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The Advanced Learning Technologies in Education Consortium (ALTEC) creates video games for classroom use Sounds of laser beams firing, hot rod engines revving and victorious cheering may not be common on the KU campus, but in the ALTEC center they are an everyday occurrence.
ALTEC is a member of the national MATRIX Learning project funded by U.S. Department of Education Star Schools program designed to create games and simulations to teach middle school mathematics in underperforming urban and rural areas. ALTEC has ongoing projects to develop and support these types of learning games. The Arcademic Skill Builders are popular online games that are designed to teach basic math and language skills using fast-paced action. Arcademic games are free and accessible using any Web browser that has Flash capability.
As the ALTEC staff explain, today’s students are frequently playing video games on their computers or on dedicated consoles such as Sony PlayStation. Video games are creating a generation of students who want to actively participate and create their own entertainment and learning environment. The ALTEC games are designed to help schools engage students more effectively in learning and practice activities. Games also help stimulate higher-order thinking skills and can expose students to situations that could not easily be replicated in the classroom. James Gee, professor of curriculum and instruction at Arizona State University, wrote in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, that schools have traditionally used two methods of getting students to do difficult work: either force them or make the work less challenging. Yet neither option is open to video game designers, who can't force people to play their games and who recognize that most gamers don't want short, easy-to-finish games. Henry Jenkins, professor of literature and comparative media studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and principal investigator of MIT’s Education Arcade initiative, said in a 2006 interview with the Orange County, Calif., Department of Education that while students complain about the difficulty of homework, they also complain if a video game is too easy.
ALTEC’s game-development work is based on the Arcademic Skill Builders games developed during the early days of computer gaming by Jerry Chaffin and Barbara Thompson. Chaffin and Thompson designed some of the first educational game software on the market. Created for home computers of the early-1980s, these programs used theories of learning dealing with "automaticity" and "fluency" to help students learn basic math and language arts skills. The Arcademic games were popular for many years until technology and game design flourished into more mainstream markets. Recently, Chaffin, Thompson and colleagues have begun revamping games for a new audience. Today, students who play the Arcademic games are challenged to respond quickly to problems over a series of short, timed trials. The goal is to make the students fluent in the skills being practiced - skills like addition, subtraction, subject-verb agreement and parts of speech. As students play more and their rate of response increases, their error rate decreases until eventually they can solve the problems automatically. A new multiplayer game called Grand Prix Multiplication allows students to play against each other on different computers. In addition to the Arcademic games, ALTEC is also working with the MATRIX Project to develop interactive games and simulations for middle school math programs that can be accessed through the Internet or downloaded to a mobile device. The MATRIX Learning Project is a partnership among K-16 organizations in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico and California. ALTEC and the KU Center for Research on Learning are working together to create Flash games, which include a multiplayer game called Matrix Racer and videos that target the understanding of math vocabulary. Additional components in the program include the use of virtual reality to build scale models and artificial intelligence tutors to help students understand the process of asking effective questions to solve math problems. ALTEC is conducting field tests of MATRIX products in supplemental middle school math classes in Lawrence and after school programs in Wichita. Learn more about Matrix Learning projects at http://matrixlearning.org. As ALTEC moves forward in the development of games and virtual environments for education, the hope is that teachers and administrators will incorporate games into their curriculum as more than just time filler activities or rewards for completing class work early. Games have the potential to challenge students in a way they understand and respond to. ~Doug Adams, ALTEC |
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Contact Special Education Joseph R. Pearson Hall, Rm. 521 1122 West Campus Rd. University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045 3101 phone: (785) 864-0556 Related Info 2007 was an outstanding year and 2008 looks even better KU CRL and Vanderbilt University team up on LD resource kit New online program blends instruction with state assessments Beach Center launches online Community of Practice |
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