This is pretty cool. It’s something that I wrote about during one of my early entries on this blog. Glad someone realized some of my initial annotation ideas…
Click on the video when prompted. This is Choose-Your-Own-Adventure storytelling. It’s a story and game-like.
I doubt that there are many people who would look at this image and know how to discover that there is a game hidden within the black and white lines and pixels. It’s curiously ambiguous, and provocatively unrelated to education.
Yes, this image contains a game. However, most people would likely jump to the superficial conclusion that the image is either a maze or one of those weird visual puzzles. Let me be clear: The image is not a maze with random deadends. It is also not a visual trick emphasizing (a) a lack of crucial cranial connections or (b) visual acuity. Either guess or extrapolation is misguided.
The image is a semacode. Actually, it is a QR-code.
Semacodes and QR-codes are similar to barcodes that appear on the back and sides of common items in grocery stores and other commercial products. However, instead of a series of vertical lines that identify the product and price, semacodes and QR-codes contain web 2.0 information that can be accessed via smart phones. More specifically, information like URLs, text, and phone numbers.
The QR-code on this page (the image above) points to a game that I am designing for newly admitted UVA students. It includes hidden information about my initial brainstorms. How do you access my ideas?
Answer: Find a way to unlock the text within the image.
I could tell you how to discover this page’s QR-code and the embedded game, but how fun would that be? In the meantime, I prod you to consider how semacodes and QR-codes can be used to…
Yes, you can cheat your way to the specified page, but would you know about semacodes or QR-codes? The opportunities?
I love the idea, and it is apparent that using game-like qualities increase motivation to change. Let me repeat: I love the idea, creation, and ultimate objective: Recycle.
If the incentive of the game is stripped away from the objective (recycle), what do you think would happen? If these “game-recycling machines” were ubiquitous, would that cheapen the motivation? I wonder what Alfie would say… Perhaps Daniel Pink…
cc licensed flickr photo shared by neko_4343
In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster writes:
It’s worth asking ourselves what skills are more commonly needed today. Games should be evolving toward teaching us those skills.
The entire spread of games for children is fairly limited and hasn’t changed much. The basic skills needed by children are the same. Perhaps we need a few more games about changing TV channels, but that’s about it. Adults, on the other hand, could use new games that teach more relevant skills. Most of us no longer hunt our own food and we no longer live in danger every moment of our lives. It’s valuable to train ourselves in some of the caveman traits, but we need to adapt (p. 66).
There are a number of claims that Koster makes that I find both agreeable (It’s worth asking ourselves what skills are more commonly needed today) and disagreeable (Most of us no longer hunt our own food and we no longer live in danger every moment of our lives). Yet, the statement that resonates most with me is his contention that adults need new games that teach more relevant skills.
Yes, I agree that new, relevant games are necessary. Serious games, ones with a research foundation, have the potential to powerfully impact learning on many different levels for both students and adults. However, I believe that people are learning valuable, real world skills when playing mainstream titles.
For example, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, lays out a relatively typical problem that players confront while engaged in the video game The Legend of Zelda. The problem, written in the form of a multiple choice question, isn’t explicitly displayed; it is meant to be a cheeky way of describing the thought process that gamers must employ. He writes:
You need to cross a gorge to reach a valuable destination. At one end of the gorge a large rock stands in front of a river, blocking the flow of water. Around the edge of the rock a number of small flowers are growing. You have been given a jar by another character. How can you cross the gorge?
A. Jump across it.
B. Carry small pails of water from the river and pour them in the gorge, and then swim across.
C. Water the plants, and then use the bombs they grow to blow up the rock, releasing the water, and then swim across.
D. Go back and see if you’ve missed some important tool in an earlier scene (p. 59).
Whether you know the answer or not, I would side with Steven Johnson in saying that this type of scenario, one that lacks formal instructions or explicit hints, parallels one type of thinking that students and adults must do in the real world: Problem-solving. And problem-solving, IMHO, is a relevant skill. Perhaps Koster needs to probe a bit deeper.
Despite disagreeing with Koster’s claim, he did tease out an important question that I struggle to answer: Do games (video or otherwise) like The Legend of Zelda teach problem-solving skills that transfer to the real world? In other words, does playing open-ended games that require you to solve unknown problems make you a better problem solver in daily life?
I don’t know…
cc licensed flickr photo shared by TW Collins
I must qualify the following words by saying, “For the past ten hours, I have been reading/thinking about game design and the adaptation of commercial games as each applies to education.” Both lines of inquiry seem like a happy, welcomed educational endeavor, but approximately ten hours into my assignments, I am quite exhausted. Thinking about gaming and education is mentally taxing. I never thought that the words would filter from my brain to words on a blog post. The qualification is necessary because I now realize that I don’t know squat, and ten hours of studying is an inefficient period despite numerous years of playing video games. I thought that I knew about games, video-based or otherwise, but I was a bit deluded.
As a part of a course assignment, I was told that I needed to find a game and adapt it to a learning setting. I chose a familiar game for me, The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). The paragraphs below describe how I would use mathematics AND rudimentary economic principles to teach some real-world ideas about money, investing, and decision-making to middle school students. Namely, what habits of mind and personal questions does it take to make mathematical decisions with bottom-line consequences? I will let the ideas filter out as good, bad, or otherwise…
The game that I am using for the first game design challenge is The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). This game may or may not be well known, but it is a diversion that I access occasionally over the course of a given year. I was an early HSX adopter and was once a top player, but my account now lies relatively dormant.
The Hollywood Stock Exchange “is a web-based, multiplayer game in which players use simulated money to buy and sell “shares” of actors, directors, upcoming films, and film-related options” (Wikipedia). An entire community exists within HSX and the surrounding fan-affiliated websites such that Hollywood itself looked upon this game as an indicator of a potential box office success or failure. HSX may or may not be a viable thermometer for movie moneymaking in 2010, but I confidently assert that I learned the value of high-dollar trading and basic economic principles through my game play.
I never had the guts to actually use HSX to support mathematics or economics in my classroom. I taught in mostly affluent independent schools with a loose religious affiliation, and I felt that “buying and selling” people might ruffle a few feathers. This would probably happen in public school settings as well. As an aside, the questions that follow this introduction mostly refer to movie stocks, not actual people.
I drew upon sixth grade standards in the Virginia curriculum as a starting point. However, the questions actually use mathematics as a rationale for economic decisions, something that I feel is much more relevant than simply solving problems and computing mathematical equations. Economic decisions, often mathematically based, appear to be something that isn’t important according to Virginia’s educators. Hmmm. Mathematics appears to = solving math problems, at least according to a superficial reading of the sixth grade SOLs.
I tried to gear my questions around the very real connection between mathematics and economics, whether or not the specific questions are developmentally appropriate. I do recognize that some of the questions might be phrased in a way that embeds unnecessary uncertainty and a complexity that is overwhelming at first blush; I know the layout, mathematics, and inner workings in a way that a novice user might not. Ideally, HSX would be an ongoing, recurring constant that weaved in and out of the mathematics curriculum for this fictitious classroom. I believe that this would eliminate some of unknowns associated with the grab-and-use culture that surrounds the teaching profession. Furthermore, I have not vetted all of the questions that appear below through proper channels (namely, testing questions with similarly aged family members). I reserve the right to say that I am completely “off my rocker.”
Nevertheless, the task was to take a “well-known game” and brainstorm five ideas for how I could use it in a learning setting to meet a specific goal of my choice. My goals and choices happen to be standards, listed in bold.
The first question is not the best…
If I buy 3 shares of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (WIMPY) at $55.99 and there is a 1% commission on the total price of the three shares, how much money will I need to have?
See http://www.hsx.com/security/view/WIMPY
Estimate the price of Men in Black 3 (MIB3) at five different months. What is the average price of the five dates? Do you think that this average is useful for determining whether or not to buy stock in this offering? Explain.
See http://www.hsx.com/security/view/MIB3
What percentage of the total portfolio amount is Tron 2 (TRON2)? Represent the results in a pie graph. After examining the historical trends, do you see this as a worthwhile investment over the next few months?
In order to answer this problem, students must log into a portfolio. I am including a snapshot of my portfolio below (even though you it is difficult to read without clicking on the image).
Display the monthly percent change of the following movies in a bar graph. Using both the graph and the relative cost of the stock offerings, which stock would you recommend me to buy (if I bought the maximum number of shares with commission)? Explain. What other data (not opinions) might influence your decision?
Iron Man 2 (IRNM2): http://www.hsx.com/security/view/IRNM2
I am Legend 2 (LEGN2): http://www.hsx.com/security/view/LEGN2
The Tooth Fairy (TOFRY): http://www.hsx.com/security/view/TOFRY
Find the mean, median, and mode for the six dates listed for Toy Story 3 (TOYS3) on the graph at http://www.hsx.com/security/view/TOYS3. Which one of your calculations would serve as THE BEST guide for determining whether to purchase stock in this offering? Explain.
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