Board Games as Play-full Pedagogical Pivots for STEM Teaching and Learning (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Drawing inspiration from Ellsworth’s (2005) work on thinking with pedagogically nonprescriptive objects and the pedagogies they permit and prohibit, we turn our attention to similar educational “texts” increasingly used in STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education—board games. We tinker with board games as they refuse and resist the ways that STEM education often privileges cognitive destinations rather than relational learning journeys that enfold the whole learning self, the content, as well as the materiality of learning. We ask, how might games simultaneous act as locations of, and as, pedagogy that inflect experiences of student learning? To answer this question, we explore the pedagogical intents expressed by game designers themselves by their design diaries, blogs and interviews while thinking with Ellsworth’s concept of pedagogical pivot . In exploring game designers’ statements, we map out some of the potentialities that this pedagogical medium mi...
Special Issue “Revisiting Teaching and Games. Mapping out Ecosystems of Learning”
Gamevironments, 2021
Previous special issues from gamevironments have explored, e.g., games’ entanglements with democracy (Pfister, Winnerling and Zimmermann 2020), nationalism and identity (Kienzl and Trattner 2019), ethics, and sociocultural developments (Grieve, Helland, Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2018). In this special issue, we hope to contribute to these explorations further by anchoring them in a specific environment: education. Through education, we encourage students to develop critical literacies that prepare them to analyse society, culture, politics, and ethics. Through the use of games, as well as the making of games, teachers are trying to find ways to empower students further in these pursuits. Games can provide meaningful spaces for learning and discourse, but in which ways does the actual game contribute to the space – in which ways might they detract from it? Understanding games and education is to understand the role of technology in a crucial part of society, and the contributions in this special issue will look at games as vehicles of learning, teaching, activism, exploitation, culture, and politics.
The Politics of Video Games in STEM Education
Advances in Media, Entertainment, and the Arts
This chapter considers broad issues related to videogame design and art educational policy issues. Discussed are Science, Technology Engineering, and Math (STEM) funding proposals, and recent moves to add the arts to this equation. Following this is a discussion of Quest to Learn, and their curricular structure, which incorporates complexity thinking, and relates to STEM, but deals more with game design as opposed to specifically being about videogames. The paper closes with recent statistics on videogame sales, and youth media use, making the argument that videogames are becoming part of a larger network of gaming experiences, and are not limited to one particular mode of delivery.
Advancing STEM Learning with Games
How we engage youth with science is being addressed both in and out of school. However, out-of-school learning is crucial to engage youth and helps connect learning that happens within school to learning that occurs in other areas of their lives. In order to engage with science, youth need connection and translation between in-school and out-of-school learning through “ecologies” of learning. These ecologies can provide pathways of engagement across the spaces where young people develop (Ito, 2013). Cultural and civic institutions like the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), The Field Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC), and University of British Columbia comprise a handful of institutions that have contributed to creating these learning pathways through the development and implementation of innovative STEM games. Games, as part of a well-designed learning system, have an important role in advancing learning by providing deeper modes of engagement and providing a context for thinking through problems (Gee, 2008). This panel explored what the driving ideas are for using and developing science games. What common themes arise? How are outcomes affected given different audiences, resources and limitations? Panelists will foster discussion with the audience and with each other on how games are being used, and how they might be used, to advance STEM learning using civic and cultural institutions as case studies.
Games and Learning: what's the connection
International Journal of Learning and Media, 2009
This article reviews how the relationship be- tween computer games and learning has been conceptualized in policy and academic litera- ture, and proposes a methodology for exploring learning with games that focuses on how games are enacted in social interactions. Drawing on Sutton-Smith’s description of the rhetorics of play, it argues that the educational value of games has often been defined in terms of rem- edying the failures of the education system. This, however, ascribes to games a specific on- tology in a popular culture that is defined in terms of its opposition to school culture. By analyzing games produced in school by 12- to 13-year-olds in the context of a media education project, the article shows how notions of what a game is emerge from conventionalized and historical relations within a setting, and that the educational value of games can therefore be re-thought in terms of the situated significa- tion of “game” rather than games causing learn- ing. The students’ production work is analyzed using a discursive, semiotic methodology and focuses on changing principles of design across time. Changing notions of “game” and “play” are therefore highlighted and analyzed in terms of how students position themselves in relation to the teacher, researchers, and their peers. The significance of the study for conceptualizing the relationship between games and learning is re- viewed in the conclusion.