The call for submissions to present lectures, panels, full day tutorials and roundtable sessions at the 2012 Game Developers Conference® Online (GDC Online) is open now through midnight PT on Wednesday, May 2. The tenth annual edition of the conference is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, and will take place over three days, October 9-11, 2012 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX.

GDC Online focuses on development of connected games including social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online titles, large-scale MMOs, and beyond. Submissions should address the most pressing development challenges for online and connected games with submissions related to the following tracks: Business & Marketing, Design, Customer Experience, Production and Programming.

The deadline is May 2. Additional info is available at gdconline.com.

We broke into small groups to focus on games for middle school science, middle school social studies, and early childhood. I was in the social studies group, admirably led by Bill Tally at CCT, where among other things he is the PI for evaluation studies of Mission US, a history game focusing on revolutionary America.

One of the challenges of history games we mulled over is the question of game mechanics. As I’ve opined elsewhere, good game mechanics involve key learning elements. The classic example is traditional dominoes, which requires players to count by fives in order to succeed, making it a great game for teaching basic arithmetic to children.

In history games, though, the primary learning dynamic often takes place through text. Narrative action is thus often the key mechanic in which learning takes place. This led to much discussion regarding the problem of compelling game play, with fascinating insights from participants such as Bert Snow, lead designer and VP at Muzzy Lane, and Tracy Fullerton over at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Conferences such as this one are important in bringing together multiple perspectives. Knowledge and understanding gleaned from these discussions further preparations for research and development of future educational games. My thanks to all the good people at CCT who made this conference possible.

SITE 2012 is the 23rd annual conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. Join with 1,200+ colleagues from over 50 countries in Austin, Texas!

This society represents individual teacher educators and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and faculty/staff development. SITE is a society of AACE.

Attendees can participate virtually; there is a new call for virtual presentations. A new topic this year for teachers and school leaders is Teaching with Technology: Engaging Students Through 21st Century Learning. Games & Simulations remains a popular topic strand.

Here is the Call for Participation. Deadline is Oct. 21.

“To a wargamer,” writes Greg Costikyan in the just published collection Tabletop: Analog Game Design, “wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. . . . You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways you can learn more from wargames than from reading history”

I agree. Gee has been telling us for most of the last decade that we can learn from games.

Kirschenbaum went to the recent Connections wargaming conference. He says wargaming has a rich history:

Indeed, the Connections conference advertised itself as being held on the 200^th anniversary of the “invention” of wargaming. What can this mean, with games like Chess and Go dating back to antiquity? In the early 1800s, the Prussian staff officer Georg von Reisswitz formally introduced his Kriegsspiel, a game played by laying metal bars across maps to mark troop dispositions (derived from a set his father had made up) to his fellow officers. “This is not a game! This is training for war!” one general is said to have exclaimed. (The authoritative account of the origins and development of Kriegsspiel is to be found in Peter Perla’s excellent The Art of Wargaming.)

One of the key elements of beneficial learning players obtain by engaging in these games is not so much historical knowledge, but rather decision making skills. When faced with limited resources, for instance, in times of high crisis such as war, what are the best decisions a leader can make? Better yet, what are the best skills a leader can acquire so that he or she can make the best critical decisions when previously unforeseen circumstances arise? It is within this context that wargames provide a beneficial sandbox.

Most of the action seems to involve sitting around a table and talking (sometimes colloquially referred to as BOGSAT, “Bunch of Guys [and Girls] Sitting Around a Table” by those in the know). Such games, which are staged not only by the Pentagon but also by corporate consulting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, can be about response to a global pandemic or an interruption in the supply chain for a manufacturing process as well as military operations and contingencies. Wargaming, increasingly, is a term as likely to be encountered in a business leadership seminar as inside a Beltway think tank.

The article hardly qualifies as a blog post. It is more along the lines of something one would read in The Atlantic. It’s a very interesting perspective and well worth the read.

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Abstracts are invited for presentation in the international conference “Literacy and Society, Culture, Media, & Education” held at Ghent University 9-11 February 2012
http://www.literacyconference2012.ugent.be .

The conference is conceived to offer a forum of discussion about digitality in/of society, culture (incl. literature and the other arts), and education. In an age of digitality and mass media, perceptions and practices of culture, cultural production and consumption, and thus also education and pedagogy — from elementary to higher education from epistemological questions, classroom practices, and application (including technology), as well as institutional structures — are undergoing rapid changes and debate. The impact of digitality thus results in the necessity of and demand for new perspectives on literacy(ies). Participants in the conference explore theories, practices, and applications for the study of the interrelations of digitality and contemporary society, culture, and pedagogy.

Papers are presented in the thematic sections of 1) Media and Society, 2) Media and Culture, and 3) Media and Education. Abstracts of 300 words with a 150-word bioprofile are invited by 30 September 2011 to Geert Vandermeersche at geert.vandermeersche@ugent.be . Presentations are 20 minutes in length followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Selected papers from the conference are planned to be published in the peer-reviewed and AHCI indexed humanities and social sciences quarterly CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb (ISSN 1481-4374).

Limited funding is available to graduate student participants.

steven totosy de zepetnek ph.d. professor

http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/totosycv

editor, clcweb: comparative literature and culture
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/ clcweb@purdue.edu

series editor, purdue books in comparative cultural studies
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/seriespurdueccs &

http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/comparativeculturalstudies.html

8 sunset road, winchester, massachusetts 01890 usa

Deadline May 3, 2010

June 29 – July 3, 2010  *  Toronto, Canada
The Westin Harbour Castle

Many players have noted the “work” in FarmVille seems somewhat educational. This, in fact, is what intrigues educators about video games in general. They are so interactive and require focused attention to progress. So, the thinking goes, if we can have students play with educational elements perhaps they’ll absorb some pedagogical content in ways they can’t through books or television.

Could FarmVille be a tool leveraged for classroom use? In November I was invited to sit on a panel of school district tech directors at a regional technology conference to discuss the educational value of social networking. One fellow tech director indicated her school board suggested the district open their network to Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools to students as well as staff. She described the various issues involved, how teachers treated the new access as a classroom management issue, and ways in which the tools were being incorporated into the school day. Then, she said the high school Ag teacher was investigating ways to bring FarmVille into the classroom.

So, is FarmVille educational? Can it be used effectively in the classroom to teach useful things? I turned to the net to see what the hive has to say and also try to find some academic research on the issue.



Math and Organization Skills
Like many games, there are things you can count in FarmVille, and a modest amount of math skills might prove helpful in the game. An eHow article offers six steps in using FarmVille to teach math. Here’s a sample:

Teach fractions using the Chicken Coop and Dairy Barn. There are 4 windows in each building and each building can hold 20 animals. For every 5 animals a head pops out a window. So you can show them how 4/20 is 1/5 of the animals.

CommonSenseMedia.org, which purports to rate video games for parents and teachers, notes that FarmVille requires “simple math and organizational skills.” Later in the review author Carla Thornton writes:

The game itself is clean, safe, and loads of fun, if not especially educational. In FarmVille players plow, plant, and harvest crops to earn virtual coins, raise animals and improve their farmsteads with fences, windmills, and other objects. The more Facebook friends a player can convince to become FarmVille neighbors, the bigger and more successful the farm will be.

Lisa Russell, writing over at the home schooling section for Suite101.com, shows how players can exert a little more math effort to figure out the fastest way to earn money in the game:

Initially, the only seeds available are strawberries, eggplant, wheat and soybeans. Strawberries cost 10 coins and after 4 hours are harvested for 35 coins, a ROI (return on investment) of 25 coins, or 6.25 coins an hour. Using the same method of calculation, it can be seen that the eggplant is worth only 1.31 coins per hour, the wheat breaks down to only 1.1 coins per hour and finally, the soybeans are worth 2 coins per hour. Clearly, the strawberries are a better investment for the player who has time to return in 4 hours to harvest.

Later, she offers a formula for the calculation:

H=harvest value

C=initial price

T=time (in hours)

ROI=(H-C)/T

Players can use a similar formula for comparing the value of their trees (both purchased and gifted) as well as their animals. … FarmVille may have absolutely nothing to offer on a scientific level. In fact, if an entire generation of humans were to learn farming skills from this game, humans might starve to death. However, for math skills and virtual applications of algebra, as well as estimation and strategic planning, FarmVille is more than just fun and games.

So the general consensus seems to be, FarmVille requires a little math skill and some attention to organizational details, but it was made more for fun than education, as are so many popular games.



Academic Interest
As far as academic consensus, a lot of the research interest in FarmVille has revolved around the game indirectly. It crops up in lists of popular social games in academic papers, for instance, but specific studies focusing on the game itself are rare if not non-existent.

A great example of FarmVille serving as a framework for a presentation is one loaded onto Slideshare.net by Sidneyeve Matrix over at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It is titled Pedagogy Inspired by FarmVille, or Seeds of Engagement, From Social Games to the Classroom: Educational Design Inspired by FarmVille.

In it, she highlights three videogame design principals that can be extrapolated for classroom courses. They are derived from a discussion at the recent Social Games Seattle meeting led by Amitt Mahajan, who is part of the core team and lead designer for FarmVille.

First, instructors should design games with broad appeal. FarmVille succeeds because playing farm is something many kids have grown up doing, sometimes using plastic toys provided by companies like PlaySkool. In the classroom or lecture hall, Dr. Matrix suggests this can translate to humanized case studies, current events, and pop cultural references to widen the appeal of the subject matter to apathetic students.

Second, FarmVille uses something Mahajan called “microsociality,” meaning social connections become painless. Players don’t have to go out of their way to keep up with contacts; they’re all easily accessible in the game. This has become “a viable alternative to offline face-to-facetime,” according to Dr. Matrix. So, for classroom incorporation she suggests instructors build or use existing social sites where students can share and divide workloads and resources.

Finally, FarmVille succeeds because it adds “visual pleasure.” There is a certain graphic appeal to the game, common among most successful commercial titles, that enhances player engagement. Instructors should be sure and incorporate visually appealing graphics in lectures and discussions to help focus attention on the subject matter.

Conclusion
All told, FarmVille is a major hit, sure to be popular for years to come. Educators, as well as perhaps classroom students, can certainly learn a thing or two from the game. But, ultimately, it was designed more for fun than for teaching essential knowledge.

A great session was delivered by Scott Floyd, who is the technology curriculum specialist over at White Oak ISD in east Texas. He is an outspoken advocate on the state level for students and technology, and runs the influential ed tech blog, A Piece of My Mind.

Scott is a former literacy teacher, and technologies that facilitate and encourage student literacy are always fascinating to him. I sat in on a session he delivered on using blogging to encourage reading and writing with students.

The interesting thing about using blogging tools, WordPress in this case, for students in the classroom is the way their use resembles gaming. Students are charged with a task, often collaborating with one another in producing their product, and complete the “quest” together.

But when the product is published, deep concerns arise among teachers and students regarding errors in the text. So, Scott said, what’s a teacher to do? Should she let an error-riddled post go live on the Web, refuse to allow it to go online without student editing, or just edit it herself? Interestingly, the problem seems to resolve itself through the students, and more concern on “getting it right” is displayed by them when they realize everyone in the world can see their work.

Cool stuff. Anything that helps kids read and write more gets a thumbs up in my book. For more neat stuff on technology and student literacy, follow Scott Floyd on Twitter here.

The SMART Table reminds me of the old Ms. PacMan tabletop game of the 1980s, where two players could square off with one another while seated (and yes, I threw far too many quarters down the gullet of one such machine in a College Station eatery way back when).

It also reminds me of Dr. Merrick’s table top computer portrayed in the movie The Island, which was the brain spawn of an MIT consultant for the film.

Various games and activities are included with the SMART Table, including puzzles, mazes, and arithmetic problems embedded in a fun environment. On one, a money game, kids have to slide representations of coins to indicate the cost of an item. Buckleitner asks the SMART rep, jokingly, “So kids could actually gamble and do poker in preschool?” I had to smile since we talked about poker in school earlier today.

Buckleitner seems a bit concerned about the $8,000 price tag for the SMART Table, but if past success is any indicator SMART Technologies will sell plenty of them. Here’s Buckleitner’s video: