Critical perspectives, enabling classrooms and digital games: challenges for teachers and researchers working with games-based learning

There is significant interest in the potential of digital games for Twenty first century pedagogy and curriculum in schools. However, developing an informed and granular understanding of the challenges facing 'everyday' teachers in introducing work with digital games in a range of schools, across diverse subject areas, age groups and system requirements, is not straightforward. This paper reports on the initial stages of a three-year research project investigating the introduction and use of games in a variety of contexts, and discusses some of the challenges entailed in introducing teacher participants to working with games in critical and productive ways.

Literacy into action: digital games as action and text in the English and literacy classroom

Using data gathered from a three-year research project exploring digital literacy and pedagogy with respect to video games, including classroom games-based pedagogy and curriculum and ethnographic research on students' digital game playing, this article locates and explores a key conceptual problem facing the incorporation of digital games into English and literacy classroom activities. This challenge is defined as "action" and refers to the non-visual and non-textual elements of gameplay. This challenge is explored both theoretically and through a practical discussion of various strategies developed by teachers in the project to approach this issue. The article draws on contemporary game studies in order to map out and highlight several key areas where action-based projects lead to critical reflection.

A model for critical games literacy

This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom for teachers. The model illustrates the connections between in-game actions and youth gaming culture. The article explains how the out-of-school knowledge building, creation and collaboration that occurs in gaming and gaming culture has an impact on students' understanding of their own lifeworlds. The authors demonstrate how the development of curricula around and with games and gaming cultures can incorporate and capitalise on approaches to learning and collaboration, design and identity that students have developed in their own gaming practices.

The role of serious games in robot exoskeleton-assisted rehabilitation of stroke patients

his chapter describes how serious games can be used to improve the rehabilitation of stroke patients. Determining ideal training conditions for rehabilitation is difficult, as no objective measures exist and the psychological state of patients during therapy is often neglected. What is missing is a way to vary the difficulty of the tasks during a therapy session in response to the patient needs, in order to adapt the training specifically to the individual. In this chapter, we describe such a method. A serious game is used to present challenges to the patient, including motor and cognitive tasks. The psychological state of the patient is inferred from measures computed from heart rate variability (HRV) as well as breathing frequency, skin conductance response, and skin temperature. Once the psychological state of the patient can be determined from these measures, it is possible to vary the tasks in real time by adjusting parameters of the game. The serious game aspect of the training allows the virtual environment to become adaptive in real time, leading to improved matching of the activity to the needs of the patient. This is likely to lead to improved training outcomes and has the potential to lead to faster and more complete recovery, as it enables training that is challenging yet does not overstress the patient.

Teaching games for understanding (TGFU) as a positive and versatile approach to teaching adapted games

This paper presents a small scale research project that focused on pre-service physical education (PE)teachers’ and sports coaches’ considerations of using Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) to teachgames. A research design akin to action research was adopted whereby pre-service PE teachers and sportscoaches (n = 72) completed a one-off 90 minute introduction to wheelchair rugby league utilising a TGfUapproach. Data were generated through end of session whole-class reflections, semi-structured individualinterviews undertaken (n = 3), and post session first-author/primary practitioner reflections. Data analysiswas conducted via inductive coding procedures and revealed three themes: 1) TGfU as a positive pedagogy;2) TGfU as a versatile approach, and 3) significance of content within a PE Teacher Education programme.

‘What else can I do?’ Radical suggestions to help physical education teachers successfully implement a game based approach to teach games

As with any new relationship when teachers implement a different or unfamiliar pedagogical approach into the classroom it is often accompanied by a period of unaccustomed behaviour; such as a reluctance for teachers to commit or a wariness from learners to invest or reveal. The challenges that teachers and learners face in the initial stages of this new relationship, if overcome, can be the mainstays of a mutually beneficial learning experience. Yet, as many teachers have experienced, the reverse of this is also true. Failure to adequately invest, plan and commit to the introduction of a new pedagogical approach can bring with it long term consequences that include an unwillingness to ever start a new relationship again.

Shifting practices and frames: literacy, learning and computer games

Digital culture and the online world have profound implications for contemporary notions of literacy, learning and curriculum. The increasing integration of digital culture and technologies into young people’s lives reflects the energy and excitement offered by online worlds. Online forms of text and communication are shaping students’ experience of the world, including expectations and experiences about learning and literacy. While print literacies remain important, for schools to prepare students to participate in critical and agential ways in the contemporary and future world, they need also to teach them to be fully literate in digital and multimodal literacies, and at ease and in control in the online world. Computer games, and other forms of digital games, teach and exemplify multimodal forms of literacy. Schools can capitalize on their potential and work with them productively. Doing so however, entails recognizing the messy complexity of schooling, and the practicalities of classroom lives. This chapter reports on a three year project in five schools concerned with literacy and computer games, and discusses the important role of teachers as on-the- ground leaders in pioneering new conceptions of literacy, and of curriculum change, and the importance of school structures and support to enable such change to happen.

A simultaneous extraction of context and community from pervasive signals using nested dirichlet process

Understanding user contexts and group structures plays a central role in pervasive computing. These contexts and community structures are complex to mine from data collected in the wild due to the unprecedented growth of data, noise, uncertainties and complexities. Typical existing approaches would first extract the latent patterns to explain human dynamics or behaviors and then use them as a way to consistently formulate numerical representations for community detection, often via a clustering method. While being able to capture high-order and complex representations, these two steps are performed separately. More importantly, they face a fundamental difficulty in determining the correct number of latent patterns and communities. This paper presents an approach that seamlessly addresses these challenges to simultaneously discover latent patterns and communities in a unified Bayesian nonparametric framework. Our Simultaneous Extraction of Context and Community (SECC) model roots in the nested Dirichlet process theory which allows a nested structure to be built to summarize data at multiple levels. We demonstrate our framework on five datasets where the advantages of the proposed approach are validated.

Multiliteracies in the wild : learning from computer games

The growth of interest in virtual worlds and other online spaces for children and young people raises important issues for literacy educators and researchers. This book is a timely and much-needed collection of current research in the area. It provides a synthesis of knowledge and understanding and will be a key resource for scholars, students and teachers, particularly those interested in digital literacies. The work presents a coherent vision of current knowledge, and some of the most engaging, empirical research being undertaken on virtual worlds and online spaces in and beyond educational institutions. It contains international studies from the UK, North America and Australasia.This is an important time for those researching virtual worlds, videogaming and Web 2.0 technologies, since there is growing professional interest in their significance in the education and development of children and young people. Whether these technologies are solely associated with informal learning or whether they should be incorporated into classroom contexts is hotly debated. This book provides a principled evaluation and appreciation of the learning, teaching and instruction that can occur in digital environments, showing children, young people and those who work with them as active agents with possibilities to navigate new paths.

A model for games and literacy

Digital Games: Literacy in action is the result of a wide-ranging investigation into the educational possibilities involved in young people's games.

Literacy, identity and online fantasy sports games

Digital Games: Literacy in action is the result of a wide-ranging investigation into the educational possibilities involved in young people and games.

Multimodal literacy, digital games and curriculum

Digital games offer enormous potential for learning and engagement in mathematics ideas and processes. This volume offers multidisciplinary perspectives—of educators, cognitive scientists, psychologists and sociologists—on how digital games influence the social activities and mathematical ideas of learners/gamers. Contributing authors identify opportunities for broadening current understandings of how mathematical ideas are fostered (and embedded) within digital game environments. In particular, the volume advocates for new and different ways of thinking about mathematics in our digital age—proposing that these mathematical ideas and numeracy practices are distinct from new literacies or multiliteracies. The authors acknowledge that the promise of digital games has not always been realised/fulfilled. There is emerging, and considerable, evidence to suggest that traditional discipline boundaries restrict opportunities for mathematical learning. Throughout the book, what constitutes mathematics learnings and pedagogy is contested. Multidisciplinary viewpoints are used to describe and understand the potential of digital games for learning mathematics and identify current tensions within the field.Mathematics learning is defined as being about problem solving; engagement in mathematical ideas and processes; and social engagement. The artefact, which is the game, shapes the ways in which the gamers engage with the social activity of gaming. In parallel, the book (as a textual artefact) will be supported by Springer’s online platform—allowing for video and digital communication (including links to relevant websites) to be used as supplementary material and establish a dynamic communication space.