Our very own Robert Duncan of the CUNY Games Network (pictured above in a very cool pic) is doing some excellent work with students at York College. He’s set up a game lab where students design and build digital learning games! He was recently interviewed by Daily Edventures about this work. Follow the link for the full text of the interview.
Going to the gym for an hour is 2 red points. Calling my mom is 1 blue point while calling Aunt Deborah is 5 blue points because, honestly, Aunt Deb’s sort of a pain to talk to and sometimes she says crazy inappropriate things. Cleaning the bathroom is 15 red points. Otherwise I would never do it. This is the plan to gamify my life, to relate everything I do to a point-based game.
Here it is argued that with game-based learning it is possible, through their inherent teaching mechanisms, to sustain stimulation throughout a class within higher education. That is, the “net generation” (Tapscott, 1999, p. 6) is intrinsically motivated by games and that commercial video games have a potentially important role in the classroom to assist learning of a range of crucial transferable skills. We further argue that commercial off the shelf (COTS) game design is replete with effective constructivist teaching structures and that such games should play a more prominent role within mainstream education…
