Action Adventure

Wow, my son thinks I am now the coolest mom ever. Zelda is his favorite game and I have watched him play many hours of this game on Nintendo 64 as well as the Wii. I like the decision making aspect of this game, the choices players are faced with.

I am trying to decide how this can best be used in education and I think allowing students choices in their education is the best way to do this.

Mechanics of Game-based Learning

As I have spent the last three weeks in the gamelab, I have fought some of my pre-conceived ideas about gaming. I was one of "those" skeptics who saw video games as a waste of time, something that is destroying the minds of our youth. I am shedding those ideas as I have seen how the lessons learned in video games can cross over in to education.

In some of my previous posts I talked about how excited I get about the rewards in the game lab. I love logging in and checking out my progress, seeing the rank bar creep farther and farther over to the right, and the number of rewards continue to increase in each group. I get excited! I have no doubt my students will get even more excited. This is really motivating for me and prior to this I had very little interest in gaming.

I want to find and have been brainstorming, ways to incorporate this concept into my class. I am an online instructor with the Idaho Digital Learning Academy and I am anxious to go back and report how successful the concepts of gaming are in a class. I plan to use rewards and level and points and everything else I can to get my students not only excited but motivated to come back for more, and not just to get the grade. I want them to learn and I want them to enjoy learning, but I believe they will.

Tom Chatfield

I have found that the rewards I have received in the 3D game lab are one of the biggesdt draws. I love what I am learning, but I love even more seeing how many XP points, and what rewards I have earned. The power of rewards, in any form is huge and I can see how essential that is in education. And those rewards can not be grades.

Can games make the world better?

• Reflect on Jane's 4 things that games do to make us "virtuosos": Urgent Optimism, Social Fabric, Blissful Productivity, Epic Meaning.

I really enjoyed listening to Jane, I thought her topic was interesting and her humor was entertaining. However, I think her ideas are a pretty far stretch. I am not convinced the lessons learned in gaming by the "average" gamer can be applied to real life. It is much easier to save a virtual world, there are no real sacrfiices, only buttons to click. I think some of the lessons are real and ideally we should be able to cross from virtual to reality, but to ask someone to give up life style habits in real life is much more difficult than to give them up in a virtual world.

The 4 things that make us virtuosos are not compatible from virtual to real, in my opinion. I believe they require a different make-up of a person to be a virtuoso in real life. I think about virtual basketball. To sit and play may take decision making, but a real professional basketball player has to sweat and work hard physically as well as mentally to be successful. You take the physical hard work and practice out of basketball and you don't end up with the same result.

Larry Bird is one of my basketball heroes, but my son can play Wii basketball and can win a championship, but in real life, my money is on Larry Bird on a real basketball court. I don't think you can take real life lessons and teach them to be effective in a virtual world and visa versa.

Peasant's Quest

Just spent some time playing Peasant's Quest with all of my kids surrounding me. We got quite a kick out of it and I was amazed how my 9 year old son offered suggestions that I had not even thought about as I played. I read the instructions and went about my playing and when got stuck, I figured oh well, I guess I am done, and then my son would make a suggestion and get me a little farther than I thought I could go. It was interesting.

I liked the humor in the game the best, it made me chuckle a little as I watch these old school graphics begin the foundation of where we are today.

Are Games Better than Real Life?

I really enjoyed the David Perry and found his presentation rather gripping. His statistics he shared were enlightening; target age to sell video games to is 37, and that 43% of gamers are women. That does surprise me. I have 1 son who loves gaming and 3 daughters who couldn't care less about video games, so this statistic shocks me.

However, the part of the presentation that sticks out in my mind was the video made by the addicted gamer, honestly it scared me to my very core. I am not ready to accept that real world and virtual world gray area. I suppose I learned from it, however, that if we are designing, the games need to promote good qualities, that perhaps our students will adopt.

Interactive Fiction

I just spent 15 minutes attempting to play the game Zork, created in the early 1980's. Iam intrigued at the amke-up of the game, and the complexity of how it works. Coming from today's gaming world, this would hold a person's interest for about 5 minutes as each step requires reading and imagination, whereas today's gaming is so visual and immediate. It reminds me of the endless Choose your own adventrue books I read as a kid. I chose directions and was told, the mountains are impassable, so I went another way only to find some other obstacle. It was actually very frustrating that I could not see what was happening. I will admit, I didn't get very far in the game, as it seemed to complex and I got frustrated.

I liked the need for decision making and the use of your imagination, both which are a large part of learning, but without the visual, this was on a completely unfamiliar level to me.