HELLO! Please stop me any time and ask me any questions or go straight to the questionnaire.
TL;DR below.
Hi, my name is Andrea and I am working on a project to make good educational video games – whatever this means! I am a trained software engineer and academic researcher (specializing in Interaction Design and Human-Machine Interaction), and I have played real-life and computer games for as long as I have memories. My favourites are (point-and-click) adventure games, better with pirates, and I am not a great fan of computer-based RPGs, though I’m open to be swayed.
Recently, life got in the way of me playing games so I thought I’d reconnect with them by starting this EU funded project to figure out how to make educational digital games that people want to play and re-play. There are many ways to use games to achieve many different educational goals and I’m sure you have plenty of opinions on this: I’m here to listen.
However, in a research project, you have to focus. For this project, I focus on misinformation. Actually, in the funding proposal I said I was going to focus on games to learn and practice skills in the Critical and Computational Thinking skill set, but hey, look, these cover many of the skills that also help with detecting and countering misinformation. Coincidence?
TL;DR: if you are reading this it means I reached out to you, or someone else sent it to you, because we think you, as an educator, might like to be involved with this project. In fact, one of the goals of the project is to bring together experts like you, researchers like me, and game designers and developers, to figure out how to make digital games and interactive experiences that can have a meaningful educational impact, especially as informal and lifelong educational interventions.
I’m talking too much and I’d be happy to talk some more, but for now may I ask you to answer these questions, please? Take as much or as little time as you want, don’t feel like you have to answer all the questions if you don’t have an answer, or just take these are guidelines for your thoughts. You can copy and paste the questions in a text editor and answer them whenever you have time, pieces at a time, you can send me voice messages, videos, dank memes, links, or we can have a call if that works for you, or you can even stop me in my tracks right now and ask me questions!
I value your opinion and I want to listen, so feel free to use the medium that works best for you and let’s start a conversation. I hope you like the idea so… here we go!
Contents
About you and your relationship with games
- Do you play games and/or have you done so in the past?
- What about video games?
- Do you consider yourself a gamer or rather a person that plays games? Why?
- What types of games and video games do you like and dislike, and why?
- As a player, how do you approach games and video games? Do you go in to play, to win, for the story, for the experience, to play together…?
- Anything else?
About your educational activity
- What kind of educator are you? What do you do? Who are your learners? What areas of knowledge and/or education do you cover? What are your typical educational goals?
- As an educator, do you use games and/or video games?
- If so, how and why? If not, why not?
- Whether you use them or not, do you think games and video games can help you achieve your educational goals? If so, how? If not, why?
- Anything else?
About games and video games in informal education and lifelong learning
- Have you ever played “educational” games or video games? If so, which ones? And did you like them? Did you think they were “good” or “bad” as games and as educational interventions? How and why?
- Self-described educational games and video games are sometimes described as “bad”. What do you think could be reasons for calling an educational game “bad”?
- You are the learner: what notions and skills would you like to learn by playing video games? And what notions and skills have you learned?
- What notions and skills do you think can be learned and practised by playing video games?
- There are different types and genres of video games: mobile, desktop, console, handheld, action, role-playing, cards, adventure… Which ones (or combinations) do you think would work well as a lifelong learning intervention, and why?
- Anything else?
About misinformation
- What is misinformation for you?
- What are the pieces that make up misinformation? What do you need to do to create effective misinformation?
- Give me an example of misinformation that affects you or makes you mad or that you care about countering. Or more than one!
- Misinformation often has roots in specific misconceptions: what are the misconceptions that contribute to this example?
- Misinformation has also more general aspects common across topics: which ones can you think of and which ones do you care about the most?
- Give me examples of games and video games that contain the theme of misinformation. They don’t have to be trying to educate players against it, just have it as one of their themes.
- Now give me examples of games that aim at educating players against misinformation, directly or indirectly.
- Anything else?
About inclusion
- What does “inclusion” mean to you? What does it mean to you in an educational context, whether formal or informal?
- Inclusion in games and video games is often an afterthought. What do you think might be the reason?
- If you were to design an educational video game, how would you make it more inclusive?
- Anything else?
Everything else
- You are the expert here, what else can you tell me around education and video games?