Game Informed Learning & Teaching

Michael BeggLearning Technology Section

College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine

University of Edinburgh

But

• Games are immersive– And immersion is active not passive

• Narratively rich– And emergent

• Responsive environments– Players are consequential agents

• Games are replayable and are replayed– And communities grow around them

Playing, Stories and Learning

• We begin, grow and end through our stories– Be good and the stories persist after you end!

• Play is pleasurable engagement

• Our sense of play evolves with us

• Play is more hard than easy

• Play implies striving to succeed

Process of engagement

• Player adopts a character role

• Player enters an environment containing goals, challenges and puzzles

• Player adopts the required vocabulary

• Player uses lessons learned to inform approach to future challenge

Process of engagement

• Student adopts a character role

• Student enters an environment containing goals, challenges and puzzles

• Student adopts the required vocabulary

• Student uses lessons learned to inform approach to future challenge

Game Environments

• Multiple streams of immediate feedback

• Compelling sense of immediacy

• Adaptive and responsive

• Motivation is intrinsic

Game Based Learning

• Knows all of this!

• Persists in the idea that IT has to be a game

• Consequence;– Extrinsic motivation, expensive, costly,

platform issues

• Undermines the playful, explorative, rich stuff of learning itself

Game Informed Learning

• Considers learning and teaching to have the potential to be playful

• Makes use of professional narratives

• Maintains intrinsic motivation

• Contextualizes learning activity

• Does not insist that the product is a game

Virtual Patients

• “The concept of virtualisation is an extremely powerful one. It involves any mental operation that leads from the here and now, the singular, the usable for once-and-for-all, and the solidly embodies to the timeless, abstract, general, multiple, versatile, repeatable, ubiquitous, immaterial, and morphologically fluid… It is through the consideration of the virtual as potential that the mind puts together representations that can act upon the world”

Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality

• Remind me why we might need this?

– Opportunistic learning is not an option*

– Student access to patients is increasingly problematic

– Indicators of competence are presently hard to measure

– Requirement for increased validity of assessment of complex cognitive processing

– Rehearsal, reinforcement, thin-slicing

* General Medical Council (1993). Tomorrow's Doctors. UK, General Medical Council.

Virtual Patients

Game Informed Virtual Patients

• character and context

• Narrative

• emergent

• consequence and agency

• Individual experience

• Choice

• Replay value

• Moratorium

See Also: Begg, M., D. Dewhurst, et al. (2005). "Game Informed Learning: Applying computer game processes to Higher Education." Innovate 1(6).

Labyrinth

Labyrinth: Game Informed

• Context

• Consequence

• Realism

• Feedback

• Replayability

Labyrinth: Flexibility

• Client delivery

• Flexible counters

• Audio / Video

• Session Capture

• Open Source

• Growing CoP

Labyrinth: Usage

• UG Clinical Skills

• Simulation Prep

• Student Projects

• Professional training

• Context for KB

• VP based curriculum

• Assessable?

But what about teaching?

EEK! Is that the time?

• Stories and games are fun• The processes of learning and play

seem very similar• Reframing our teaching approaches to

accommodate GIL may …• Why does formal education remove us

so far from our natural inclination to play and tell stories anyway?

Thank You

Play with me, daddy. Tell me a story