Jane McGonigal thinks that we can solve real-world problems by engaging people in large-scale, collaborative games. Her argument makes perfect sense the more you realize that many of our most creative, innovative people are hands-on learners – the very people that schools fail, but who thrive in virtual worlds.
This interview expounds on McGonigal’s vision with her new game, EVOKE
Steve Harrison is an architect by training whose work in academia and industry has crossed into engineering, computer science and interactive media. He is also a provocative thinker about the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration in research and teaching. Steve is also my co-PI on the CPATH Distributed Expertise Project funded by the National Science Foundation. The PI is Lillian (Boots) Cassel. In this video, Steve talks about what it’s been like to build collaborations between scientists, engineers and artists at Xerox PARC and between computer science, art, design and media students at Virginia Tech.
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In June, 2009, my colleague Ursula Wolz and I had a chat with outgoing Ewing New Jersey Public Schools Superintendent Raymond Broach about his views on the IJIMS Project. IJIMS or the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, is collaboration between Ewing township’s middle school and The College of New Jersey that is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing Project. Wolz is the Project’s principal investigator; I am a co-PI along with Monisha Pulimood. The other TCNJ members of our team are gender equity specialist Mary Switzer, several TCNJ student research assistants, and a select group of volunteer mentors. Meredith Stone is our external evaluator.
Our hypothesis was that students who don’t think of themselves as “computing types” can be successfully introduced to computing and programming concepts by learning to do multimedia journalism about their own communities. Our research results more than validate our hypothesis.
In this interview, Dr. Broach lauded the constructivist nature of the IJIMS model – a method of teaching the emphasizes collaboration and discovery, making students participants in creating knowledge, not merely absorbing knowledge. Broach noted that the Fisher teachers and guidance counselor who collaborated with us also received training in multimedia journalism and programming in Scratch. This, he said was a departure from the usual professional development model, because it required the teachers to learn skills that weren’t necessarily part of their training.
By the way, one of the Fisher teachers, Laura Fay, recently presented her experience teaching the Scratch programming language in the 8th grade language arts classroom at a meeting for investigators in the BPC program. You can read the notes from the presentation she and Ursula Wolz gave on the IJIMS project:
I’ve written quite a bit about my work on the IJIMS project, but it’s not my only major research project. I’m also co-PI on another exciting NSF-funded project (Award #0829616) that involves creating model curricula and resources that connect computer science education with other disciplines. The formal name of the project is Distributed Expertise in Enhancing Computer Science Education With Connections to the Arts, or Distributed Expertise for short.
The PI for the project, Lillian Cassel, has been thinking about these issues for a long time.
Last spring, I team-taught a game production class with my TCNJ colleague Ursula Wolz, in parallel with a game development class at Villanova taught by our colleague Tom Way. We used a PBworks Wiki and Skype to manage the distance collaboration. You can explore the documentation here:
Meanwhile, our colleague at Virginia Tech, Deborah Tatar, team-taught an ethics class with a colleague in Ireland. I’ll post a link to more information about that project soon.
This semester, I’m working with Wolz and Way again, coordinating my interactive storytelling class with Wolz’s game production class and Way’s software engineering class. Wolz will also be working with Way’s computing with images class. We are running separate classes, but will use material generated by each other’s students to form the basis of specific assignments. It’s going to be an interesting and exciting semester.
I also want to start a series of conversations about how to make these kinds of collaborations work, and extend them to to more institutions. Part of our vision is that this could be a way of providing CS expertise to disciplines that are becoming computing dependent, such as journalism, while helping CS students understand the nuances of working with content from different knowledge domains. Also, we hope that this can become a model for augmenting the resources of financially strapped institutions, such as small liberal arts colleges and HBCUs.
I plan to do some blogging in this space about our experience, as well as the general concept of our these kinds of collaborations can work. I really look forward to comments and feedback.