From the Teaching
Effectiveness Program: Video
Games in Higher Education
Friday, April 25, 2008
3:00-4:30 pm, Proctor 41, Knight Library
http://tep.uoregon.edu/workshops/events/year0708/spring/videogames.html
If video games are long, hard, and
complex, why do people pay to
play them?
From the keynote “Libraries, Gaming, and the New Equity
Crisis” at the TechSource Gaming Symposium
James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of
Literacy Studies at Arizona State University
• 1. Lower the consequences of
failure
• 2. Performance before
competence (with support
and help)
• 3. Players high on the agency
tree (their choices matter)
• 4. Problems are well ordered
• 5. Cycles of challenge,
consolidation, and new
challenge (expertise)
• 6. Stay within, but at the
outer edge, of a player’s
“regime of competence”
(confidence)
• 7. Encourage to think about systems
instead of facts
• 8. Empathy for a complex system
(you’re in it and a part of it)
• 9. Give verbal information, just in
time and on demand
• 10. Situate meanings of words and
symbols
• 11. Modding attitude (you can add to
it and make it your own)
• 12. Assessment (graphs/charts at the
end of a mission help with selfevaluation)
Uses in education:
Elsewhere:
• Hacking the Wii remote for physics class
• Inspired by Wii, professors create a virtual dance
space
• ‘Wii’ bit of technology aids medical education
• Video Game in Mechanical Engineering Education
www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/coller
• Teaching math disguised as video game
Uses in education:
Video games mapping to information literacy indicators
http://researchquest.blogspot.com/2008/01/acrl-infolit-indicators-and-video.html
http://researchquest.blogspot.com/2008/04/vs-modegta-iv-round-2.html
Uses in education:
At UO:
• Human Physiology - Anatomy class exercise based on a video
game
• Music - use Wii remotes in a performance
• Teaching Effectiveness Program
• Math - for non-math folks
• Environmental Studies - simulation - proposed
• Literature - especially new media courses
• Computer Science - video game programming course
In the classroom
For an anatomy class, driven by professor’s
desire for a more useful student activity,
the Center for Educational Technologies
Interactive Media has been developing this
module:
The bicep
http://uoregon.edu/~dwight/CET/arm/
The characters:
Libraries contain stories
Have you seen how much text these have?
Try them yourself!
• In the library search for “video games” as a
genre.
• Our collection and policies are on Scholar’s
Bank:
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/han
dle/1794/5456