Stanford’s BEAM office (ex-Career Development Center) has a great (free) service to help any student with their resume, cover letter, and online profiles. Went their today to update my resume – very helpful! Highly recommend it. Will post my updated resume here once it has been updated.
Good class. Went over research terminology and talked in pairs about each term to clarify any missconceptions. My pair was Anita Tseng, who is doing some very intersting research on common scientific misconception on the internet and social media.
Quick exercise we did in class… write down our own research goal and discuss with our partners based upon it.
My Research Goal
(to do… go through Candace’s slides to evaluate my research question)
During class we had the pleasure of hearing Prof. Ulisses Araújo, Director of USP’s Research Center for New Pedagogical Architectures, talk about his work around the “Challenge of Quality Education in Brazil: Technologies and Active Learning Methods as an Answer”. I was honored with the task of being his discussant during the Q&A session.
Prof. Ulisses also suggested to share the following articles that were closely related to the talk:
Presentation Notes:
(bold = questions I asked)
The Research Methods Knowledge Base: 3rd edition by William M.K. Trochim and James P. Donnelly. Chapter 1
Nathan, M., & Alibali, M. (2010). Learning sciences. WIREs Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1002/wcs.54
This week we had a wonderful talk by Kathryn Moeller, Assistant Professor University of Wisconsin, Madison on “The Logic and Consequences of U.S. Transnational Corporate Funding of Girls’ Education in Brazil”
She talks about Nike’s program called “The Girl Effect” which attempted to help underprivileged girls, and then suddenly stopped the program… and it seemed like they just wanted to tell these girls not to get pregnant, so that they could be used in the labor market…
The initiative is now a standalone program that has no more ties with Nike… here’s the very well polished video they came up with to get some initial attention and funding:
Final group is set with Camila and James. Rodrigo dropped the course unfortunately. Had our co-teacher Chris Bennett, expert in game design lead the intro session of the “core loop” as we did in the Fall quarter pop-up session.
Here are a couple of interesting links about CoreLoops:
Talked about the MDA+Outcomes Approach:
Core Loop:
Grand finalle by Candace:
Did my Monday 2 hours worth of work but felt it was not extremely productive in terms on continuity. To be fair the last 40 mintues were with Grace going over what I’ve done before. Going to stick to the schedule this week to test it out and maybe change to 3 hour chunks… let’s see.
In any case, going down the To Do list and starting to get more hands-on and actually creating some minor peices of content.
Volunteered this morning to be part of the “Welcome Comitee” during Admit Day for the the new LDT cohort. The event serves as an opportunity for those students who have not yet decided if they will accept their offer from Stanford yet, or simply for those who want to meet others who might come to the program.
Made me reflect briefly on how much I have learned since the start in late September, 2015. It is actually so much more than I expected… I really didn’t know how much I didn’t know… how vast the educational and learning science fields are… how many niche areas exist… how efervescent this market is in the Bay Area…
Very exciting for the new cohort – such a pitty that we don’t have a chance to meet all of them or oficially work or have classess together.
Readings:
Summary:
I’ve developed mobile apps in one form or another for the past 16 years – from WAP to iOS. These apps were mostly utilitarian and far removed from games. Considering how creating a great user experience was complex and challenging, I’ve always said that games is the most daunting task a development team can undertake. From a technical standpoint, the numbers of variables, mechanics, and rules are enormous and all interconnected. From a creation standpoint, one must envision a whole set of complex interactions between the user and the interface. From a design standpoint, it has too look great! On top of that, you must take into account the emotional nature of the user interaction with the game. All this requires skills and knowhow that only comes with years of practice – just like teaching.
The readings were extremely helpful in organizing and categorizing some of the considerations, possibilities, and methodologies required when creating a game. The MDA Framework shows how the interaction path of the game developer and the player is opposite, illustrating one of the complexities and iterative nature the game design process can be.
Method | Dynamic | Aesthetic
Schell then expands the arsenal by walking us through the several possible lenses we can look at games, the players, their interactions, and even how to improve them. The level of detail we can go into when looking at games is amazing.
How might we new apply these frameworks, insights, and mechanics to education? Can we gamify teaching? If we look at education as a game, could we create better learning experiences for the teacher, the learner, and society? All I know is that we must keep playing this ‘game’ of education, continuously trying to overcome obstacles, making it better, more efficient, and more effective. Can we ever win? We certainly cannot lose.
Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004, July). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI (Vol. 4, p. 1).
Schell, J. (2014). The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. CRC Press.
(Read Chapter 8 Psychographics section & Chapter 10: Mechanics 1-5)
Chapter 8 – Psycographics
Chapter 10
“Most game designers agree that interesting emergent actions are the hallmark of a good game.”
