Explanation for final project
The whole idea of teaching someone about a theory is that in some way you have a grasp on it as well. We thought the best way to show that we had a grasp on the theory was to show applications of Paul James Gee's theory to video games and learning in the classroom. Initially, we had the idea of taking two similar actions (one based in video games and the other based in classroom or real life applications)and seeing how an individual deals with trying to learn the skills needed to perform a specific task without difficulty. We had the original idea of comparing someone who is good at guitar hero and someone who is good at playing the guitar. We eventually came to the conclusion that it would not help us explain Gee's principles as efficient as we wanted.
We decided to do more of a tutorial to explain the thirty six principles. It was easier to address the principle directly than to attempt to explain them. So we decided to have a little battle between two environments where learning happens so we could see where the principles apply. Once we decided to go that route, it was pretty much a race from there. We had the idea of making it more like a boxing match and keeping score of which learning environments gets the most principles. So we divided all the principles into similar groups (12 groups) which worked out because it came out to 12 which worked to be rounds of a boxing match. What we did to illustrate the battles was break down certain fight sequences to show who was winning. We also used old games like pong. The whole idea was to make a video game-like video that would question Gee’s learning principles and how they applied to video game learning and if they applied to learning in the classroom but now I see that our video may come off as biased due to the heavy use of video game motifs.
The whole process was really interesting. We used a lot of other video to supplement our diverse selection of games. My favorite part in the video is when I’m playing rock band. I’m really not playing rock band at all. We just did a really nice editing job there. We had the audio start when the video came up on me and then we showed the video of rock band when the audio matched video. It was funny because I am really not good at rock band. It really looked like I was though. It was just a lot of fun putting this together. We had to video tape me playing several games and I hadn’t touched a controller in such a long time so that was nice. Another thing I wished we could have done is had more time. We put this together very well but I feel like if there was more time go through the principles in our video, it would have way more effective.
We decided to do more of a tutorial to explain the thirty six principles. It was easier to address the principle directly than to attempt to explain them. So we decided to have a little battle between two environments where learning happens so we could see where the principles apply. Once we decided to go that route, it was pretty much a race from there. We had the idea of making it more like a boxing match and keeping score of which learning environments gets the most principles. So we divided all the principles into similar groups (12 groups) which worked out because it came out to 12 which worked to be rounds of a boxing match. What we did to illustrate the battles was break down certain fight sequences to show who was winning. We also used old games like pong. The whole idea was to make a video game-like video that would question Gee’s learning principles and how they applied to video game learning and if they applied to learning in the classroom but now I see that our video may come off as biased due to the heavy use of video game motifs.
The whole process was really interesting. We used a lot of other video to supplement our diverse selection of games. My favorite part in the video is when I’m playing rock band. I’m really not playing rock band at all. We just did a really nice editing job there. We had the audio start when the video came up on me and then we showed the video of rock band when the audio matched video. It was funny because I am really not good at rock band. It really looked like I was though. It was just a lot of fun putting this together. We had to video tape me playing several games and I hadn’t touched a controller in such a long time so that was nice. Another thing I wished we could have done is had more time. We put this together very well but I feel like if there was more time go through the principles in our video, it would have way more effective.
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