Pre-Service Teachers Designing and Constructing ‘Good Digital Games’
Abstract
There is a growing interest in the application of digital games to enhance learning across many educational levels. This paper investigates pre-service teachers’ ability to operationalize the learning principles that are considered part of a good digital game (Gee, 2007) by designing digital games in Scratch. Forty pre-service teachers, enrolled in an optional educational technology course, designed and constructed their own digital games in an authentic learning context. The course was structured to prepare pre-service teachers to use game design and construction in their future pedagogical practice. These pre-service teachers had various levels of game-playing experience, but little-to-no previous game-design/building experience. To evaluate the digital games, we created the Game Design Assessment Survey, which determined the degree to which a core set of learning principles, identified from the literature, were present in the digital games constructed by the pre-service teachers. Results suggested that pre-service teachers were generally unaware of the learning principles that should be included in the design of a good digital game, but were familiar with quality principles of interface usability. In addition, no relationship was found between the amount of time pre-service teachers played digital games and their ability to design and construct a good game.References
Bandura, A. (1994). Efficacy. Behaviour Therapist, 17, 127-127.
Bickford, P. (1997). Interface design: the art of developing easy-to-use software. Academic Press.
Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives. Vol. 1: Cognitive domain. New York: McKay.
Brand, J. E. & Todhunter, S. (2015). Digital Australia 2016. Eveleigh, NSW: IGEA. Retrieved from http://www.igea.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Digital-Australia-2016-DA16-Final.pdf
Brown, H. J. (2014). Videogames, history, and education. In Videogames and education (117-135). London: Routledge.
Carbonaro, M., Cutumisu, M., Duff, H., Gillis, S., Onuczko, C., Siegel, J., ... & Waugh, K. (2008). Interactive story authoring: A viable form of creative expression for the classroom. Computers & Education, 51(2), 687-707.
Carbonaro, M., Szafron, D., Cutumisu, M., & Schaeffer, J. (2010). Computer-game construction: A gender-neutral attractor to Computing Science. Computers & Education, 55(3), 1098-1111.
Clark, D. B., Tanner-Smith, E. E., & Killingsworth, S. S. (2015). Digital Games, Design, and Learning A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Review of educational research, 0034654315582065.
Crawford, C. (1982). A taxonomy of computer games. The Art of Computer Game Design. New York: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Cutumisu, M., & Szafron, D. (2009). An Architecture for Game Behavior AI: Behavior Multi-Queues. In AIIDE.
Cutumisu, M., Szafron, D., Schaeffer, J., McNaughton, M., Roy, T., Onuczko, C., & Carbonaro, M. (2006). Generating ambient behaviors in computer role-playing games. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 21(5), 19-27.
Cydis, S. (2015). Authentic instruction and technology literacy. Journal of Learning Design, 8(1), 68-78.
Denner, J., Werner, L., & Ortiz, E. (2011). Computer games created by middle school girls: Can they be used to measure understanding of computer science concepts?. Computers & Education, 58(1), 240-249. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2011.08.006
Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(2), 67–83. doi:10.1007/bf02504866
Entertainment Software Association (ESA). (2012). Essential facts 2012. Report. Retrieved from http://theesa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Essential-Facts-2012-EN.pdf
Gee, J.P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1145/950566.950595
Gee, J.P. (2005). Good video games and good learning. In Phi Kappa Phi Forum (Vol. 85, No. 2, p. 33). THE HONOR SOCIETY OF PHI KAPPA PHI. Retrieved from http://www.phikappaphi.org/publications-resources/
Gee, J.P. (2006). Why game studies now? Video games: A new art form. Games and culture, 1(1), 58-61. Retrieved from http://www.jamespaulgee.com/sites/default/files/pub/GamesCulture-1-1.pdf
Gee, J.P. (2007). Good video games+ good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: P. Lang.
Gee, J.P. (2013). Video games and learning [Video file].
Gee, J.P. (2014). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Macmillan.
Good, J. (2011). Learners at the wheel: Novice programming environments come of age. International Journal of People-Oriented Programming (IJPOP), 1(1), 1-24. doi: 10.4018/ijpop.2011010101
Groff, J., Howells, C., & Cranmer, S. (2010). The impact of console games in the classroom: Evidence from schools in Scotland. UK: Futurelab.
Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., & Oliver, R. (2014). Authentic learning environments (pp. 401-412). Springer New York.
Hsu, T. Y., & Chiou, G. F. (2014, June). A Play-Design-Programming Model for the Training of Preservice Teachers’ Education Game Literacy. In World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunication (Vol. 2014, No. 1, pp. 1887-1891).
Huitzinga, J. (1944). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Jennett, C., Cox, A. L., Cairns, P., Dhoparee, S., Epps, A., Tijs, T., & Walton, A. (2008). Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games. International journal of human-computer studies, 66(9), 641-661.
Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2005). Teachers learning technology by design. Journal Of Computing in Teacher Education, 21(3), 94-102.
Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S., & Salen, K. (2009). Moving learning games forward. Cambridge, MA: The Education Arcade
Koster, R. (2005). A theory of fun for game design. Paraglyph Press.
Latham, G., & Carr, N. (2012). Authentic Learning for Pre-Service Teachers in a Technology-Rich Environment. Journal of Learning Design, 5(1), 32-42.
Li, Q. (2013). Digital games and learning: A study of preservice teachers' perceptions. International Journal of Play, 2(2), 101-116.
Lombard, M., Reich, R. D., Grabe, M. E., Bracken, C. C., & Ditton, T. B. (2000). Presence and television. Human Communication Research, 26(1), 75-98.
Malone, T. W. (1982, March). Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games. In Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 63-68). ACM.
Mayer, R. E. (2011). Multimedia learning and games. In S. Tobias & J.D. Fletcher (eds.), Computer games and instruction (p. 281-305). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139547369.037
Metacritic. (2015). Metacritic. Retrieved October 21, 2014 from http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/all
MIT. (2009). Scratch (Version 1.4) [computer software]. Available from http://scratch.mit.edu/
Murphy, C., Chertoff, D., Guerrero, M., & Moffitt, K. (2013). Design better games! Flow, motivation, & fun. In S. Coleman & T. Hussain (Eds.), Design and development of training games: practical guidelines from a multi-disciplinary perspective (146-178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newmann, F. M., & Wehlage, G. G. (1993). Five standards of authentic instruction. Educational leadership, 50(7), 8-12.
Nielsen, J. (1994, April). Enhancing the explanatory power of usability heuristics. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (152-158). ACM.
Norman, D. A. (2002). The design of everyday things. Basic books.
Oxland, K. (2004). Gameplay and design. Pearson Education.
Papert, S. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism (pp. 5-23). Norwood, NJ:Ablex.
Prensky, M. (2008). Students as designers and creators of educational computer games: Who else?. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 1004-1019.
Rickard, N. S. (2004). Intense emotional responses to music: a test of the physiological arousal hypothesis. Psychology of Music, 32(4), 371-388.
Robertson, J., & Howells, C. (2008). Computer game design: Opportunities for successful learning. Computers & Education, 50(2), 559-578.
Schrader, P. G., Archambault, L. M., & Oh-Young, C. (2011). Training by Gaming: Preparing Teachers of Today for Tomorrow’s Learning Environments. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 19(3), 261-286.
Vos, N., van der Meijden, H., & Denessen, E. (2011). Effects of constructing versus playing an educational game on student motivation and deep learning strategy use. Computers & Education, 56(1), 127-137. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.08.013
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the development of children, 23(3), 34-41.
Whitton, N. (2014). Digital Games and Learning: Research and Theory. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203095935
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).