From MIT, educational technology, interesting to see both video to understand the what and how.
Regards
As Scot and Eric play the computer game Zoombinis, they explore how Zoombini players must leverage their wrong answers to solve the puzzle, while in MathBlaster, wrong answers are penalized (4:24).
Dear reader. Here is an excellent chat, this is part of one of my classes at MIT, and I want to share with you
Prof. Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil, Creative Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, play and discuss aspects of the computer game MathBlaster. Scot explains how “edutainment games” like MathBlaster are not designed to help students who are struggling with the concepts (5:25). Eric then talks about the importance of substantive feedback for student learning (7:31).
Regards
Julia
Muy buenos días a todos, lectores, hablando de educación, me gustaría contaros que en algunos casos los padres no tienen ningún interes en la educación digital de sus hijos y menos qué hacen con ellas y para más “inri” fomentan algunos tipos de conductas absolutamente negativas, a continuación os dejo una infografí de lo que supuestamente debería ser la educación y consejos.
Ahora os cuento la historia. Como todos sabéis, estoy realizando un máster en tecnologías educativas en el prestigioso MIT, a estas alturas estamos estudiando los videojuego educativos.
Por lo cual decidí comprar una playStation para estudiar la mecánica de los juegos de esta empresa. No necesitaba una nueva y busqué en una página de ventas de segunda mano, llamada “wallapop” y como estoy acostumbrada a comprar por internet, no tuve ningún problema en hacerlo. Encontré una play 3 por 80 Euros, envié un mensaje y me enviaron el móvil de un niño de unos 12 años, nos pusimos de acuerdo en el chat y fui con un vecino mío que tiene 12 años también a buscarla, Cuento corto, cuando llegué a su casa el niño tenía la play lista con los juegos, al no poder ver si estaba en condiciones., si funcionaba, pedí a la madre, por teléfono que me diera una semana de garantía, ella accedió.
He probado de hacer funcionar el dispositivo en tres diversos televisores y marcas y no funciona, he pedido al niño, quien no me ha querido dar el móvil de su madre, que por favor si no funciona me devuelva el dinero y el dice que no devuelve el dinero porque la habíamos hechamos a perder, pero a continuación me dice, que el arreglo cuesta 40 Euros y que la arregle y el me entrega la diferencia del dinero. Ya podéis sacar conclusiones.
Estamos educando a los niños de manera correcta?, están los padres atentos a su educación, mi respuesta es no y no. Por supuesto la culpa fue mía pero me fie de la madre con lo de la garantía y le dejé el dinero al chaval, no revisé cuantos juegos nos metió en la bolsa pero el primero y único que vi era uno para mayores de 18.
En fin, estafada por un niño en connivencia con los padres.
El dinero no lo voy a recuperar y denunciaré el caso a qien corresponda, ya no por el dinero, más bien para que se sepa en esta zona y que tengan cuidado de comprar nada a un niño, hablando por teléfono con la madre y sin un progenitor delante, en realidad, el padre estaba en la cocina y no quizo salir, dijo que el tema era del niño y la madre.
Qué os parece la historia?
Estáis de acuerdo que los padres tienen la culpa de estos comportamiento de sus hijos? se olvidan que los responsables finales de lo que hace un menor, es de los padres?
Julia Echeverría Moran
Excellent article, for sure you’ll like it.
Cheers
Julia
We met Raymond Sterling in the Kunlabori coworking space in Madrid. He informed us about his work as a researcher and how the university is working through European university projects with other public institutions, universities, companies, and Subject Matter Experts in various technological innovations.
“We are a research group within the Galway National University of Ireland (NUI Galway), a city that is at the west of the country. We are a research group calledIRUSE. Our group moves between computer (models, simulation, mathematics, artificial intelligence) and energy efficiency to improve the design and use of buildings in energy efficiency and comfort.
Particularly within the group I am a postdoctoral researcher, and among other things I’m working on a project called GEMS on issues of global energy efficiency. This project aims to help people who are responsible for many buildings to…
Ver la entrada original 1.897 palabras más
Dear reader, if you are searching for a job, you must know the different way to format a resume from country to country.
Hope it will be helpful.
Cheers
Julia Echeverria
Hi, I think this infographic is interesting to know.
Cheers
Julia Echeverria
Source: WhoIsHostingThis.com
Hope you like it
Julia
Coding is a logical process. You have to analyze a problem and then solve it in a series of logical steps that eventually build up to a solution. Much like a game. At its core, programming is puzzle solving and this to me is the real key. Not the language, but the way in which it makes your mind work. I have spoken about by approach to problem-solving and IF THIS THEN THAT thinking before.
The same processes are there in most games. You have to take a logical step by step approach to solving the problem that is presented to you. Be it how do I kill the bad guy to how do I build the castle I want in Minecraft.
So I would rather my kids get good at playing games and solving problems with logical analysis. Then, if they want to learn to code or feel it would be of use to them, their minds are already prepared!
Let kids learn through play and fun!
Reading Time: 2 minutes (ish)I keep seeing articles stating why everyone should learn to code. The same message is aimed at adults and children, pointing to a new type of digital literacy needed to survive in the new world.I myself have known how to do code in one form or another since my dad showed me BASIC at about 5 years old. In later life, my career relied on me knowing how to code as a web developer. I have built many tools and found being able to code of great benefit to me. It has certainly been a skill that I have made use of a great deal in the last 30 years or so. But does that mean my 9 years old should learn, or even my 4-year-old?
Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics
Source: The State of Healthcare Training
Again, nobody’s having issues with meaningful decisions in multiplayer games — it’s single player games that are proving to be the issue here, so that’s what I’ll be addressing. Firstly, for any single-player game, you simply have to have random elements.
If your game doesn’t have randomness, then it has a correct answer, and if it has a correct answer, then there aren’t meaningful decisions for a player to make (it more closely resembles a puzzle as described above). Further, if you care about having any meaningful decisions, then “losing” has to exist in some form, and having several flavors of winning doesn’t count!
Many of you who know about the dungeon-crawling genre known as “roguelikes” might know that they are one of the last defenders of this sort of play in a single-player game. The internet podcast Roguelike Radio recently had a show topic called “Roguelike Features in Other Genres” (listen to this episode here).
I was a guest on this episode, and I predicted that we were going to start seeing more and more quote-unquote “roguelike” features in all genres of single-player games. Not because of how great roguelikes are, but because roguelikes don’t own concepts like “permadeath” (which just means, losing) and randomization at all — up until the 1990s, all games had these qualities.
Here’re a few examples of single-player games that do, in my view, have meaningful decisions.
Klondike (the solitaire card game that came with Windows, which we often just refer to as “solitaire”) is a solid example of a single-player game that has real meaningful decisions. I’ve been playing the game a long time myself, and while it might not be clear to some who’ve only played a handful of games, I notice these moments where I have a real choice that changes the future challenges and even the outcome of the game.
I was a guest on this episode, and I predicted that we were going to start seeing more and more quote-unquote “roguelike” features in all genres of single-player games. Not because of how great roguelikes are, but because roguelikes don’t own concepts like “permadeath” (which just means, losing) and randomization at all — up until the 1990s, all games had these qualities.
Here’re a few examples of single-player games that do, in my view, have meaningful decisions.
Klondike (the solitaire card game that came with Windows, which we often just refer to as “solitaire”) is a solid example of a single-player game that has real meaningful decisions. I’ve been playing the game a long time myself, and while it might not be clear to some who’ve only played a handful of games, I notice these moments where I have a real choice that changes the future challenges and even the outcome of the game.
More recently, Derek Yu’s Spelunky ran with this concept, literally, and became one of the first well-known platformers to do what I’ve always thought platformers should be doing: randomizing the levels. Because the levels are random each time you play, becoming good at Spelunky has absolutely nothing to do with memorization or any “process of elimination”. It has to do with your skill at making decisions in Spelunky.
Desktop Dungeons is not only game with meaningful decisions, but it does so in a brilliantly innovative way. In the game, you gain bonus experience for defeating a monster that’s higher level than yourself. So, you can choose to use potions early-game (usually reserved for the end-game boss) in order to defeat some mid-level monsters to get that extra experience.
It’s a great example of an “ambiguous decision” — you don’t know for certain if the spent potion will be worth the extra experience or not. No level of experience playing other games will have helped you make this decision, either. This is what’s so exciting about games: the idea that when someone comes up with a game that’s new, it exercises your brain in new ways. It forces you to make new kinds of decisions that work in a way that your brain never had to work before.
If we can agree that meaningful decisions are important, then we can hone in, focus our games down on offering as many interesting, meaningful decisions as possible per moment spent playing the game. I call this “efficiency in game design.”
While Klondike does have some meaningful decisions, it has many no-brainers or false decisions — so I’d say it has a rather low level of efficiency in this way. Spelunky‘s a bit higher since it’s real time and you’re threatened most of the time, but there are still some situations that are no-brainers. Desktop Dungeons is highly efficient, and while it may seem to newcomers that there are no-brainers, better players realize that the most obvious moves are rarely the best ones.
And here’s another way to look at the whole “ambiguous decision” thing — this is what makes games special and interesting: even when you won, there was always room for you to have won by more, and you’re not sure how. In contests, you always know how — hit the moles even faster when they appear next time. There’s no ambiguity about what you should be doing. In puzzles, if it’s solved, it’s solved. There may be different ways to solve the puzzle, but all solutions are equal. This feeling of “I wonder how I could improve” is what’s so magical and amazing about games. In a way, games ask us to rise to our unknown theoretical highest level of ability, and this is really valuable.
I propose this philosophy about games not to be pedantic or controlling about how we look at games. It is my sincere belief that the only way we can improve our games is by looking closely at what makes a game a game. I don’t see many people doing this; instead, I see a lot of people simply echoing safe but conversationally useless ideas like “games are different things to different people.”
Again, I propose that we remember that there is a thing called a game, and even if you don’t agree with my ideas, I hope that you do pursue your truth about what games are so that you can focus your games into the most efficient, fun games they can be. To quote the author Robert McKee in his book Story, “We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent.”
I am sure that this post will be very interesting for who will want to understand some theory and practice.
Cheers
Julia Echeverria
Article, entirely from gamasutra.com
A Hierarchy of Interactive Systems
As I said, a lot of different types of media get bunched up together in a giant bracket we refer to as “video games,” but as I also said, I think we all know that games are also their own unique thing when it comes to any non-digital fields. Employees at Toys R Us have no problem separating their puzzles from their board games, each of which usually get their own separate areas, for instance.
I’ve created a chart that illustrates the relationships between some of the different types of interactive systems that we encounter in the world casually known as “games”:
Simulators (Examples: Flight Simulator, Sim City, Dwarf Fortress) — A simulator is a type of interactive system whose primary responsibility it is to simulate something.
In the end, one of the interesting differences between a simulator and a game is that it’s not a valid complaint to say that a simulator isn’t fun. Simulators really have no inherent requirement to be fun — they only need to simulate something.
So, you could have a simulator that simulates something fun and interesting as in Dwarf Fortress, or you could have a plant-growing simulator. It’s worth noting that even in Dwarf Fortress, there’s no guarantee that anything particularly interesting will happen.
I recall one game where my fortress went totally undisturbed, with almost no significant events happening for many hours. Were it a game, I might be disappointed, but given that it’s a simulator, I actually appreciate that this is a real possibility.
To be more precise, the real difference between a simulator and a game is that a simulator is not a type of contest, and a game is. Of course, I suppose you could have a “contest simulator”, but the fact remains that competition is not an inherent part of simulation.
Contests (Examples: a weightlifting contest, Guitar Hero, Simon) — All games are contests, but not all contests are games. The issue is that while contests are competitive, they do not require meaningful decisions. They are often a pure measurement of ability — a simple question of “how much weight can you lift”, or for the example of Guitar Hero or Simon, “how well have you memorized this sequence”. It can be a bit hazy in some situations, but generally I think most of us have a pretty good innate sense of what the difference is between a game and a contest.
One exception to this would be something like Guitar Hero, which I expect that many people would be appalled at the thought that it is a contest, and not a game. Firstly, you should know that calling something “not a game” is not a value judgment, although it’s often mistaken for one. I personally believe that Guitar Hero is a lot more like a contest than a game, because it is a pure measurement of ability, and I would argue that little or no meaningful decisions can be made during play.
Puzzles (Examples: a Portal level, a jigsaw puzzle, a math problem) — A puzzle is another word for “a problem”. A puzzle has a single correct answer — a “solution”.
Some games can also be solved (“perfect information” games, such as chess, where all the information about the game state is known to the player), however if it is common for people to be able to solve a game, it’s considered a knock against that game (Tic-Tac-Toe is solved easily by most people other than very young children, and therefore it is not considered a good game for adults). Puzzles, on the other hand, do not get a knock for having a solution; that’s what they’re all about.
So do puzzles have “decision-making”? I argue that they do not — at least, certainly not at all in the same way that games do. Puzzles are not games, because while some puzzles allow players to make decisions, this is actually rather irrelevant to the outcome. All that matters for a puzzle is whether or not the player gave the correct answer.
If a math problem asks four plus six, if you say 10, you have solved that puzzle. What you did along the way changes nothing about the outcome. So, while you can make decisions while attempting to find the solution, these decisions are actually irrelevant to the puzzle. In games, decisions that are made by the player have effects that change the state of the game, and the outcome of the game. So in games, a player’s decisions really matter in a way that they don’t in puzzles, and this is the way that I draw the line between games and puzzles.
As I see it, we’ve got three major issues that are most guilty of threatening the meaningful decision in games. These are also examples of problems which would naturally be avoided if game designers adopted my philosophy for games. They are character growth, saved games, and a story-based structure.
Character Growth. Ideally, a game should be increasing in difficulty as a game progresses. However, we’ve now got an expectation that our character — our avatar — will gradually increase in power as the game progresses.
Of course, designers try to make up for this by cranking the late game difficulty further, but this is a very bad position to put yourself in, and it’s one of the reasons why we in video games have such trouble balancing our games.
Essentially, you’re trying to hit a moving target. Assuming that the player can become better at the skill of the game, and the character can also become more powerful, and both of these can happen at somewhat irregular rates, the prospect of balancing late-game difficulty becomes impossible.
Anyone who’s played a Final Fantasy game through to the end can back me up on this (I remember the final boss ofFinal Fantasy VII being pathetically easy for my Cloud to take down.) I think the designers of such games are aware of this issue and prefer to err on the side of “too easy”.
Of course, if your game is too easy, then your decisions are no longer meaningful (as my decisions weren’t meaningful in my Sephiroth battle — I think it was a foregone conclusion just based on character stats alone).
Saved Games. I call the quicksave/quickload (or any similar system) “the most powerful weapon ever wielded” in a video game. This one is so straightforward that I can keep it short: essentially, a player’s job is to try to play his best; to try to make optimal moves. The game allows you to save and load whenever you want. So, when faced with a difficult decision, what is the logical thing to do? Save the game, then make the decision. Well, it looks like that was a bad idea! Re-load the game, and try Door Number Two. Hooray! I’m so good at this game!
I will end to share with you this excellent article written on gamasutra.com
Julia
