It has been over a decade since Jim Gee’s seminal text What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy was published and the proposition that video games are great learning environments was advanced. Since that time, slowly but surely, games have advanced along the Gartner Hype Cycle from “peak of inflated expectations” to the “slope of enlightenment” (Squire, 2016). We now have a decade of research under our belts on what works (and why) in games for learning. We better understand how games specifically can generate learning and behavior change both inside classrooms and out. And we have begun to see third generation products enter the market that blur the distinction between games for impact and games for commercial ends.
In this presentation, Steinkuehler highlights ten big findings from the scholarly literature confirm, explain, and sometimes surprise about the nature of games and changing minds. She then draws some observations about the remaining frictions and opportunities in the games for change ecosystem and offers a few admonitions as we shift into the next phase or R&D.
Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she investigates cognition and learning in multiplayer videogames in domains including literacy, scientific reasoning, mathematical reasoning, computational literacy, collective problem... Read More →
