With Support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and New Roads, The New Reinvented Learning Space Will Be Unveiled at May 11^th Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Los Angeles, CA – April 29, 2013 – GameDesk, the gaming education non-profit that rethinks learning through playing, making, and discovery, today announced the launch of new spaces at its PlayMaker School, a life-reflective revolution in education designed to prepare students for 21^st century success. The school is realized with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and launched in partnership with New Roads. The new school space was conceived by Lucien Vattel, the GameDesk design team, Gensler, The Third Teacher+ group led by Trung Le, and construction led by Steve Lappin of Pacific Cove Development.

Student showcases, tours of the space, learning activities, and ribbon cutting ceremony will take place from 11am-4pm on Saturday, May 11, at PlayMaker School at New Roads located at 3131 Olympic Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90404.  For more information email: contactus@gamedesk.org

“The spaces we inhabit have a profound effect on how we inhabit them. We have a responsibility to students to create a vibrant exploratory space for young people to discover, play, build, and learn,” said Lucien Vattel, Executive Director at GameDesk, Founder and Co-Director of PlayMaker School. “This is the future of learning and it’s now a working model for everyone to come see and participate in. I am incredibly proud of the work we have accomplished this year. You’re not going to believe what you’re going to see.”

PlayMaker School launched in the fall of 2012 and incorporates four years of GameDesk research and development in play and tech infused curriculum. “Forty years in the wilderness of education and I finally see the promised land,” said Joe Wise, Co-Founder of PlayMaker School and Assistant Head of New Roads School for Curriculum and Assessment. “PlayMaker School at New Roads promises effective reform through assessed play and student guided learning.”

GameDesk partnered with global design firm Gensler to realize three distinct creative spaces. First there is DreamLab, a bright world of sloping whiteboard walls where every inch of space can be drawn upon, used for ideation and brainstorming. Next is the spacious Adventure Room. With four plasma flat screens, a motion-capture system, and a mounted floor projector, this room is bursting with 21^st century technology that fascinates students and foretells the future of learning. And the final room is the Maker Space. Students get to be hands-on, wielding drills and soldering irons, or designing projects on the computer to then print using the Makerbot 3D printer.

“Gensler collaborated closely with the GameDesk team to transform the traditional classroom and revolutionize the learning experience,” said David Herjeczki, Design Director at Gensler. “Our goal as a team was to create three innovative spaces, enabling stimulating, hands on, immersive learning environments, designed to capture the imagination.”

“The Third Teacher+ of Cannon Design team is founded on the idea that the learning environment should respond to the dynamic and complex nature of learning,” said Trung Le, Lead Designer for Cannon Design’s education group. “We are humbled by the opportunity to collaborate with GameDesk, transforming STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning through empowerment, play, and a deep sense of curiosity.”

Student exhibitors from PlayMaker will be on hand to showcase learning experiences from throughout the year, so get ready for food, games, photo booth fun, giant Aero wings, SMALLab wonders, Dream Lab graffiti, and wild maker activities!

About GameDesk

GameDesk is a 501(c)3 nonprofit research, game development, and outreach organization that seeks to rethink learning through play, making, and interaction. It evolved out of seven years of research at the University of Southern California with a mission to transform the learning experience, help close the achievement gap, and deeply engage students in learning core curriculum.

To learn more visit our website or blog, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

About Gensler

Gensler is a global design firm, with 43 offices and 3,500 employees worldwide. Gensler helps clients succeed by focusing on the needs of the people they serve, whether they are employees, customers, sports fans, students, passengers or guests. Founded in 1965, Gensler has deep expertise in design and architecture across 20 practices, including commercial office buildings, professional services, retail, aviation, planning and urban design, entertainment and hospitality, sports stadia and education facilities.

For more information, visit our website or blog, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

About The Third Teacher+

The Third Teacher+ is an educational design consultancy within the global architecture firm, Cannon Design. It is a multidisciplinary group that looks at the whole picture, the whole ecology of learning. The Third Teacher+ designs learning environments and uses design thinking to strategize with clients’ cultural, pedagogical and organizational change.

#####

]]> http://www.educade.org/gamedesk-celebrates-first-year-at-playmaker-school-introduces-transformed-classrooms/feed/ 0 http://www.educade.org/im-not-a-gamer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=im-not-a-gamer http://www.educade.org/im-not-a-gamer/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:03:19 +0000 Tanner Higgin http://www.educade.org/?p=574 Help all students recognize and value how they play and integrate those interests and habits into instruction.

By: Tanner Higgin, Research Lead at GameDesk

One of the issues with integrating game-based learning into the classroom is that some students are resistant. They’ll tell you, as they’ve told us at the PlayMaker School, that they’re not “gamers.” I hear this from adults all of the time too. When someone I’m talking to finds out I work at GameDesk, they often confess that they’re “not that much of a gamer.”

But they’re wrong.

Everyone plays games; everyone likes games. Think about it: could there be anything more natural to a child than play and games? Have you known any children for whom play is not an essential part of their daily lives not to mention how they learn? And among adults, do you know any that do not occasionally fiddle around with a crossword or Sudoku puzzle, or who don’t dabble in Farmville, chess, or Scrabble? Probably not. So it’s not that people don’t play games; rather, the problem is most games apparently don’t qualify someone as a “gamer.”

So what qualifies as “gamer” culture then? The term itself is mostly a marketing construction from the 80s and 90s; it’s an ever-shrinking, mythical demographic composed of hyper-competitive White twelve to thirty-five year old males who play games regularly on a cutting edge videogame console or PC. Most recently, it’s been used most in combination with the term “hardcore” to describe this same subset of videogame player in conflict with an encroaching group of so-called “casual” players and games (often stereotypically assumed to be female).

But this “gamer” is not representative of actual players: 47% of videogame players are women; African American and Latino@ teens play more games than their White counterparts; and the average player age is hovering around thirty. And that’s just videogame players. What if those statistics tracked people who play board games, poker, or twenty questions?

So what does this mean then for educators and schools trying to get game-based learning off-the-ground? Well, we shouldn’t force games on students. We also shouldn’t let students shut down and avoid gaming altogether. What we should do is:

1. Help all students recognize and value how they play and integrate those interests and habits into instruction.

2. Use inclusive and accessible videogames in the classroom to help more students connect with videogames.

3. Encourage cooperative play.

4. Work with self-identified “gamers” to make them effective counselors and tutors rather than competitors, trolls, griefers, or bullies.

5. Cultivate a culture that sees failure as productive.

Do you have any other suggestions to get students more comfortable with games in the classroom? Please add to the comments.

IMAGE CREDIT: RomaXP

Some new to the educational games sector might assume, based on the controversies /debates (particularly violence) surrounding games, that there would be resistance to games in the classroom. Yet  educators generally support game-based learning, and parents’ support depends primarily on a perceived lack of educational rigor in games. Consequently, educational game developers perceive the challenge as creating experiences that pass the muster of parents and educators.  But what parents/educators want kids to play and what kids will actually play is very different. How do educational game developers compete with the kinds of irresistible experiences the broader game industry provides and that kids love to play?

Perhaps the best answer lies in not just creating bigger and better educational games, but in re-framing what we consider “educational.”

From a certain perspective, every game has learning content because every game is a system that can be understood. This is a hard thing to “get” if you’re peering over a child’s shoulder while she’s playing. From this perspective games can look non-nonsensical, and maybe even offensive or trivial (and clearly some games are either or both). The reason? If you’re not playing the game, what you’re looking at is the narrative, characters, dialogue, etc. These qualities, historically, are the least interesting or well drawn aspects of games.

Focusing on these elements is like playing football and focusing on the uniforms or the rivalry of the teams. They’re important elements, but far from totalizing. What’s happening at each moment on the field — the cognitive and physical struggle between two teams within the context of the game and its rules — is totally lost. With gaming, like anything else, you just had to be there.

What’s important about games but less obvious to spectators is how players make the game work; it’s how they exercise systems thinking. This notion of systems thinking is one of the more popular cross-cutting conceptual skills often included under the banner of “twenty-first century century skills.” It boils down to something very simple: understanding how individual components of a system interact. It’s a popular concept because, well, systems are everywhere. They’re in every subject, every workplace, and, more important to my point here, they’re in every game whether that game is an “educational” game or not.

What’s really happening during play is a rapid, intuitive testing and retesting of the objects, attributes, and relationships within a game. Players figure the system out then use it so they can accomplish goals. As a result, expert players are expert systems thinkers who have, over hours and hours (and sometimes their entire lives), learned how to learn, and become masters of a variety of different incredibly complex systems. From this perspective, when someone plays Sim City they might not be learning math or science, but they’re making up for it with high-level, transferable systems thinking knowledge (not to mention flat out fun) that applies to both math and science as well as every other class in school.

Consequently, we’re seeing mass market, polished releases like Sim City 4 and Portal 2 making waves in educational gaming as we recognize that these experiences are far more interesting both from a design perspective and systems thinking perspective. Compared to these games, built by the most talented people in the industry, an educational app that mixes vocabulary with Bejeweled simply can’t compete. (That being said, both Sim City 4 and Portal 2 are being reworked as “educational” versions with explicit connections to standards. But this isn’t a bad thing. It’s added value.)

Of course many games also present a weak value proposition. They may take too much time, or they may not be of appropriate age level, or they might not be very interesting. Just because all games are systems doesn’t mean that all games present a valuable learning opportunity. But you need to play them to find out. So resist the urge to call a game noneducational or useless the next time you see a friend or child playing; instead, take a seat and call “next.” You’ll probably be surprised; you might even learn something.

PHOTO BY SEAN DREILINGER

- Joseph Makokha

This week we are featuring team Crazy Croc from our March Stanford Game Jam.  The moment this team formed they began wildly discussing ideas and hunting down concepts within the domain analysis.  All teams exuded excitement as they began the process.  However, team Crazy Croc had a particular kind of energy brewing.  They covered their whiteboard with words and drawings.  They littered their table with post-its and charts.  They rearranged their furniture configuration –twice.  This team was ready to create, and the air around them hummed with vitality!

They began breaking down grade levels and created a domain analysis organization chart to help navigate the multiple factors they would need to account for within their game.  Eventually this process shook out an idea geared towards younger grades to help early learners distinguish the difference between multiple objects and schemas.  Team member Joseph Makakha says, “This is made possible given that today’s children are learning to interact with digital media at a very early stage. Our team set out to find a way of leveraging mobile technology in helping these early learners to recognize images, shapes and other age-appropriate mathematical representations of the natural environment.”

You’re probably wondering about this team’s name by now.  If not, you should be.  Why Crazy Croc?  To communicate this concept and lead game play, the team appointed a character to engage students and interact with objects being manipulated.  Enter Barry, with his toothy grin, oversized belly and wild appeal to kids.  Barry is a crocodile (Aha!) and he has an incessant appetite.  He continuously asks for game play learners to feed him, and his demands change.  Sometimes he wants triangles, and other times he wants fruits.  Students playing the game must select from a pool of many different objects and direct correct objects into Barry’s mouth.

Correct selections are rewarded with points and a thank you dance from the Crazy Croc, while incorrect choices are rebuffed, forcing Barry to actually spit them out so the player can try again.  This reward system is very simple, but the team brainstormed other incentives as well.  Maybe Barry grows with a good feeding, causing him to become fatter and fatter as a visual trigger for correct answers.  Or the opposite could happen.  Perhaps Barry diminishes in size from poor care, showing a weakened character from incorrect answers.

The team also discussed that the difficulty level should increase as the player’s skill level increases.  Not only will students have to discern between various objects, but also between objects that have many similarities. An example of this could be a triangle shape and pizza slice.  The game is geared towards younger learners, but its appeal spans crosses grade and age.  Everyone remember Hungry, Hungry Hippos?  Crazy Croc has similar appeal, yet with common core curriculum woven into its model.

Barry, we enjoyed meeting you and hope that students have the opportunity to fill your belly with knowledge soon!

Team Crazy Croc members include: Alexandra Halbeck, Blake Marggraff, Robert Lee, Shun Nagao, Joseph Makokha, and Marina Spivak

Special Thanks to IDEO, Epicenter, Prezi, Google, Pearson, Stanford d.School, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, and Laurie Moore. 

“Art is our greatest form of speculation; it’s our access point to the future and our archive of the past.”

By: Tanner Higgin, Research Lead at GameDesk

Industrial Schooling and the Advantages of Art

Budget cuts have disproportionately affected arts education. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) gutted its arts budget, dropping funding by 76% from $78.6 million in 2007-2008 to $18.6 million. While these cuts often go unnoticed, fortunately LAUSD’s drastic decline in funding stirred controversy and forced the school board to declare art a core subject and pledge to return funding levels to the 2007-2008 high.

When we ask people if they value the arts, they almost always say yes. Art, conceptually, is very popular. And generally people understand and recognize, at least when polled, its importance. The problem is, however, that when push comes to shove it’s the first thing to go. Why?

Our current model of education continues to be framed as a means of economic sustainability. Schools are structured to produce able-bodied and capable workers. Hence our schools resemble factories, teaching kids to be on time, complete rote tasks, and follow managerial instruction. Even innovative “twenty-first century” approaches that look to destabilize this model still promote themselves as creating innovative students. The implication here is that these students will continue to contribute to a productive workforce just in more agile ways.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Certainly students should be positioned for financial success so they can support themselves, their families, and their communities. The problem is that economic success and productivity is often the sole ideology supported within our schools. In our current standardized and STEM focused educational climate, there’s little space for the non-instrumental and purely expressive means of art.

However, what we’re seeing is that arts education, far from being a waste of time within an instrumental model of education, is actually a valuable support system for content areas traditionally deemed more “core” to career success. Research has show that art, theater, and music classes are linked to improved outcomes in math, reading, and a variety of critical skills.

Speculation and Imagining the Possible

But there’s another reason why art is not just important but central to good learning: Art is our greatest form of speculation; it’s our access point to the future and our archive of the past.

I’ve selected the term speculation very deliberately, drawing connections to the genre of speculative fiction most people conflate with science fiction and fantasy. However, speculative work extends far beyond those boundaries to include any art that explores possibilities that might seem unreal, impossible, more than real, or just not make sense yet.

Speculative imagining is one of the more generative functions of art especially when considering the value of arts education within an economically instrumental classroom model. Creating art requires students to be creative and expressive. It requires them to visualize and model the world, to construct metaphors, and to struggle to represent that which otherwise might be unrepresentable. Art is an exploration of past, present, and future which crosses disciplinary boundaries and emerges from and intervenes in the social, historical, political, and cultural. Art students create, collaborate, and establish ownership and investment. They design, iterate, and publish. Art classrooms are safe spaces for the risky, marginal, reflective, and critical. All of these qualities align perfectly with the kind of creative, adaptable, articulate, and innovative learners that government and business argue our schools need to produce. Luckily, the maker and STEM to STEAM movements have recognized this, and are finding ways to fuse art with science and engineering, and to generate more funding interest in the arts.

But does this mean that the arts classroom as we know it is an antiquated construction? Are we seeing an inevitable push toward an infusion of art in science classrooms or transitioning art classes to maker education? I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Art can certainly benefit other disciplines, and design-based art tuned toward creating usable and innovative technologies and products is a good thing. But we also need to preserve art for art’s sake. These two styles of arts education inform each other. The engineer realizes the dream of the artist. So as we push for STEAM and support the creation of maker spaces in schools, we need to also invest in arts classrooms. We need to preserve safe spaces for the speculative where students express, wonder, and discover free from the demands of a world that measures worth with money. It’s only there, in the hands of the artist, that anything is possible.

Above image credit: Youth Arts Collective

Header Image Credit: Olivia Briere, 7th grade via Youth Arts Forum

We are really enjoying watching her blossom and her transformation from a passive learner to an active learner.  We were just commenting that while she was on the computer the other evening she was getting on the forums and watching YouTube videos on equivalent fractions without any prompting or help from us.  We certainly appreciate all of your hard work.  We also see dramatic changes in student expectations and behavior. The language used by students in conversation has shifted to terms reflecting creating meaning and intrinsic motivation.  One situation yesterday involved a girl who had just gotten an envelope for the ARG. She came to AJ and asked, “What should I do with this?” AJ grinned back and the girl said, “I know, be creative.”

The Bammy Awards provide a platform that honors all levels and roles within the educational field, creating recognition for a wide array of disciplines including educators, principals, and school nurses to name a few.  The awards celebrate the collaboration that occurs within schools and communities, thriving on the mindset “It takes a village to educate a child.”

We believe leaders in education should be recognized and celebrated as well.  Our CEO, Lucien Vattel, has this to say about the importance of such an event:

Learning in the right context can be a wondrous experience full of natural curiosity, experimentation, play, and fantastic failures that deepen us. We need to recognize teachers who are creating this context and shifting our attitudes about what learning is and how we implement it. The Bammy Awards is a great platform for those who are inspiring a generation to become deeply curious and encouraging them to understand themselves and the universe around them.

For more information about the 2013 Bammy Awards you can visit their website at www.bammyawards.com, and for information on how to submit your own nominations please follow the link HERE