Jennifer S. Groff

Console Game-Based Pedagogy: A Study of Primary and Secondary Classroom Learning through Console Video Games.

The main focus of this research project was to identify the educational benefits of console game-based learning in primary and secondary schools. The project also sought to understand how the benefits of educational gaming could transfer to other settings. For this purpose, research was carried out in classrooms in Scotland to explore learning with games played on games consoles, such as PlayStation, Xbox, and Wii. Interviews were carried out with school leaders, classroom teachers, and students in 19 schools and followed up by a series of lesson observations in four of these schools. Findings include significant impact on students’ performance and engagement, as well as strong support from participating teachers and school leaders.

Four-Dimensional Education for Sustainable Societies

The rate of change in our lives today has pushed us to evolve and adapt our daily practices so quickly, that if one does not pause to reflect on them it is easy to overlook just how much our world has changed. The past 50, 20, and even just the past 10 years has produced deep and profound changes in our world. Just 20 years ago, many educational systems were under intense scrutiny for not being effective and/or equitable for all learners. Many educational systems were not up to par—and to think, that was before these global dramatic shifts. The call and demand for radically improved, but more poignantly, refocused educational systems have never been higher. What does it mean to prepare young learners for a life in today’s world? What do they need? What do we value? How can we deliver that? These are complex yet critically important questions to the future of education. Today, each of us faces a highly complex, rapidly changing world that affects our lives at a local level. The way we communicate, do business, even interface with our doctors and government officials is altering. Entire industries are deeply impacted by new technologies that continue to arrive at a rapidly increasing pace, with once long-held traditional job skills being phased out—leaving a growing generation of people to ask how they are to make a living.

Designing games for learning and assessment: the radix endeavor

In this paper, we briefly present a design framework, XCD, that we developed through the design of The Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game for STEM learning. The framework provides a method for ensuring that the learning objectives, game mechanics, and data collected are closely aligned throughout the design process. We present this method here as a resource for other learning game designers, with the goal of making designing games with deep learning more accessible.