possibilities for learning and education.” This event is sponsored by the Center for Games & Impact, ASU Teachers College, and ASU Learning Sciences Institute.
Description: In this talk, Professor Reed Stevens will borrow the provocative trope of cyborg—a functioning system part human, part machine—to explore what are superficially acknowledged but theoretically and empirically underdeveloped issues for learning and education.Drawing on ideas from distributed cognition and actor network approaches, he will argue that “there’s an app for that” and “just Google it” barely scratch the surface as metonyms for both what and how our lives are being reorganized by our cyborg learning experiences. We explore, work, navigate, search, connect with each other, and play in an ever increasingly media- and information-saturated world. Furthermore, our cyborg learning experiences are thoroughly mediated, as he will show from a decade-long program of research on everyday youth media practices. Taken together, these phenomena have theoretical and methodological implications for research on learning and cognition. Finally, the reality of cyborg learning has massive, uncomfortable implications for 19th and 20th century models of schooling, which obdurately persist. These implications will be considered and possibilities of designing for cyborg learning will be presented.
Event Details:
- Date: Thursday, April 23, 2015
- Time: 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM (MST)
- Location: University Club At ASU (Heritage Room), 425 East University Drive, Tempe, AZ 85281 (click for map)
- Notes: Refreshments will be served. Click here to view the event flyer.
- For more information on Dr. Stevens work visit: http://www.fusestudio.net/program-design
Speaker Bio: Reed Stevens is a Professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. As an ethnographer of everyday experience, Stevens conducts field studies exploring how learning, thinking, and joint action are comparatively organized in range of cultural settings. A leading goal of these studies is to understand the ways that individuals, groups, and standing cultural practices organize and sustain productive activity and, in particular, how people learn together. In the past two decades he has conducted field studies spanning classrooms, professional workplaces, homes, and museums. Topics of prior work have included: STEM learning in and out school, designing by young people and by professionals, learning in families, and media practices among children including video game play, television viewing, and use of mobile devices. Insights from these studies inform designs of new learning technologies and new learning experiences, in both school and out-of-school settings. A current widely adopted project is FUSE Studios (http://www.fusestudio.net/), funded by the Macarthur and National Science Foundations. Stevens has co-led two NSF Centers, one focused on engineering learning (CAEE) and one focused on learning in and out of schools (LIFE). He has expertise with a range of field methods with special expertise in video interaction analysis methods. In 2004 he was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research & Scholarship in Learning Technologies from AERA. In 2000 he created the video annotation software VideoTraces, among the first tools of its kind.
ASU Teachers College’s graduate programs are listed in the top 20 (among 245 public and private graduate programs nationwide) of the 2015 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings released earlier this year. In Arizona, the Teachers College ranks first among graduate programs in the state. Masters candidates and graduates looking to take educational transformation, innovation, and research to the next level are invited to learn more about and apply to the ASU Teachers College new Doctor of Philosophy in Learning, Literacies and Technologies.
Kelly Tran, Graduate Student Fellow
Teachers College graduate student, Kelly Tran, said she chose the Learning, Literacies and Technologies (LLT) program specifically for the award-winning faculty, including Dr. Elisabeth Gee, associate director for the Center for Games & Impact and Tran’s adviser since joining the program.
“The support we have received as first year doctoral students has been tremendous, and it is clear that the new LLT program has been made a priority,” said Tran who is also a graduate student fellow with the Center, “It’s rare to have such access to mentorship and resources. I’ve learned more about research by working on social impact and games projects than I ever expected to my first year.”
“We are really proud to be a part of ASU’s Teachers College and many of the initiatives that the Center has been able to advance as part of our mission to investigate game-infused solutions to society’s biggest challenges, focus on innovating and transforming education in the United States and around the world. Among the reasons we can carry out our research successfully the exemplary graduate students LLT students we have working with us this year. We are excited to work with new LLT program students in the next year as the program grows,” said Sasha Barab, executive director for the Center for Games & Impact.
From the ASU Teachers College Website:
The [LLT] program draws from a rich array of theoretical perspectives, research traditions and content disciplines that enable graduates to address the complex nature of research in schools and other educational spaces, and advance their scholarly contributions to education. Students graduate equipped to develop interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems and issues.