In Blikstein’s section 2, he explores the constructivist, constructionist, and critical pedagogy philosophical roots of Maker pedagogy. From this perspective, Maker learning is meant to buttress its students’ development in ways that extend beyond STEM classes. Very succinctly,it is meant to support their development in an object and creative-oriented atmosphere, and to expose them to ways of thinking that are nontraditional, for the learning of tangible and intangible skills and understandings.

Contrast this with Peppler and Bender’s article. Their description of the Maker movement is very community-oriented, with a focus on a Maker identity and movement. They focus quite a bit on the material aspects of Makerism and the concrete products to be made. There is no hint of the deep theory that Maker space pedagogy taps into, and they left me with the sense that the defining qualities of a Maker space are which gadgets they have.

Blikstein has written about this less-theoretical approach to Makerism. We see a little of this in the “keychain syndrome” portion of the reading, and for anyone interested in further critique, I recommend his and Marcelo Worsley’s article “Children are Not Hackers,” which concerns their fears about shallow interpretations of the Maker movement. I also recommend this speech by Leah Buechley about Maker magazine and Maker Faire (these were both readings in Beyond Bits and Atoms). In brief, there are serious equity concerns about an interpretation of the movement that focuses too much on product over process and on STEM over more general personal development, and identity worries that the pedagogical Maker movement may be overtaken by well-to-do, adult “hackers” who like tech and are demographically nearly homogenous.

I can’t do the issues justice in this small space so I hope you will explore these links. I think good Maker pedagogy has a lot of potential, but am concerned that Peppler and Bender’s profile of it leans more “hacker” than “maker.”

In general, I think the authors’ connection of all these habits to “scientific thinking,” insofar as they related it to the sort of science taught in science class, is a little too specific. This sort of reasoning is important to hard sciences, but it’s also important to all sorts of academic fields and everyday activities, such as politics, economics, and simple decision-making. What they observed is important to far more than just science.

What I think Steinkuehler and Duncan saw, rather than “scientific” thinking, is simply what people do when they care about a topic or earnestly want to solve a problem. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to make someone learn something, or do something, is to incentivize that something such that they really want to do it or need the target skills. Video games like WoW are mostly played for leisure. Hardly anyone playing is disinterested in the game, I expect, or they’d quit. Anyone interested enough in WoW to post on the forums is probably deeply engaged with the game and wants to improve at it. The reasoning and discovery in the forums is based in this motivation.

I’ve thought about this before in relation to video games, and active leisure activities in general. I’ve played plenty of games and at one point asked myself why I enjoyed them when, essentially, they’re quite similar to work. They’re mostly on screen, they present me with problems, they entail resource management, etc. Why put effort into them when effort in other, more important tasks, tires me out? The answer, I think, is interest. I think people are generally capable of evidenced-based thinking and rational problem solving, and that they’ll gladly do those things when motivated by interest or incentive. This is why kids who hate math class can become obsessed with sports statistics.

When Steinkuehler and Duncan report that many students don’t have requisite scientific inquiry skills (p. 530), I wonder if that study was done only in the context of science class, or if the students were only asked abstract philosophical questions. My hunch is that the students would demonstrate decent reasoning skills if the researchers had observed them doing things that matter to their real lives (there is analogous issue in math reasoning, about the difference in ability that students show between everyday “street math” and academic “school math”).

I agree with the authors that video games (or any other active leisure activity) can be a great setting to view reasoning in action. People will reason about causes and topics they earnestly care about, when they have a “reason to reason.” I would urge caution about their claim that MMOs and other games can boost informal scientific literacy (540). As a video gamer, my hunch is that these games are demonstrating extant reasoning skills by leveraging genuine interest, not by teaching new reasoning skills. These skills may not translate to topics where the interest is not genuine.

Parents and teachers should be able to distinguish between good games and ineffective ones, as well as how to properly integrate such games as a part of their students’ academic diet. It is not enough for some ed-tech designers to know good practices for educational games. If those quality games are indistinguishable in the app store from lower-quality games, this barely helps the student population writ large. Perhaps there could be some sort of certification board, like the ESRB or MPAA, that could review and certify research-backed educational games?

I wonder how much status matters for Cassell’s model of peer collaboration. I’d think that the “balance” of which participant “modified” the understanding of the other would depend on the roles and status of the participants. Not all collaboration is equal; Rogoff’s own idea of “intent community participation” (Week 2 reading) depends on the notion that children observe community activities for a while before assuming greater and greater responsibilities. This is collaboration via a teacher-student relationship, wherein we’d expect the learner to modify their understanding far more than the teacher.

I’d be curious to know how Cassell’s idea of collaboration extends to the “affinity spaces” that Curwood, Magnifico, and Lammers discuss. Quoting Gee (2004), they say that “‘newbies and masters and everyone else’ interact around a shared passion” in these spaces. Surely “masters” and “newbies” must have different roles in these spaces, as suggested in the features they list for affinity spaces. I’d be curious to know more about the roles of leaders and followers within these affinity spaces [aside: can we just call them ‘fandoms’ like everyone else?] and how they influence the conversations within, and especially the influence on young people. Is the language of superfans influencing the language patterns of young fans?

No group yet

Interested in math mostly, but willing to explore other traditional content areas. Interested in K-8. I’m a good writer, creative thinker, am decent at mocking up simple interfaces, and have a somewhat developed idea for my LDT project ready to go.

1. What are the other significant simulations we encounter each day? And how does Squire define “simulation?”
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages to such a culture? Are we learning things better? Are we out of touch with reality? Both?
3. How deeply has this culture really reached into the larger society? I think there are plenty of people (older people come to mind) who are fairly cut off from many simulation-based forms of culture.

Something related to simulation that wasn’t covered in these readings: Where does the literature currently stand about our ability to separate fantasy from reality, or the impact on children of subjecting them to ever-more-realistic fantasy worlds? Does it matter that so much time is being spent in computer simulations? We read last week about the potential social impacts of robots; couldn’t computer simulations affect our perceptions of the real world in the same way?

PDF: Marc Campasano – Assignment 1 (Sushi Monster)

I looked at the iPhone app Sushi Monster by Scholastic. Sushi Monster is intended to teach addition and multiplication facts according to the FASTT Math learning framework. There are seven levels of addition challenges and five levels of multiplication challenges. Each level consists of several rounds. The game displays a circular table with a hungry cartoon monster in the center. The monster wears a sign around its neck with a number on it. In each level, sushi plates with numbers on them are placed on the table. The player taps the plates to put them in front of the monster. If the plate numbers add (or multiply) to the monster’s number, the monster eats them and a new number appears on the monster’s sign to be solved with the remaining plates for the next round.

Overall, I did not think this was a good game for teaching math. My biggest complaint concerns the game mechanic in which the player must solve for consecutive sums or products using one large batch of plates. This system can create a situation wherein the player feeds the monster an entirely correct batch of numbers, but be penalized because they used a number they were going to need later for a different sum or product. For example, if my sushi numbers in addition mode were 6, 2, 8, and 1, and the monster’s number were 8, I could feed it 6 and 2. But if the monster’s next number is 7, I no longer have the 6 to add to the 1, so I cannot solve the 7. The “correct” thing to do was to use the 8 on the first number, but this requires planning ahead. I do not think that the game designers actually intended this to be a game about mentally planning ahead. This is a much more cognitively demanding task than the rest of the game, and the upcoming numbers are shown on an insignificant area of the screen. I cannot imagine a real-world situation wherein a person might need to “save” numbers like that. Worst of all, I worry that this mechanic might teach children that there are “right” and “wrong” ways to add up to 8, to use the number from my example.

This game also has the “chocolate-covered broccoli” problem, whereby a fun façade masks a tedious task. The narrative does not make sense. The sign on the monster does not mean anything in the game world. It’s not an indicator of how “hungry” the monster is, because if that were the case, it wouldn’t matter in what order the player fed it the sushi. The numbers on the sushi don’t mean anything either, and don’t reflect the amount of sushi on the plate or anything tangible. The whole “match the sign number to feed the monster” conceit is a totally arbitrary justification for doing these exercises.

As far as creative presentation, I don’t think Sushi Monster has many issues. All of the characters are cartoon monsters, so the game somewhat sidesteps diversity questions by not presenting any raced or gendered characters. The game uses a Japanese restaurant aesthetic, but does not indulge in any Japanese stereotypes, as far as I can tell with my knowledge of that culture. The monsters are all mean-looking in a cartoonish way—clearly meant to be “scary” but not actually threatening or disturbing. The art and animations are well done, and the player is rewarded with success by a funny animation of the monster gobbling down the sushi.

I think Sushi Monster may emphasize its game elements to the point of detracting from good teaching. As I mentioned above, the upcoming numbers important for strategizing are confined to a small corner of the screen. These numbers are smaller than the score and the game clock, which are both far less important in terms of content, but are the things I’d expect to be large in a non-educational video game. (This may be less of a problem on an iPad.) The app’s approach to assessment and reward also feels very video-gamey. When the player gets an answer wrong, whether due to math mistakes or input error, they do not have any opportunities to try again, which may not be the wisest design choice for encouraging reflection on these errors. Each level ends with a rating (one to three stars) and a high score comparison. The player can also get “trophies” for accomplishing in-game feats (complete all addition levels, complete all multiplication levels, and earn 30 stars). Perhaps these mechanics encourage some learners to play, but I can also imagine them discouraging some learners with a low rating, or having players lose their interest after unlocking all rewards. I played every level of Sushi Monster, earning all three trophies, and (as a long time video gamer) I feel like I “finished” it. Some learners may not return to games they feel they “finished.”

If I redesigned Sushi Monster, I would adjust the narrative and gameplay to fix the planning problem and the “chocolate-covered broccoli problem,” which I think are big issues. In my version, over the course of one level the player would feed a series of hungry monsters, not just one. Each monster’s number would represent the amount of sushi it wanted to eat. The size of the sushi plates would scale with their number, and in multiplication mode, some of the numbers would be serving-multipliers (“3 plates,” “50 plates”) instead of sushi. With this reimagining, the monster’s number would represent how hungry it was, and the player’s number would represent an amount of sushi, so the task would actually make sense. The monster wants some amount of sushi, and it is your job to feed it that amount. My second major change would be that the plates would not carry over from monster to monster, so the ordering problem would disappear. The player would be able to provide any correct combination of plates possible to satisfy the current monster, without worrying about the subsequent monsters’ numbers.

To discourage players from “finishing” the game, I’d eliminate the “levels” system and present the game as essentially “endless,” adjusting the difficulty depending on performance without ever having the learner reach a “last level.” I might leave the stars in for an extrinsic reward, but would present them as a cumulative score to build up forever as a sign of growth, not as a discrete “You got two stars on level 3” system, which may discourage some weaker users.

I think this is important to consider in our discussions of all digital learning technologies, not just ebooks. Computer technology is very good at providing instantaneous feedback, and this is often seen as an advantage of the medium. However, I’d like to see a discussion of how non-instantaneous gratification may be important for learning. The struggle to read or understand a word, or concept, is likely important for student learning (in Core Mechanics class, we speak of this as “generation”). In all sorts of circumstances, it may be better that the student NOT have the calculating and encyclopedic powers of computers at their fingertips.

I’d be curious to hear what the research says about the role of time in learning, and what researchers understand about the rapidity of feedback vs. the importance of reflection and mulling things over. In my experience, instant referencing and feedback are usually seen as a unique advantage of computers, and I am interested in what the evidence against might be.