Gaming

I was excited to start “Gaming, Simulations, AR” this week because I already agree that gaming is the way to go.

The first website that I checked out was the Stop Disasters game.  Automatically, I started thinking about how this game could be used for public health trainings in a real situation and within the classroom for students. The basis of the game is to stop disasters from occurring or prohibit them from doing more damage.  As a public health educator, there are certain disasters that we have to be prepared for, such as earthquakes, floods, blizzards, nuclear war, and tornadoes.  Within the degree for public/community health, the student should learn about ICS (Incident Command System).  The ICS allows communities to follow a chain of command to ensure that a natural hazard doesn’t become an epidemic disaster.  According to the Horizon Report, simulation games like Stop Disasters give students challenges to invent and implement creative solutions to pressing social issues (2011, pg. 19).  Students/Trainees have the ability to run through these simulations and learn from their mistakes if they fail, without endangering the lives of many.  Did you know that the NIH (National Institute of Health) started creating an ICS plan for a zombie attack?  I laughed when I read about it too, but it’s not a fallacy, they really do.  Either way the game is a perfect training tool for educators and communities alike.  Not only will this help with hands on experience with specific disasters, it can also be a huge live saver if you know what to do in a situation. 

The second website I looked at was the Teen Second-Life, but overall Second-Life in general.  I have heard about this before in a magazine somewhere, but didn’t even think about it until I clicked on the website.  This is the craziest thing I have ever laid eyes on and exploring the website only makes it more intriguing, yet creepy at the same time.  The idea of having an avatar that can do all the things that you can’t do in real life is a little weird to me.  Second-Life is perfect for educational purposes because you can set up classrooms as if you were already there.  Since it’s my belief that classrooms will be moving to all online one day, this would be perfect to do a distance learning class.  After some research, I found that some colleges like MIT and Notre Dame already do this and it is very cost effective.  It actually makes it easier to communicate with a professor who is theoretically in front of you, instead via e-mail and discussion boards.  According to Strangman & Hall “there is significant evidence that virtual reality experiences can offer an advantage over more traditional instructional experiences at least within certain contexts” (2003).  This means that students who engage in the virtual reality are better within specific areas being learned.  I can see this becoming bigger in the future and think that this will be the way to work on your degree.  Now, call me old fashioned, but why would you want to sit in front of a computer for an hour pretending to be in a classroom?  Wouldn’t you want to “be” in the classroom physically?  Those are just my thoughts and a limitation to the whole Second-Life thing. 

The last website I chose was the Dump Town game.  Again, my mind went right to how this can be incorporated into a classroom, but more specifically a public health focused topic such as recycling.  Here you are the manager of Dump Town and are in desperate need to clean it up.  The simulation follows the student through an array of actions that need to be done to reach the ultimate goal of turning Dump Town into Clean Town.  It is very amazing to see what goes into cleaning up a town and how much it costs to do it.  I feel that using this simulation, students also gain valuable knowledge in understand why some problems surrounding recycling may be difficult to change quickly.  I would certainly give this out as an out of class assignment for my future students. 

I really enjoyed doing this module because in my personal life, gaming certainly has a little place in my heart.  I just wished they had this stuff when I was a kid, because I would have paid attention more in class if I knew we were creating games for the day.

References

Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Haywood, K., (2011). The NMC Horizon Report:

2011 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Strangman, N., & Hall, T. (2003). Virtual reality/simulations. Wakefield, MA: National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. Retrieved [2/7/2012] from http://aim.cast.org/learn/historyarchive/backgroundpapers/virtual_simulations