| dc.description.abstract | James Paul Gee wrote a book on games that pointed out how much learning happens when you play a game. Gee was writing about video games, but the same is true for analog games, like board games. Designing a game for players and designing a learning experience for students can run surprisingly parallel. In both contexts, you put together a sequence of experiences and interactions that are intended to guide the participants in certain directions. Gee pointed out that, since games can motivate and encourage a lot of learning by players, there could be design moves commonly made in games that could inform the design moves we make as teachers. This led to what’s sometimes called the gamification movement, adding game elements to learning experiences to help motivate and reward learners. In today’s episode, however, we talk with a professor who doesn’t borrow elements from games to use in his teaching—he runs game labs where students play entire board games as part of the learning process. | en_US |
