Summer will be here before we know it, and there will be school kids with lots of time on their hands. I'm sure kids (and parents) will be happy to learn that the The Cartoon Network has beefed up its Game Creator Central website and has expended the number of games available that allow users to build and play their own games. This should keep would-be game developers busy on rainy summer days.
Although some teachers might frown upon cartoon-related content, the creating games is a learning process and can help young people become more interested in "STEM"-related studies and careers. (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)
About Game Creator Central
"Game Creator Central is a free games site that lets you build your own games with your favorite characters from Ben 10: Alien Force, Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Star Wars: The Clone Wars and then send them to Cartoon Network's online game gallery for everyone to play. Plus, you can play tons of games made by other players, rate your favorites or share your creations with your friends. Welcome to the biggest user-generated game site in the world!"
"Nothing's impossible, we just get smarter and smarter by the day." - Student, commenting about his experiences in the SMALLab environment.
The research team at Arizona State university, lead by David Birchfield, has worked to create embodied, multimodal, and collaborative mediated learning learning environments using mixed reality that has been in use at Coronado High School with much success. The SMALLab is a learner-centered approach to learning that provides multi-modal, multi-sensory activities that engages learners, and also results in deeper understanding of more complex concepts.
Video of high school students describing their work in SMALLab (Coronado High School) "Central to our work is the development of a new interactive mixed reality learning environment, the Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab [SMALLab]. SMALLab is an environment developed by a collaborative team of media researchers from education, psychology, interactive media, computer science, and the arts. SMALLab is an extensible platform forsemi-immersive, mixed-reality learning. By semi-immersive, we mean that the mediated space of SMALLab is physically open on all sides to the larger environment. Participants can freely enter and exit the space without the need for wearing specialized display or sensing devices such as head-mounted displays (HMD) or motion capture markers. Participants seated or standing around SMALLab can see and hear the dynamic media, and they can directly communicate with their peers that are interacting in the space. As such, the semi-immersive framework establishes a porous relationship between SMALLab and the larger physical learning environment. By mixed-reality, we mean that there is an integration of physical manipulation objects, 3D physical gestures, and digitally mediated components. Byextensible, we mean that researchers, teachers, and students can create new learning scenarios in SMALLab using a set of custom designed authoring tools and programming interfaces. SMALLab supports situated and embodied learning by empowering the physical body to function as an expressive interface. Within SMALLab, students use a set of “glowballs” and peripherals to interact in real time with each other and with dynamic visual, textual, physical and sonic media through full body 3D movements and gestures. For example, working in theSpring Sling scenario, students are immersed in a complex physics simulation that involves multiple sensory inputs to engage student attention. They can hear the sound of a spring picking up speed, see projected bodies moving across the floor, feel a physical ball in their own hands and integrate how the projected ball moves in accordance with their own body movements to construct a robust conceptual model of the entire system."
About David Birchfield: David Birchfield is "a media artist, researcher, and educator. He has created work that spans from interactive music performance to generative software to robotic installationsn to K-12 learning environments. In recent years, this work cuts across three areas of exploration:K-12 learning, media art installations, and live computer music performance."
Some publications: Birchfield, D., Megowan-Romanowicz, Johnson-Glenberg, M., Next Gen Interfaces: Embodied Learning Using Motion, Sound, and Visuals – SMALLab. To appear in Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference; SIG Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning [ARVEL], San Diego, CA, April 2009. Megowan-Romanowicz, M., Uysal, S., Birchfield, D., Growth in Teacher Self-Efficacy Through Participation in a High-Tech Instructional Design Community, to appear in proceedings of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Conference, Garden Grove, CA, April 2009.
Birchfield, D., Thornburg, H., Megowan-Romanowicz, C., Hatton, S., Mechtley, B., Dolgov, I., Burleson, W., Embodiment, Multimodality, and Composition: Convergent Themes Across HCI and Education for Mixed-Reality Learning Environments, Journal of Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 2008, Article ID 874563.
Dolgov, I., Birchfield, D., McBeath, M., Thornburg, H., Todd, C., Amelioration of Axis-Aligned Motion Bias for Active versus Stationary Judgments of Bilaterally Symmetric Moving Shapes’ Final Destinations,Perception and Psychophysics, in press 2008.
D. Birchfield, B. Mechtley, S. Hatton, H. Thornburg, Mixed-Reality Learning in the Art Museum Context, Proceedings of ACM SIG Multimedia, Vancouver, BC, October 27, 2008.
S. Hatton, D. Birchfield, M.C. Megowan, Learning Metaphor through Mixed-Reality Game Design and Game Play, Proceedings of ACM Sandbox Conference, Los Angeles, CA, August 10, 2008. [pdf]
Institute of Play's SMALLab contact: Katie Salen, Executive Director, Institute of Play Associate Professor, Parsons The New School for Design
The Institute of Play, along with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and others, have a number of publications related to technology and learning:
"The mission of The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is to catalyze and support research, innovation and investment in digital media technologies to advance children's learning. Nurturing foundational and "21st century" literacies:
The inaugural focus of the Center—given the national need—will be on determining how technology can help elementary-aged children develop the fundamental building blocks of literacy. These include the vital reading, writing, speaking and listening capabilities that all children must develop during the primary grades. A special emphasis of the Center will be on struggling readers who risk educational failure if they do not catch up to their peers by grade four...Another important focus of the Center is to leverage the potential of interactive media to promote "21st century" literacies that students will need to compete and cooperate in our connected world—competencies such as critical thinking and problem solving, second language competency, inter-cultural understanding and media literacy."
The NETP is consistent with the Framework for 21st Century Learning model, calling for schools to ensure students are prepared for the skills they will need in an increasingly complex, technological society:
"The model of 21st century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices."
Secretary Duncan announcing the Education Technology Plan on YouTube
Hopefully the NETP initiative will encourage teachers to consider video clips for their students to explore that are more exciting than this well-meaning gentleman's talking head!
Teachers who are still struggling with figuring out how to access e-mail attachments and the basics of Microsoft Office 2003, this plan will call for a steep learning curve! I will be by your side to help. It is good to know that David Rose, of CAST, the father of Universal Design for Learning, was one of the members of the NETP working group.
RELATED
National Educational Technology Plan Technical Working Group:
The most frequently visited post on this blog is Interactive Multimedia for Social Skills, Understanding Feelings, Relaxation, and Coping Strategies, and the hits are increasing. For that reason, I'm working on an extensive update, which is very involved process, given the increase in research in this area. Until then, I thought that it would be helpful to provide a mini-update. Below are some resources and links for those of you who are interested in digital multimedia story telling or digital social stories with young people. Although some of the resources are specific to children or teens with autism spectrum disorders, I've also included information that is appropriate for use in regular classroom settings. (If this is your first visit to this blog, it might be a good idea to first check out the resources from the above link, and then return to this post.)
This nine-page primer is useful for anyone interested in learning how to create digital stories or develop digital storytelling activities with young people. The information was provided by David Jakes, an instructional technology coordinator for Community High School District 99 in Downers Grove, IL, provides a good case for digital storytelling and an outline of the process of implementing related activities at the high school level.
David Jakes has a website, Jakesonline.org, that contains additional resources about digital storytelling, including strategies for instruction. The website also provide information about collaborative tools and a collection of extensive web resources.
Process: • Team identifies the need for behavior intervention. • Functional assessment is completed. • Social stories included in behavior plan. • Social story is written. • Social story is introduced and progress is monitored with data. • Success is evaluated with data. Note: The authors cite an article written in 1999 that mentions that the use of multimedia social stories has not been demonstrated to be effective, as little research had been completed in this area at the time. Take this with a grain of salt, as there are recent studies (see below) regarding the effective use of multimedia applications, including computer/video games and VR, for social skills training as well as counseling.
This link provides extensive information about on-line resources for programs that simulate social interaction. It also includes information about the use of social stories with students, and resources for putting together multimedia social stories. Included are some summaries of research about multimedia social stories and the use of multimedia for instructional activities.
Be sure to explore the rest of the CITEd site when you have the time.
Learn N.C. has a wealth of on-line resources for educators, students, and parents. I particularly like the on-line multimedia library. Below are links to resources for the following topics, obtained through the "tag cloud" on the multimedia library site.
"Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design." (Scratch website) Scratch can be downloaded, free of charge, from the website. It can run on Windows as well on Macs. There are over 12,000 contributors to this project, with over 60,000 registered members. The website provides plenty of support for teachers and students.
The Scratch project is run by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, along with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
I'm looking forward to playing with Scratch on a touch-screen or interactive whiteboard.
Leave a comment if you use Scratch with kids- or for yourself.
![Gaming SMALLab [IOP, ASU]: Lab install at Parsons DT](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uBZ1PKlw_WARyt37GFHOaFCFx9NXuggzF6wJe_pWWuq0sKbuah_YmGv-aFaoWjrqWtPFNDcbr_0YlFfSPPVgq1ww8Rmbc0eA_6csAM9j4JO4bD1j8nafnGzxcUt9XccRg=s0-d)
