Session Information
| Title | Let's Play - Together |
| Presenter(s) | Scot Osterweil
Scot Osterweil is the Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade and a research director in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a designer of award-winning educational games including the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games. He is a founding member, and Creative Director of the Learning Games Network where he leads the Hewlett Foundation's Open Language Learning Initiative (ESL). He has worked in both academic and commercial environments, and his work has focused on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. Jason Haas |
| Time | Friday, October 19, 2:30p-3:30p |
| Location | Ballroom |
| Format | Speakers |
| Description | Osterweil will call upon a number of Education Arcade initiatives to discuss the inherent social nature of play and the integral role of collaboration in game play and learning. Osterweil will introduce three unique models of collaboration - distributed intelligence, networked public, and role-based. He will provide examples of these models of collaborative play, review their application to varied gaming environments, and their alignment to different types of learning objectives.
Referencing Vanished, a curated massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian during the spring of 2011, he will provide examples of the distributive intelligence model of collaboration including a game-based task requiring the participation of at least 99 different players each holding a unique string of characters making up a single coded message. Discussion of Lure of the Labyrinth, an award-winning online game resulting from a collaboration of FableVision, Maryland Public Television and the Education Arcade will provide an example of networked public collaborative play but will also provide data from a recent national middle grades math challenge in which students were required to play the game as members of a team to examine the effect of student collaboration on game play, development of peer-to-peer math dialogue, and problem-solving strategies. Osterweil will discuss the role-based collaboration embedded in The Radix Endeavor, an MMO currently under development to build math and science content knowledge and engagement among high school students. In Radix players have access and tools and game assets contingent upon their role in the game, e.g. geneticist, oncologist etc. Finally, Osterweil will engage participants in discussion of how these models and other models of collaboration might apply to their current work. |