Creating Space: Building Digital Games

Studies of games, rhetoric, and pedagogy are increasingly common in our field, and indeed seem to grow each year. Nonetheless, composing and designing digital games, either as a mode of scholarship or as a classroom assignment, has not seen an equal groundswell. This selection first provides a brief overview of the existing scholarship in gaming and pedagogy, much of which currently focuses either on games as texts to analyze or as pedagogical models. While these approaches are certainly valuable, I advocate for an increased focus on game design and creation as valuable act of composition. Such a focus engages students and scholars in a deeply multimodal practice that incorporates critical design and computational thinking. I close with suggestions on tools for new and intrepid designers

Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

Narrative Threads: supporting young people in developing writing skills through narrative-based game creation

This thesis examines how narrative-based game creation can be used as an activity to improve writing skills for young people aged 11-15, and how additional representational support in a game creation tool can increase the benefits of the activity. Creating narrative-based games can involve traditional writing skills as well as requiring the 21st century skills of multimodal and interactive writing. Toolsets make it possible for young people to create 3D role-playing games with a commercial look and feel, but they do not provide support for the complex task of interactive and multimodal narrative creation. To investigate the desirable features of a tool that would support this task and the associated learning, an extensive learner-centred design process was conducted. This involved teachers and young people, and also incorporated relevant theory synthesised into a design model. A suite of tools, Narrative Threads, was designed and developed through an iterative process to provide the support highlighted as important. Two evaluative studies were conducted in different learning contexts; a secondary school and a vacation workshop. A mixed-methods approach was used to examine the overall potential for the activity to support writing skills development and the impact made by additional representational support. Comparative studies between groups showed some evidence that writing skills were improved for those taking part in game creation, and there were further benefits for groups using Narrative Threads in the workshop setting, but not in the school setting. Additionally, a multimodal analysis of the games created showed that many participants demonstrated a developing proficiency in using 3D graphical elements, text and sound to convey an interactive narrative. The findings indicate promise for the approach, although additional curricular and pedagogical support would be crucial if the potential is to be actualised in a classroom context

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

Design-activity-sequence: A case study and polyphonic analysis of learning in a digital design thinking workshop

In this case study, we report on the outcomes of a one-day workshop on design thinking attended by participants from the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning conference in Philadelphia in 2017. We highlight the interactions between the workshop design, structured as a design thinking process around the design of a digital environment for design thinking, and the diverse backgrounds and interests of its participants. Data from in-workshop reflections and post-workshop interviews were analyzed using a novel set of analytical approaches, a combination the facilitators made by possible by welcoming participants as coresearchers

Narrative support for young game designers’ writing

Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools

Computational Thinking and Literacy

Today’s students will enter a workforce that is powerfully shaped by computing. To be successful in a changing economy, students must learn to think algorithmically and computationally, to solve problems with varying levels of abstraction. These computational thinking skills have become so integrated into social function as to represent fundamental literacies. However, computer science has not been widely taught in K-12 schools. Efforts to create computer science standards and frameworks have yet to make their way into mandated course requirements. Despite a plethora of research on digital literacies, research on the role of computational thinking in the literature is sparse. This conceptual paper proposes a three dimensional framework for exploring the relationship between computational thinking and literacy through: 1) situating computational thinking in the literature as a literacy; 2) outlining mechanisms by which students’ existing literacy skills can be leveraged to foster computational thinking; and 3) elaborating ways in which computational thinking skills facilitate literacy development