Course Description

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of the course, students will be able to …

1. Select and evaluate computer games for specific learning objectives.
2. Design an engaging educational game with appropriate goals, challenges, rewards, and feedback.
3. Rapidly prototype game ideas, for testing and promotion.
4. Create a simple educational game/simulation that can be played on the web.

Textbooks

Readings for the course will be from the recent literature, and may be found on the Blackboard site. Materials for learning Comic-BEE and AppInventor are online; I will provide links in Blackboard.

Course Materials

Course Requirements

• Projects - 70%
  Over the course of the semester you will design an educational simulation and an educational game. There will be a Design Review for each, where you are expected to present the design for your project, and a Project Presentation, where you present the finished product. See the Assignments section for further details.
   
• Mid-Term Paper - 20%
  This paper will be due mid-semester. See the Assignments section for further details.
   
• Participation - 10%
  This will include participation in discussions of the readings.

Advisories

• Americans with Disabilities Act: If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact your course work, please contact Disability Support Services, located at ECC (Educational Communications Center) Building, Room 128 (631) 632-6748.  They will determine with you what accommodations, if any, are necessary and appropriate.  All information and documentation is confidential.

• Academic Integrity: Each student must pursue his or her academic goals honestly and be held personally accountable for all submitted work. Representing another person's work as your own is always wrong. Faculty are required to report any suspected instances of academic dishonesty to the Academic Judiciary.  Faculty in the Health Sciences Center (School of Health Technology & Management, Nursing, Social Welfare, and Dental Medicine) and School of Medicine are required to follow their school-specific procedures.  For more comprehensive information on academic integrity, including categories of academic dishonesty, please refer to the academic judiciary website at http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/academic_integrity/index.html

• Critical Incident Management:Stony Brook University expects students to respect the rights, privileges, and property of other people. Faculty are required to report to the Office of University Community Standards any disruptive behavior that interrupts their ability to teach, compromises the safety of the learning environment, or inhibits students' ability to learn.  Faculty in the HSC Schools and the School of Medicine are required to follow their school-specific procedures.

• Course Evaluation: Each semester Stony Brook University asks students to provide feedback on their courses and instructors through an online course evaluation system. The course evaluation results are used by the individual faculty, department chairs and deans to help the faculty enhance their teaching skills and are used as part of the personnel decision for faculty promotion and tenure. No individually identifiable data are ever reported back to the university or instructor. Students who have completed previous evaluations can view all faculty ratings at: https://classie-evals.stonybrook.edu/

My Own Advice

Think of me as your cranky client. There may be times when you disagree with what I say. You may think that some things are a matter of opinion, or that you are right and I am wrong. Just remember that I am the one giving out the grades. When I make a suggestion, be sure to listen, because it may have an impact on your final grade.

Start your assignments and your project early. That way if you have trouble, you can get help in time to finish your assignment by the due date. This will also help you to avoid a last-minute crunch in the lab.

Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you don't understand something, it's likely that your classmates don't understand it either. Raise questions in class. If you need further explanation, come see me during office hours. If you can't make my office hours, send me email. Be sure to do this before you get hopelessly lost.

Work with other students. I do not mean that you should copy each other's work (which will not be tolerated). Rather, you should learn from one another. If you can't figure out how to make something work, see how your colleague did it. It is also useful to discuss different ways of approaching a problem.

Please let me know as soon as possible if you anticipate any problems with this class. If alerted to them early on, I may be able to accommodate your needs.

Topics

Classes are divided into two parts: theoretical and practical. Readings are posted in the Course Documents section of Blackboard. You are responsible for doing the readings before class, as they will be discussed in class. Assignments are due on the date listed. Please note that this schedule is approximate, and subject to change.

References

Aldrich, C. (2005). Learning by doing: A comprehensive guide to simulations, computer games, and pedagogy in e-learning and other educational experiences. John Wiley & Sons.

Aldrich, C. (2012), ‘Why Educational Simulations? Designs to Develop Competence Plus Conviction’, Inside Learning Technologies & Skills, January, 2012, 121-126.

Blasi, L. and Alfonso, B. (2006) Increasing the transfer of simulation technology from R&D into school settings: An approach to evaluation from overarching vision to individual artifact in education, Simulation Gaming, vol. 37, no. 2, 245-267.

Cassidy, K. (2001). Enhancing your experiential program with narrative theory. Journal of Experiential Education, 24(1), 22-26.

Types of learning - Clark, D. and Nelson, B. and Sengupta, P. and D’Angelo, C. (2009) Rethinking science learning through digital games and simulations: Genres, examples, and evidence, online at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/Clark_Gaming_CommissionedPaper.pdf.

Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popovic´ & Foldit players (2010). Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game, Nature, vol. 466, 5 August 2010, 756-760.

Adrián Domínguez, Joseba Saenz-de-Navarrete, Luis de-Marcos, Luis Fernández-Sanz, Carmen Pagés, José-Javier Martínez-Herráiz, Gamifying learning experiences: Practical implications and outcomes, Computers & Education, Volume 63, April 2013, Pages 380-392.

Dondi, C. and Moretti, M. (2007) A methodological proposal for learning games selection and quality assessment, British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(3), 502-512.

Foster, A.N. and Mishra, P. (2008). Games, claims, genres & learning. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education. Information Science Reference; Hershey, PA (1759 pages; 3 volumes), 33-50.

Gee, J. P. (2010). A situated sociocultural approach to literacy and technology, online at http://www.jamespaulgee.com/sites/default/files/pub/Approach%20to%20Literacy%20Paper.pdf.

Gentile, D.A., Anderson, C.A., Yukawa, S., Ihori, N., Saleem, M., Ming, L.K. Shibuya, A., Liau, A.K., Khoo, A., Bushman, B.J., Huesmann, L.R. and Sakamoto, A. (2009) The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors: International Evidence from Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies, Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2009 June ; 35(6): 752–763.

Greitemeyer, T., & Osswald, S. (2010). Effects of prosocial video games on prosocial behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 98(2), 211.Hilton, M., & Honey, M. A. (Eds.). (2011). Learning science through computer games and simulations. National Academies Press.

Huang, T. and Plass, J.L. (2009) History of Play in Education, Institute for Games for Learning, white paper #06/2009, available online at http://g4li.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/6-History-of-Play.pdf.

Hunicke R., LeBlanc M. & Zubek R. (2004) MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. Game Design and Tuning Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, San Jose, CA. Available at: http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf.

Iten, N., & Petko, D. (2016). Learning with serious games: Is fun playing the game a predictor of learning success?. British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(1), 151-163.

Ke, F. (2009) A Qualitative Meta-Analysis of Computer Games as Learning Tools, in Ferdig, R.E. (ed), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education, Information Science Reference; Hershey, PA (1759 pages; 3 volumes), 1-32.

Kelle, S., Klemke, R., & Specht, M. (2011). Design patterns for learning games. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(6), 555-569.

Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S. and Salen, K. (2009) Moving learning games forward: obstacles, opportunities & openness, The Education Arcade, available online at http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf.

Pitaru, A. (2008) E Is for Everyone: The Case for Inclusive Game Design, in Salen, K. (ed), The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 67-88.

Resnick, M. (2007, June). All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition (pp. 1-6).

Rice, J.W. (2007) Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games, Journal of Technology and Teacher Education 15(1), 87-100.

Rutten, N., van Joolingen, W. R., & van der Veen, J. T. (2012). The learning effects of computer simulations in science education. Computers & Education, 58(1), 136-153.

L.L. Scarlatos (2002). TICLE: Using Multimedia Multimodal Guidance to Enhance Learning, Information Sciences 140 (2002), pp. 85-103.

Steiner, C. M., Kickmeier-Rust, M. D., & Albert, D. (2015). Making sense of game based user data: learning analytics in applied games. RAGE Publications, downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/1820/6046

Wouters, P., van Nimwegen, C., van Oostendorp, H., & van der Spek, E. D. (2013). A Meta-Analysis of the Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Serious Games. Journal Of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 249-265.

Yee, N., Ducheneaut, N. and Nelson, L. (2012) Online gaming motivations scale: development and validation, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12), 2803-2806.