Making Game Artifacts To Facilitate Rich and Meaningful Learning.

摘要

The artifacts (instructional games) created by a class of fourth-grade students engaged in designing educational games are analyzed. To facilitate the analysis, these artifacts were compared with products created by students in a similar design context who were creating instructional software. In both situations, inner-city fourth graders were asked to create products in Logo to teach third graders about fractions. Of the 32 products created, 16 were instructional games. Evaluation of the development process indicated that both instructional and game designers improved their understandings of Logo and their own of fractions. Analysis of the project demonstrated that the given design task made a difference in terms of the product and process and in terms of the learning experience. Instructional software designers used Logo code to create fraction representations, but game designers usually preferred to use modified geometric shapes. Game designers tended to place the game in the foreground; software designers made fractions central. Game designers also preferred active manipulation and animated scenes. For these students, the openness of the design task varied according to the task specifications. (Contains 16 figures representing computer screens and 17 references.) (SLD) * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. U S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office 04 Educa1.00a. Resew ar0 EDu ATIONAL RESOURCES tNE ophAto ION CENTER 1ERICI Thm document has tree repioduc ed as received 1000, the Dets00 0,genaano,' ongnnating it C Minco changes ea.e beor mane , .n0/4e reprOduCt.On Quality Poosts 01 view or opm,005 Slated .s lv .. ment 00 001 ,sectss.ailly ,c0,ese OE RI posnon 0. 1,4v , fil Y425/t/ /A) ./i/9 f/t Making Game Artifacts to Facilitate Rich and Meaningful Learning Yasmin Kafai University of California, Los Angeles Session 3.1.37: Artifacts of Learning: A Perspective on Students' Learning Processes and Strategies through their Learning Products Ame1ican Educational Research Association April 1995, San Francisco Address for Correspondence: UCLA Graduate School of Education I Lehrer, 1991; Carver, 1991); these educational researchers and practitioners stress the importance of self-directed, complex and personally meaningful activities for students' learning. Constructionist theory (Papert, 1980; 1993) also emphasizes that learning happens particular well if the learner is engaged in creating external and shareable product such as a robot, computer game or bookin short, artifact. One of the pedagogical challenges, among many others, is it to find tasks that stimulate and sustain students' cognitive engagements with the subject matter at hand and, at the same time, are personally meaningful to students. Video games are a central part of children's culture of the late 20th century (Greenfield, 1984; Provenzo, 1991). The number of hours spent in front of screens and the quality of engagement that children show for these games speak for the energizing nature of video games. Yet, video games are rarely in discussion as rich contexts for academic learning. The approach chosen by most researchers to harness the motivating power of video games is to create educational games for students to play and learn with. A different approach places students in the roles of producers (rather than consumers) of educational video games to capitulize on their motivating power (Kafai, 1993, 1995). In this context, students are asked to design scftware game artifacts that teach mathematical concepts to younger students. It uses as a foundation the learning through design approach developed by Harel (1988, 1991) that sees the resulting video games as an artifact that is a shareable, critiquable externalization of knowledge (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). But it extends this view by considering the artifact not just a product of telling but also as interesting and unique piece on its own reflecting students' personal int