Design Exercies Game Participants Needed

Erika Wood, PhD Student in computing at the Australian National University needs volunteers to help her with the Design Exercise Game. 

Games for Education

Greetings from the Australian Computer Society's Reimagination 2017 conference in Sydney. The keynote speaker is Jane McGonigal on "Transforming the digital playfield – collaboration and gaming to achieve epic wins". She is pointing out that games can be used for education, because they provide reward for achievement. Also Jane pointed out that game can be a social activity. This is something well known by educators (I studied gamification in my MEd, but it is hard to achieve.

However, we don;t need to make all, or most of, education look like a video-game. The same short term challenge-reward cycle can be built into conventional looking education. As an example, my project management students at the Australian National University Techlauncher program have to learn to give presentations. Giving a presentation is a challenging stressful experience, but provides rewards through intimidate feedback from their peers. The result is confident professionals who can give very good, focused presentations under difficult conditions.

Teaching a can do approach is something which will help with Australia's tech industry development, including defecne. I was discussing this with Mark Eggleton at the Australian Financial Review recently (See: "Forging closer links with commercial partners crucial for military").

Education as an Alternate Reality Game

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra Helen Keegan, University of Salford, is speaking on learning through gaming, sims and innovative media. She described becoming increasingly frustrated with higher education as a product with fixed learning objectives and students as customers,. So she created a fictional character "Rufi Franzen". She talked yesterday at University of Canberra on "Open: Social: Mobile: Connected". You can read her blog.

The idea of a game the students is an interesting one. However some aspects of the exercise I found disturbing. As an example, students were sent anonymous cryptic notes. New university students find study stressful enough when an effort is made to make courses clear. Also international students in particular may be subject to forms harassment and physical threat. Some students are also members of various national security organizations. A cryptic anonymous note may be interpreted by a stunt as a threat. In addition international students can expect to have their on-line communications monitored by their own government, as well as others. Any cryptic communication could be misinterpreted as part of a conspiracy threating national security.

On a more positive note, much of what  Helen described, in terms of setting a task for the students, then stepping back and then providing small amounts of guidance, seems to be a reasonable description of education. Disciplines, including law and medicine, make use of role playing and simulations, but these are announced and within narrowly confined limits.