games

The Radix Endeavor was recently cited in a recent The Scientist article, Games for Science as an example of how scientists are using video games to tap the collective intelligence of people around the world, while doctors and educators are turning to games to treat and teach.  Examining games form three unique environments, the article explore how:

• Games designed to tackle tough scientific problems are leading to breakthroughs.
• Gameplay can engage unfocused students and teach complex scientific concepts.
• Medical researchers are using games to help patients overcome physical challenges.

 Over the past few weeks, the STEP team has been all over, hitting the Games+Learning+Society conference and Games For Change. While at Games For Change, I was asked to write a guest blogpost, which never made it to their blog. Never one to waste a piece of writing, here is my reaction to their panel on Games in Cultural Spaces:
GAMES IN CULTURAL SPACES

Tracy Fullerton - USC EA Game Innovation Lab 

Today at Gamasutra, they're featuring an article about an experimental game from Carnegie Mellon called Fusion that blends the genres of Puzzle, First Person Shooter, and Racing into a single, team-based game. The article, while thorough, could go into even more detail about the trade-offs and decisions made for my taste. It's an exciting experiment that seems to have met with reasonable success though, and the creators should be lauded for the work!

It's particularly inspiring for learning games because a challenge that often goes unaddressed in the educational game space is addressing students interested in different modalities. Putting aside the problematic notion of learning styles, which has recently been questioned, this represents an excellent first step in being able to address students who might simply be interested in one playstyle over another. In some ways, it echoes our work in participatory simulations, but instead of changing the players' lens on content through collaborative roleplay, you could change their lens on content through collaborative genreplay instead.

The Next STEP For more than 15 years the Scheller Teacher Education Program has been training MIT undergraduates to become secondary school science and math teachers. During that time there have been many changes, as the program has grown and expanded its reach. Nearly a dozen staff, plus undergraduates and masters students from computer science and Comparative Media Studies work on the many research and development projects going on in the lab. These research projects include design, development, implementation, and research around new ways of teaching math and science through games and simulations. The expansion of the STEP program has led us to new quarters in the Media Lab Complex (our building is known as E15, or the Weisner, building on campus), which we felt in turn deserved a new web site. This blog marks the launch of that site, with a new design and a pipeline for more frequent updates and information from and about the lab.

Weatherlings is a collectible card battle game in which players pit their decks of weather-dependent cards against other players’ decks. This game is the first created on the Ubiquitous Games platform under development at MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) lab. Created in partnership with the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University, Weatherlings is an online card game aimed at middle-school aged students who are learning about weather and climate. Game play in Weatherlings consists of short battles set in real U.S. cities in the recent past, for which the game builders have collected a record of actual weather conditions. In each battle, a player plays his or her own cards and tries to defeat an opponent’s cards. The twist that differentiates Weatherlings from other card games is that cards’ attacks and defenses depend on weather conditions at the time and place where the battle is happening. In Weatherlings, these short battles are designed to be played “casually,” after school or between classes on portable devices. After logging in to the game, and before starting to battle, a player builds one or more decks of cards customized for particular weather conditions. Based on the strengths of the decks they have built, and their knowledge and interpretation of climate graphs for potential arenas, players choose the location of the battle from three possible sites. After the arena is chosen, students choose the best deck for the arena they have settled on and begin the battle. In that battle, students are prompted to predict the weather in a given climate for each battle round, like July in Miami, Florida, to gain in-game bonuses.