How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalised reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory and practice to argue that personalised reading is only truly personalised when it is created or co-created by reading communities. Divided into two parts, Part I suggests criteria to evaluate the educational quality of digital books and practical strategies for their use in the classroom. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which digital books can support individual children’s strengths and difficulties, digital literacies, language and communication skills. Part II explores digital books created by children, their caregivers, teachers and librarians, and Kucirkova also offers insights into how smart toys, tangibles and augmented/virtual reality tools can enrich children’s reading for pleasure

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books

How and Why to Read and Create Children's Digital Books outlines effective ways of using digital books in early years and primary classrooms, and specifies the educational potential of using digital books and apps in physical spaces and virtual communities. With a particular focus on apps and personalised reading, Natalia Kucirkova combines theory and practice to argue that personalised reading is only truly personalised when it is created or co-created by reading communities. Divided into two parts, Part I suggests criteria to evaluate the educational quality of digital books and practical strategies for their use in the classroom. Specific attention is paid to the ways in which digital books can support individual children’s strengths and difficulties, digital literacies, language and communication skills. Part II explores digital books created by children, their caregivers, teachers and librarians, and Kucirkova also offers insights into how smart toys, tangibles and augmented/virtual reality tools can enrich children’s reading for pleasure

The Register, 2008-01-30

https://digital.library.ncat.edu/atregister/2399/thumbnail.jp

Making Waves, Mixing Colors, and Using Mirrors: The Self-Regulated Learning Support Features and Procedural Rhetoric of Three Whole-Body Educational Games

This dissertation investigates the question, How can the procedural rhetoric of three whole-body educational games improve the understanding of self-regulated learning with digital technology? It explores three whole-body educational games (WBEGs) using a quantitative study, a case study, and analyses of their procedural rhetoric to better understand the roles these types of games can have in teaching digital literacy and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. The three WBEGs, Waves, Color Mixer, and Light and Mirrors, are each intended to teach science concepts to players. These games are similarly structured in that they all invite players to immerse themselves in the game by standing on the screen (the games project images on the floor). The WBEGs differ from traditional console video games because they receive input from players via motion-sensing technology, requiring players to make large movements with their bodies to influence elements within the game. This study explains SRL as a complex combination of internal (mental) behavior, external (observable) behavior, and interpersonal (social) behavior, identifying within three WBEGs the presence of elements supporting the SRL behaviors of goal setting, strategy planning, collaboration, progress monitoring, feedback, and reflection. These findings inform the understanding of SRL by revealing that each game includes a different combination of SRL-supporting elements that encourage the use of SRL skills in different ways. SRL scaffolding features are those elements within a WBEG that guide players to use certain SRL strategies, helping and supporting their efforts much like construction scaffolding supports a building as it is being erected. This dissertation also utilizes analyses of procedural rhetoric to investigate the techniques reinforced by the underlying structure of these three WBEGs in an effort to further the understanding of digital literacy in education and sociocultural contexts. All three WBEGs appear to emphasize player agency and collaboration. Waves and Light and Mirrors encourage player strategy, while Color Mixer rewards speed and rote knowledge. These reinforced techniques perpetuate the underlying cultural values of accuracy, collaboration, problem-solving, autonomy, and scaffolding. This study discusses these values in the contexts of education and society

Hearing the Voices of the Deserters: Activist Critical Making in Electronic Literature

Critical making is an approach to scholarship which combines discursive methods with creative practices. The concept has recently gained traction in the digital humanities, where scholars are looking for ways of integrating making into their research in ways that are inclusive and empowering to marginalized populations. This dissertation explores how digital humanists can engage critical making as a form of activism in electronic literature, specifically in the interactive fiction platform Twine. The author analyzes the making process of her own activist Twine game The Deserters and embeds the project within digital humanities discourses on activism and social justice, hypertext, electronic literature, critical making, and hacker culture. The Deserters is a text-based digital game based on the experiences of the author\u27s family as refugees from East Germany. The player\u27s objective in the game is to research a family\u27s history by searching the game-world for authentic documents, including biographical writings, journal entries, photographs, and records, thereby retracing historical events through personal experience. The Deserters aims at inspiring a compassionate and empathetic stance towards immigrants and refugees today. The author reflects on the ethical, narrative, aesthetic, and technical choices she made throughout the creation process of The Deserters to create a critical activist game. The results of the analysis demonstrate that Twine offers a unique environment for composing politically impactful personal narratives. From the project, the author derives best practices for activist critical making, which emphasize the importance for makers to imagine the needs and perspectives of their audience. The work expands digital humanities\u27 theoretical and practical toolkit for critical making

Creating Project Contrast: a Video Game exploring Consciousness and Qualia

Project Contrast is a video game that explores how the unique traits inherent to video games might engage reflective player responses to qualitative experience. Project Contrast does this through suspension of disbelief, avatar projection, presence, player agency in storytelling, visual perception, functional gameplay, and art. Considering the difficulty in researching qualitative experience due to its subjectivity and circular explanations, I created Project Contrast not to analyze qualia, though that was my original hope. I instead created Project Contrast as an avenue for player self-reflection and learning about qualitative experience. While video games might be just code and art on a screen, through the integration of the various methods mentioned, these video games can create qualitative experiences akin to those of reality, especially well-designed video game worlds. When designing Project Contrast\u27s game world, I world-built with concept art to create an immersive and thought-provoking setting that contextualizes the game, rooting the player in the world. I then brought that world to life with animation and art and used heuristic storytelling and coding to complete the game through the introduction portion titled The Labyrinth. As an artist, my work centers around qualitative experience, so I sought to create something that explored the phenomenon in a medium I loved and could share with others: a video game

Platform, culture, identities: exploring young people's game-making

Digital games are an important component in the contemporary media landscape. They are cultural artefacts and, as such, are subjected to specific conventions. These conventions shape our imaginary about games, defining, for example, what a game is, who can play them and where. Different research has been developed to understand and challenge these conventions, and one of the strategies often adopted is fostering game-making among “gaming minorities”. By popularising games and their means of production, critical skills towards these objects could be developed, these conventions could be fought, and our perceptions of those artefacts could be transformed. Nevertheless, digital games, as obvious as it sounds, are also digital: they depend on technology to exist and are subjected to different technologies’ affordances and constraints. Technologies, however, are not neutral and objective, but are also cultural: they too are influenced by values and conventions. This means that, even if the means of production of digital games are distributed among more diverse groups, we should not ignore the role played by technology in this process of shaping our imaginary about games. Cultural and technical aspects of digital media are not, therefore, as conflicting as it might seem, finding themselves entangled in digital games. They are also equally influential in our understanding and our cultural uses of these artefacts; but how influential are they? How easy can one go against cultural and technical conventions when producing a game as a non-professional? Can anyone make any kind of game? In this research, I explore young people’s game-making practices in non-professional contexts to understand how repertoires, gaming conventions and platform affordances and constraints can be influential in this creative process. I organised two different game-making clubs for young people in London/UK (one at a community-led centre for Latin American migrants and other at a comprehensive primary school). The clubs consisted in a series of workshops offered in a weekly basis, totalling a minimum of 12 hours of instruction/production at each research site. The participants were aged between 11 and 18 and produced a total of 11 games across these two sites with MissionMaker, a software that facilitates the creation of 3D games by non-specialists through ready-made 3D assets, custom audio and image files, and a simplified drop-down-list-based scripting language. Three games and their production teams were selected as case studies and investigated through qualitative methods and under a descriptive-interpretive approach. Throughout the game-making clubs, short surveys, observations, unstructured and semi-structured interviews and a game archive (with week-by-week saves of participants’ games) were employed to generate data that was then analysed through a Multimodal Sociosemiotics framework to explore how cultural and technical conventions were appropriated by participants during this experience. Discourses, gaming conventions and MissionMaker’s affordances and constraints were appropriated in different ways by participants in the process of game production, culminating in the realisation of different discourses and the construction of diverse identities. These results are relevant since they restate the value of a more holistic approach – one that looks at both culture and technology – to critical videogame production within non-professional contexts. These results are also useful to the mapping of the influence of repertoires, conventions and platforms in non-professional game-making contexts, highlighting how these elements are influential but at the same time not prescriptive to the games produced, and how game development processes within these contexts are better understood as dialogical

2018-2019 Course Catalog

2018-2019 Course Catalo

2017-2018 Course Catalog

2017-2018 Course Catalo