[00:00:05] >> Well today we have a regular speaker so what he needs no introduction to you are Christina. Works. Maybe. Your children's games does the watch world this was my pleasure to walk her today talk about her work it's really. Let's get right. In here make. Hi everyone. There aren't as many of you here is normal as always lovely to see you are always have such a such a royal thing to come and talk to your students it's I'm so pleased that you are here because I have a topic that I'm been talking about for a number of years and I've been writing about for a number of years and present it on and I'd like to introduce you to it. [00:00:57] So I'm talking about serious topics in children's games and today I'm going to talk a little bit about serious games about playing games and about creating meaning in games which is going to be the case study that I. Have that shows you how we can use this so in a quick search of serious games I found this comment on the game learned company website this was like 2 days ago right in recent years serious games have proven that it is possible to learn while you play this teaching method is known as game based learning a trend that's expanding at the speed of light in primary schools prestigious universities and large corporations now this may be due this. [00:01:40] And I have to say that I was really really going took me a while to find exactly the right image for you because what I wanted was this rolling on the floor laughing type of image and the reason is because game based learning has been a fact of life since before Aristotle not only has it been a fact of life for several 1000 years the ancient Greeks the Romans Martin Luther John Locke and later John Dewey at the end of 18 hundreds all all. [00:02:10] And encouraged to play in games as a way to learn it's frankly a fact of our educational philosophy and has been for thousands of years it's always amusing to me. Now basic facts about computer game based computer game based learning for all age grades has existed since the end of the sixty's early 1970 s. and a prominent example is Oregon Trail How many of you have heard of Oregon Trail More of you have to go and look now this is a history of the pioneer movement in North America in the u.s. west and it was 1st used in the classroom in 1971 which is way before most of you were born it was brought to the Minnesota educational computing consortium which was a very big during the eighty's and ninety's to be available on their system statewide in Minnesota in 1974 months ago long time ago and then in 1905 it became a consumer product and was sold by the millions and children across North America and actually around the world have played a game that tells them about what pioneer life in the u.s. is like now some of you might not remember others might read a rabbit back in 1903 Math Blaster in 1904 who but probably some of you at least will remember ku finders which started often in 1908 and still ongoing soon beanies which started in 1906 is still ongoing and Minecraft Doesn't was never heard of Minecraft right Minecraft has been around since 2009 and it has a. [00:03:48] Elementary and a high school section of it as well. So Serious Games serious games was 1st coined in 1970 by Clark apt. He has a book out called serious games you can find it you can look it up and it costs like $30.00 or $40.00 and if you go to e Bay you can find it for $95.00 so that's what I did so what he says in it is he says we are concerned with serious games in the sense that these games have an explicit and carefully thought out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement although amusement is part of it now this book was written in the 1970 s. So apps this question about serious games was not based in computer technologies as Serious games are considered today and it was written mainly about adult learning and his stop x. included things like improving education with games educational games for physical and social sciences games for the learning disadvantaged games for occupational choice and training in games for planning and probably problem solving in government and industry and it's this last one that got taken up in digital media more than the others now how do we effect effectively create a game that teaches something and not only the teaches but that people learn from. [00:05:17] Apte used is theory of constructivism So anyone who is. A behavioral psychologist to work from the twenty's on and study child development he was interested in understanding how children think differently from adults based on observation he saw that they did things differently so he wanted to know what was behind that thinking he was interested in coming up with a theory that allowed him to then share with people ways that children could learn better he theorized after much observation that we learned through action this became called constructivism what he says is knowledge is not a copy of reality to know an object to know one of Bent is not simply to look at it and make a mental copy or an image of it to know an object is to act on it. [00:06:16] To know it is to modify it to transform the object to understand the process of this transformation and as a consequence to understand the way he object is constructed and that means it's process not just its actual construction and operation is thus the essence of knowledge it isn't internalized action which modifies the object of knowledge intelligence is born of action so we move over to Seymour Papert Seymour Papert is one of the fathers of Ai one of the fathers of children's games he studied with John p s j in Switzerland. [00:07:02] When he came to North America when he came to mit he brought his ideas of constructivism with it so he considered the computer as the ideal tool for learning by doing learning through action. And so with this team at mit he created logo Now this is a picture of Logo 1967 So what this is is it's called a turtle and the kids program the turtle to draw so it would draw images write it would draw different things and that was the 1st project that they created they've been moved logo into many other things but that was its start so that was as I say in 1967 once this started and once he created more. [00:07:49] Applications that children could use and you have to understand he wasn't working with teenagers or 9 and 10 year olds he was working with 34 and 5 year olds he was allowing children who were 34 and 5 to look at act as a piece of technology for growth how do you use it and use it to do things with and most of the time they were doing it on their own. [00:08:11] So what happened as educators found the children were drawn to this active engagement with computers and they became interested in providing students with this kind of eagerness to learn in all of their subject based programs right because in school everything a subject based so in the 1970 s. and 1980 s. learning and entertainment emerged and became known as edutainment and that's what computer games for kids at the time that involved learning something specific classroom type. [00:08:47] Subjects through games. Moved I will go back to that in the minute but what I want to talk to you about is why the play experience is important and so at the same time the p.s.u. was thinking about how children developed the cycle Melanie Klein was working with affected disorders in children and she was working with kids as young as 2 and what she wanted to do is she wanted to find out how to children interpreted their world in much the same way that p.s.u. wanted to find out how children develop in the world she wanted to find out how they interpret their world so after watching them for quite a number of months couple of years she hear eyes that in playing with toys and everything to a child is a toy whether it's a Cheerio that they stuff into their mouth a word that they see on a page a ball that they handle a piece of clothing anything and they think that they work with that's in around them is a toy any art or as I say any artifact could be toward children confer meaning on these objects and what they do is they invest their own ideas their own feelings in this object at a very young age they have don't have the very broad range of ideas that you have. [00:10:08] And they invest these objects with feelings and meaning you know you're Rollerball wow this round thing goes that way that's interesting that's meaning for them now the meaning of the artifact that's internalized for a child isn't something that an adult gives them an adult doesn't say to them doesn't say to a one year old or 2 year old or 3 year old roll this ball and push this ball and it will roll what happens because they don't really get that they don't think that way they push the ball they internalize the fact that when they push this round object it moves so adults don't tell children the meaning of things children develop the meaning of things for themselves they've negotiated a relationship with that object and they do that in the context of everything that they do on a day to day basis because that's the only thing they understand they can't project up other then what's around them. [00:11:11] Now did anyone caught is a brilliant psychologist one of my favorites actually and he studied with Klein and he took play furthur he began to see it as fundamental to all human development he felt that without play we simply did did not develop as human beings that it was universal the play was everywhere all around the world. [00:11:37] And beyond that that it was necessary for the freedom to be creative if you didn't play you creativity just didn't happen now the exciting part about play for him and this is important because this takes us into into. Into and onward is the interplay of personal psychic reality so cognitively what's going on in your brain. [00:12:03] And the experience and control of artifacts this is what happens in play your brain and what you're doing work together that's what creates meaning this is very much packed hurts knowing by through action so from infancy humans we you know develop our knowledge and our skills by playing with artifacts. [00:12:28] Within our reach when we're little it's immediately within our reach as we get older there's a broader broader reach and we imbue them with meaning we imbue them with our own meaning not the meaning that other people say or give to us and this interplay of a cognitive and the physical developed from a young age is actually one of the reasons why kids are really good with video games they naturally just fit in with what's going on because it's action based so in the 1930 s. the psychologist level got ski clarify something because all of these other psychologists talk about the different stages but they don't talk about the process of getting from stage to stage to stage which is one of the things I'm interested in and I found this in Forgot ski Ok so he talks about as he talks the part about the process of going from level one to level to go level 3 you know from being able to not eat with a spoon to eating with a spoon to being able to handle knife and fork to being all of this the levels that you do and indeed the same levels as you approach in gaming right he calls the the going from level to level critical periods now all human beings children in particular are never satisfied with the status quo they learn how to do one thing and then Ok so now I know how to do that and you move on to something else so what we do is we push forward to attain new understanding and skill levels now this is a critical period this is a critical period where we really don't know what to do next. [00:14:01] You really don't have the skills to do it you may not have the fine motor skills you may not have the gross motor skills you might not have a cognitive skills to move on and we work really really hard to attain that expertise through repetition we do the same thing we do the same thing until we learn better over and over and over again whether it's a stick a spoon into our molds and get it into our eye lots of times. [00:14:25] Or where they were at a game and you want to get to the next level and with the falling into about pit right so it doesn't matter whether we're learning to write the skate board or save Princess Peach games provide the repeatable experiences that increase skill to increase understanding to such a skill through that you get understanding and you also get the memorability word sticks in your brain and stays there and so these critical periods are what create our scaffolding right so here's the 1st one there is the 2nd one there is the 3rd one and we're always building on these scaffolds and as we build them we build them ourselves and that's why they are meaningful No one builds them for us we build them for ourselves and they're meaningful so we have just theories about learning knowing through action Winnicott series about personal psychic reality and experience control of actual artifacts and we get to play as or is learning. [00:15:24] Plays a mental process of transforming action into knowledge for children all play a serious because they really don't know very much so everything that they do is learning how to become a human being and as a result everything that they do serious no matter how we might find those things as trivial play or not trivial. [00:15:50] We're going to move back to serious games for a minute the most common definitions of serious games are games that do not have an entertainment enjoyment or fun as primary purpose which comes from apt and then in the late 1990 s. and early 2000 more and more of the games became digitally based and the word serious games that term became known as video game term as opposed to or digital game term as opposed to an analog game form so games were designed for primary purposes other than pure entertainment industries such as defense education scientific exploration health care management city planning engineering and politics and if we go back to acts we can see that it has moved into. [00:16:37] The topics that we would consider more serious a lot of people consider things like emerged.