Minecraft and machinima in action: development of creativity in the classroom

Numerous studies show the positive effects of introducing video games into learning contexts. These instruments help develop 21st century skills, such as creativity, from a dual perspective: i) the students? perspective, since they develop skills and competencies that allow them to find innovative solutions to the challenges posed by games, and to become digital culture producers; and ii) education professionals? perspective, to use these instruments at schools and thereby change the way students learn. Using a sample of 85 first-year secondary school students, this study aims to provide empirical evidence about the development of creativity through the introduction of video games in the classroom. To do this, an eight-week pedagogical workshop was developed, in which the Minecraft video game was introduced in the subject of Technology. To assess the results of the workshop, the participants' creativity was analysed using a pre-test/post-test design through the CREA Test, as well as the evaluation of the students? machinima productions by their teachers. Results show a significant increase in creativity and high scores for machinima productions, highlighting the opportunity to introduce these tools in classrooms in order to develop innovative educational contexts where creative processes and products are the protagonists

Adolescents Media Experiences in the Classroom: SimCity as a Cultural Model

The main goal of this paper is to analyze adolescents' experiences when they play SimCity (EA, 2008), a commercial videogame, in an innovative learning environment designed around the concept of participatory culture. By using this video game in the classroom and machinima productions created in relation to the game, we sought to generate a critical and reflective approach, related both to the content of the game and to the audiovisual discourse through which its messages are formulated. Adopting an ethnographic, action research and discourse analysis approach, we analyze the practices, conversations and multimedia productions generated in a workshop where the teacher and the research team worked together. The students were in their third year of high school, and the group comprised boys and girls in a language compensatory program. All sessions were video recorded. The analysis of the conversations and activities in the classroom revealed a process in which the teacher and the researcher shared difficulties and participated to facilitate the students' learning through the use of digital instruments. From this perspective, this article aims to provide educational strategies that help foster critical thinking by using commercial video games in the classroom

Looking BK and Moving FD: Toward a Sociocultural Lens on Learning with Programmable Media

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected This chapter is a look back at ideas about programming as a form of digital media for learning in the mid-1990s to help realize more of the potential of these tools in the future. It presents a close examination of the work of children who became fluent in programming animations, games, and interactive stories using MicroWorlds Logo. A vignette from the creation of a movie remix by African American girls in a culturally relevant school is analyzed. Their work supports a constructionist perspective that children can learn both programming and other subject-matter ideas through creating personally meaningful projects with programmable media. Unexpected from this view is that the children brought practices from living culturally to define and produce their project and that these cultural practices were integral to their learning. Implications are outlined for educators, policy makers, and researchers to use views of culture in learning with programmable media to connect more children to the benefits of these media

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age

Traditionally in the United States, schools and after-school programs have played a promi-nent part in teaching young people about the arts. Arts education has been waning in K-12 public schools in recent times, however. This is especially true in low-income communities, where public schools have often cut back on arts instruction so they can devote limited public education dollars to subjects such as writing and math that are the focus of high-stakes standardized tests.When we look outside of school, however, we see a strikingly different landscape, one full of promise for engaging young people in artistic activity. What makes this landscape possible is an eagerness to explore that springs from youths' own creative passions -- what we call "interest-driven arts learning" -- combined with the power of digital technology.This report is a step in trying to understand the new territory. It gives a rundown of scholarship in the areas of arts and out-of-school-hours learning; offers a framework for thinking about interest-driven arts learning in a digital age; examines young people's media consumption; provides a survey of youths' creative endeavors online and elsewhere, along with a look at the proliferation of technologies that young people are using in the arts; and concludes with thoughts about challenges and possibilities for the futur

Toward an Ecology of Gaming

In her introduction to the Ecology of Games, Salen argues for the need for an increasingly complex and informed awareness of the meaning, significance, and practicalities of games in young people's lives. The language of the media is replete with references to the devil (and heavy metal) when it comes to the ill-found virtues of videogames, while a growing movement in K-12 education casts them as a Holy Grail in the uphill battle to keep kids learning. Her essay explores the different ways the volume's contributors add shades of grey to this often black-and-white mix, pointing toward a more sophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matter to those considering the future of learning

Rethinking world language teacher education TPACK for integration of digital literacies in the classroom

Studies indicate that many language teachers have a tendency to view language as an abstract linguistic system and are, therefore, hesitant to acknowledge new dimensions of literacy and that learning a language in the digital age involves new communicative competencies including the ability to construct knowledge collaboratively and create and interpret texts that combine various resources made available by digital technologies. The main purpose of this thesis was to investigate the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) of language teachers engaged in the digital literacy practice of producing a multimodal ensemble with machinima with a view to proposing an updated TPACK model for integration of digital literacies into language teacher education. To this end, language teachers participated in a course specifically designed to train them to make machinima videos as well as prompt them to reflect on the affordances of the tool and their transformative effect on the concepts of language and literacy. Findings show that while participating teachers express traditional views of literacy, they demonstrate profound knowledge of multimodal composition by collaboratively constructing complex mode relationships during the machinima production process. Findings also suggest that if digital literacies are seen as encompassing the ability to adapt affordances and constraints of digital technologies to particular circumstances, then, teachers possess digital literacies as they enact the affordances and overcome the constraints of digital technologies through synaesthesia, spontaneous improvising and coaction. This thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of the Content Knowledge domain to include ecological perspectives on language and language learning and teaching and a metalanguage that would enable teachers to discuss and explain the creation of various mode relationships enabled by digital tools. The TPACK model proposed in this thesis allows for the consideration of concepts such as multimodal meaning-making, synaesthesia and coaction which are deemed to be relevant to a discussion of digital literacies within language teacher education programmes

The Effects of Machinima on Communication Skills in Students with Developmental Dyslexia

Many research efforts in the international literature have been conducted to investigate various fundamental issues associated with communication skills cultivation of students with developmental dyslexia. However, little is known when it comes to the impact that 'immersive technologies', such as three-dimensional virtual worlds, without considering any exploration of their impact to assist boys and girls with developmental dyslexia cultivate communication skills. Motivated by this inadequacy in the literature, the purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the machinima approach, created via OpenSimulator and Scratch4SL, for students with developmental dyslexia in vocabulary learning and practicing. This embedded mixed-methods research was conducted over a four-week timetable in-class course, with forty students (n = 40) aged 10-12 years old. All students were equally separated into two groups in line with their gender. Boys and girls were encouraged to unfold the communication skills developed (i.e., spelling, writing, reading) by creating their own stories, after viewing educational videos and machinima scenes, before and after the treatment. The results indicate that machinima positively affected students' learning outcomes and achievements. Machinima can improve immediate knowledge gains in boys compared to girls to purposefully translate their cognitive thinking into storytelling, when problem-solving situations through simulated realism are considered. This study also offers insights for educational implications and design guidelines for machinima creation, providing empirical evidence on its effect on the participants' linguistics understanding and communication skills for language learning in girls and boys with developmental dyslexia

Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts