Electronic Arts advertisement from the early 1980’s asks, “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” brings up an interesting idea about artificial intelligence and emotion in video games.  When I watch a movie that is touching, delivered through live action and a narrative that I can connect with, there is a chance that a lump may develop in a my throat if the main characters are facing death. This also happens when something in the movie makes me reflect back on something in my own life that I can connect with.

In video games, I have never had this experience. I have been frieghtened or startled by actions in the game, but have never felt like I would cry.  I think this is because the graphic capabilities in even the best games don’t fully represent the characteristics of human life as well as live action footage does.  Many games I play also take place in a fantasy or science fiction world.  Since I don’t live in that world, I can’t connect with it or the characters on an emotional level.  Perhaps as graphics move toward real life accuracy and if I play more games that I have real world relationships with, this will change.

One important note that struck me from James Gee’s article Learning and Games is the importance of avatars and situated learning. When a student in a learning gaming environment has the ability to create and microcontrol their avatar, the level of emotional attachment and investment is improved. This goes hand in hand with situated learning as the gaming environment allows the learner to become situated in the environment that they need to learn about.  This could increase the likelyhood of efficient knowledge transfer to an occupation as the learner already has the mental model of the new world that they would be working in.

Distributed intellegence is also an important learning research concept when discussing educationally sound video games.  Students in the classroom could learn from others in the game world as well as from and using the tools that they pick up along the way.  This person-plus model lends itself nicely to the gaming world.

When a twelve year old student wakes up in the morning and goes to middle school, they really don’t expect much. They know they will face to pressures of fitting in, their clothes, the homework and projects they are putting off and the inevitable substitute teacher assignments they will most likely endure.

Not many of these kids come to school expecting to perform hip and knee surgery in a realistic, professional environment. Edheads.com offers two medical surgeries mentioned above, crash scene investigations, simple machines and mechanics and more. Students have so many choices staring back at them through the Internet Explorer icon. I know a product is successful when they choose – over watching another Beyonce video or their favorite anime cartoon – to perform hip surgery on a flash-based patient.

The students go step by step through the entire surgery. There is no cheese factor like many other simulations. They get down and dirty – are grossed out by the real-life photos from real surgery – and then move on, finish and want more.

The middle school grade level is all about exposure to what is out there. You can’t google something you don’t know about. Using simulations like Edheads to reach out to students and say, “This is a job someone has to perform. Maybe it could be you,” is a powerful tool and is masterfully accomplished with this simulation. My students can’t wait for open heart surgery and maybe even a little gastric bypass. The grosser the better.

As a New York City technology teacher who’s job it is to review and purchase software, my first complaint about BrainPop is the developers haven’t gone through the trouble of filling the paperwork to get on the NYCDOE software catalog and receive approval for purchasing with NY State software money. This site is not perfect, but it does offer students an interesting look at scientific concepts they may not be familiar with.

Many classmates often ridicule sites like this because they are not 100 percent Mayer compliant, but right now, they are better than nothing. No other sites are taking these random scientific topics like nanotechnology and computer viruses and animating them into fun little informational tidbits. They make great educational motivators and ice breakers for teachers to use as an intro to a topic.

The animation is playful and fun. Maybe the robots don’t talk enough or the flea circus isn’t relevant. But now they know about nanotechnology and flea circuses. Increasing a students raw cultural awaremess of little topics like this help them relate to different topics they may encounter in life and even on standardized tests.

The site is jarring to look at with its millions of tiled topics, but students get to search around and explore for new ideas in a constructivist journey. From first hand experience, students will spend 20-30 minutes on the site before growing tired. And then they will pick it up again a week or two later. It serves as another piece of the puzzle enhancing students knowledge with technology. Of course it could be improved, but it is more than a version 1.0 .

This week’s journal serves as a look at two websites: Smart Museum and 2Beme.rog.

Looking at SmartMuseum from a critical eye, I like the home page. There are four clear options students can choose from and each offers a different educational path. A trip to a museum with students usually only happens on a school trip where art or museums are the last things on students minds. They are usually thinking about the girls on the bus, what’s in the gift shop or what is for lunch. It’s a play date away from school. This happens because trips are too few and far between. This website could help a teacher plan ahead of a trip – like an advanced organizer to helps students focus on the task at hand. I particularly like the artist’s tour of the site. It is so important to introduce students to careers and hook them up with real world practitioners. This section of the site attempts that.

However, I don’t like the constant popping of things on the site. It is sensory overload, distracting and childish. The sketchbook, parent section and theme-options are a nice touch and should provide students with some level of engagement. I would like to see more video of real museums.

2beme.com is a touching website that helps a niche audience with real emotional needs. Suffering from cancer, one would hope these teens would have had the time to discuss these four issues with their doctors or parents. If not, this site offers an outlet. I like how it is again broken up into four catagories and is artistically relevant. The colors and images are soft and cartoonish and should hopefully convey a feeling of optimism and positivity.

The animations are borderline. They should be tuned down a little bit as they are distracting and provide a little too much extraneous load as someone looks to get information about a serious topic. I also like the catchy titles like “chill zone.” I think it brings some levity to students who may be feeling down about their condition. It may seem callous on the surface to suggest this, but this soft, emotional touches seem to go a long way with the healthy students in my classroom.

Ted Talks:It was interesting to finally see Spore in action.  I have been meaning to check it out.  I wonder how Spore Origins differs for the iPhone and the DS – my two gaming systems.  Besides the originality of the game, I like how evolution servers as a narrative that holds that game together and is representational of the narrative humans are a part of throughout history.  The game has lots of elements of a simulation, but there are definite rules.

Discussing games and narratives and Spore further, Charles Onyett reviews a talk Will Wright gave at GDC 2008. Charles reviews Wrights thoughts on branding and narrative in games and toys and how Spore will play out. Charles quotes Wright often, but one that struck me was, “For Wright the best games, and presumably Spore, exemplify these qualities. “The whole point of this process is model‐building. In some sense…all these different worlds that I’m experiencing I’m pulling into this model‐building process and from them I’m pulling out of these toy worlds the schema, patterns and strategies that I can apply back to the real world. I’m learning lessons in an entertaining way.”  This really brings gaming, narrative and transfer together.

Chapter 25-26 of Rules of play offered an outline of meaning and representation in games.  It also fused some of the cognitive elements we have discussed the past year.  As with any design, games create meaning through the experience they provide for the player.  This meaning is created through representation of objects in reality as well as in a player’s imagination.  Chapter 26 defines narratives of games with the same elements stories have: Character, situation/plot, plot, conflict and smaller elements of narrative that players create as they move through the game.

Jenkins details in “Games Design as Narrative Architecture,” that games have narrative qualities but tell and are intertwined with stories in different ways. Game designers create worlds – settings – and players can write the narrative through gameplay inside these evocative spaces. Narrative also creates broadly defined goals. Narratives are also left embedded for the gamer to discover.

Every teacher who has ever written a lesson plan or stood in front of a group of students or adults for that matter, must worry about engagement.  This week’s readings all touch on engagement and experience both in interaction design and in real life.

From Sherdoff’s Elements of Experience Design:

I like the way Sherdoff breaks experience into three concrete steps: attraction, engagement and conclusions.  A lesson planner or instructional designer would find this a useful outline. It is missing the meat of the lesson – perhaps that is the engagement part – but overall, it is a useful framework.  The rest of the elements that fit into this framework are helpful–interactivity, creativity, style and presentation make this article a useful principled article.

From Pogrow’s SuperMath:

This concept revolves around the idea of narrative, contextual learning, anchored instruction and situated learning environments.  The SuperMath niche is that students aren’t attracted to adult or real-life contextual environments and they must be engaged at their own level about things that interest them and their imagination. Interesting idea.  I think it lends a hand, but if we want transfer, I think we need to bridge both learning situations.

From Michele Dickey’s Engaging by Design:

My favorite quote in this long literature review about how video and computer games can inform instruction:

“Prensky (2001) similarly argued that computer and video games model and promote cognitive traits that are consistent with children raised with technology. According to Prensky, electronic games require active engagement in environments, which supports discovery, observation, trial and error, and problem solving. Additionally, computer games are graphical environments that require players to read the visual environment and interpret symbols. These skills are becoming increasingly important to foster learning.”

Venturing into Panwapa without having seen the TV show, I was a little unsure about where I was.  It looked like a zoo or carnival outside of a tropical rainforest. My initial exploration took me around to see what characters I could interact with and what activities I could explore.

After playing the hide and seek game in Mandarin and watching a movie about Navajo Indian children getting water, I got the sense that this site has something to do with exposing children to different cultures.
After exploring the outside or first page of the site, I still got the sense that the site was just a place where you could go and explore a few activities that seemed loosely tied together but it took a while to get the concept of the site or where I should begin.

After exploring for a while, I clicked on the globe and saw how you could make your own place and travel around.

This site does a good job of exposing students to the idea that there are different countries and different cultures all around the world.  Many students may never leave their city block or neighborhood.  They have an undeveloped sense of geography and how their culture compares to others around the world. I also like how the site is multilingual and has activities for different types of learners and incorporates educational gaming.

If the goal is to introduce children to the concept that there are different people all over the globe, then it hits its mark.

I think the site doesn’t create even a make-believe environment that is concrete. It seems that the activities are just thrown into this zoo-like area.  They don’t really scaffold or relate to each other.  The characters know when you complete an exercise but besides that, they aren’t tied together.  It doesn’t seem rich enough. Without having read Wikipedia or the seen the show, I didn’t get the concept that I was on a floating island that could travel around the world.

However, the site does touch on the following problem solving skills:

Scanning for clues  -  students explore the site and look for interaction
Ability to explore  -  students explore the interface and the globe
Interpret graphical information  -  chart at the end of the water movie

The movie game – not the videos which are on a TV – teaches students to pay attention while exposing them to different cultural concepts.  Students watched the movie once to get a general idea and then were asked to watch the movie again and click on the button when they saw water. It also ended by asking students where they got most of their drinking water. This made the student reflect on their own lifestyle and think about how it is different then their own.  It was a clever way to introduce interactivity to a normally passive learning experience.

Alas, the wise old Richard Mayer … As an interaction designer, we must consider the heart of Mayer’s Multimedia principles, dual coding, text/picture integration etc.. etc..

The chapter 18 article introduced a few new design principles:

Apprehension principle: The graphic design of the animation should follow the design of the representation.  The animation should be readily understood by the audience.

Congruency principle: The animation should represent the conceptual model, not the behavior.

Interactivity principle: information is better understood if learner has some control over the animation

The information interaction design offered a solid look at design principles based on creating an experience for a user and how to leverage sensory elements to ensure clear communication.