What Should I Do, Now That I’m in the Game?: 3 Years Later of “The Papers, Projects, and Practices of Teaching Educational Games”

Brett Shelton · Amy Adcock · Anthony Betrus · Luca Botturi · Atsusi Hirumi · David Shaffer · Brian Winn

When people teach classes about educational games, what are they doing? What articles and books do they use? What do their assignments look like? What kind of projects do their students complete?

As a reaction to the growing number of teachers who use gaming within their curriculum and the corresponding increase in university courses aimed at teaching the design of effective instructional games, we introduced a panel at GLS 2.0 (2006) called “How Do I Get in the Game?: The Papers, Projects, and Practices of Teaching Educational Games”. This panel brought together a community of interested parties involved with teaching educational games. We collaborated with panelists before that year’s panel convened so that we could introduce resources such as syllabi, collections of readings, and discussions of theory in a wiki environment to which they could collectively contribute during the session.

The result is the Teaching Educational Games Resources wiki, which includes hundreds of educational gaming links, files, and directed pieces of information. These resources are openly available to teachers who wish to incorporate instructional gaming into their courses and researchers interested in instructional gaming.

During the presentation, we gave attendees the wiki address and walked them through the table of contents. Then we asked them to go to the wiki during the session and add resources they thought would be appropriate to each of the sections. Interest in the wiki has been high since the wiki was made public at GLS 2.0. A Google search for “educational games” and “resources” produces the wiki as the second listing of over a million and a half results, indicating (among other things) that many external web pages link to this wiki.

Due to the success of the 2006 presentation and the continued emphasis for K–12 teaching at GLS, we will follow a similar format by presenting attendees with the wiki address, and walking them through the table of contents. We’ll then ask them to hop onto the wiki and add resources they think will be appropriate to each of the sections. Contributors will lead a discussion of the originally synthesized information and call on audience members to provide brief summaries of items they are adding. The resulting wiki will continue to be kept available for the indefinite future, creating a space of resources, practices, and discussion to be helpful for other instructors of games and simulations.

At the end of the session, attendees will have the experience of a participatory session that they can relate directly to the classes they teach.

• How do panelists and attendees see the existing wiki as being helpful or unhelpful?
• Who has used the wiki since the 2006 session?
• How do we increase and sustain usage of the wiki?

The panelists for this year’s program are those from 2006 plus additional colleagues. We will describe our own answers to these questions concerning the resource, and offer our thoughts on how teaching educational games has changed since the 2006 program.