Session Information
| Title | Meaningful / Meaningless Play: The Brave New World of Play and Games in Educational Contexts |
| Presenter(s) | Casey O'Donnell, Mark Chen, Krista-Lee Malone and Sean Duncan |
| Time | Thursday, October 16, 3:00p-4:00p |
| Location | Lake Superior |
| Format | Panel |
| Description | Games designed and developed to be both "good fun" and educational are no longer novel. Increasingly, games are being developed to meet the needs of both teachers and students. However, the various organizations developing these games find themselves enmeshed in a complex ecology of interests and stakeholders placing a variety of demands on those making these games. Perhaps most importantly, questions surrounding the nature of games and how it may become perverted when appropriated for a formal education system loom large in the minds of both academics and developers. In the last decade or so, there's been a healthy amount of literature attempting to define games (cf. Juul, 2003; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), and most of these definitions state that games are formal systems that to some degree stand apart as elective activities with negotiable consequences to the outside world. In other words, as Scot Osterweil claims (2014), games are meaningless (with regard to their relationship to extraneous activity). Do games that are required - as they often are when used in classrooms - remain games? Additionally, to what extent do games in the classroom have a chance to change the total classroom ecology towards affording the learning conditions we associate with well-designed games - interest-driven learning, exploratory probing, an orientation towards mastery not performance - I.E. the things we associate with meaningful play? To what extent do they instead become de facto coopted and absorbed by the surrounding institutionalizations as yet another form of analytics and algorithmic surveillance of students, teachers, and learning outcomes? How do the surrounding social and political-economic contexts constrain and shift the terrain of what was hoped to become a more playful classroom? The needs of teachers, who are asked to undertake more and more with less and less becomes challenging for schools, districts and developers hoping to bring new educational opportunities to those environments. Questions regarding availability and access combined with the demands of Common Core standards give many involved more than adequate reason to pause and reconsider what games are in this new space. This panel brings together a variety of researchers and practitioners involved in the design and development of serious learning games together to ponder these issues and others. The goal of the panel is not to solve them, but bring to light the increasingly complex terrain of serious learning game development, particularly in cases where these games enter public classrooms. Each presenter will be given a short amount of time to characterize the kind of research they have done in these contexts and discuss key findings of those research projects. |