The Library as a Possibility Space: Cultivating 21 st Century Literacy and Learning

The Library as a Possibility Space:Cultivating 21 st Century Literacy and Learning

Brian MyersCenter for Talent Development

Northwestern University

Rhode Island Library Association2011 Annual Conference

The Library as a Possibility Space

Goal of this presentation:

To demonstrate that the public library can effectively and inexpensively promote 21st century literacy skills and STEM learning by providing access to free digital media design software and design-oriented activities. These activities include game design, digital storytelling and animation workshops that offer opportunities for learning, peer collaboration and community-building.


Structure of this presentation:

1. Game design and digital storytelling as a context for nurturing important 21st century literacy skills.

2. Game Maker Academy and the Game Design Club

Its history and current activities

3. Sample projects

Game projects produced by program participants and club members

4. Free and open source technologies, resources and instructional materials

A selected list of IDEs and other tools utilized in our programs


Computer Literacy vs. Computational Literacy

Computer Literacy:

Turning on the computerUsing a mouseUsing email and business applicationsSearching the WebEtc.

Computational Literacy:

Using the computer to create, not just to passively consumeThinking algorithmically, understanding data structuresConversant in high level programming languagesTreating information as a multimodal entityEtc.


Computers can be the technical foundation of a new and dramatically enhanced literacy, which will act in many ways like the current literacy and which will have penetration and depth of influence comparable to what we have already experienced in coming to achieve a mass, text-based literacy.

Andrea DiSessa Changing Minds: Computers, Learning and Literacy (MIT Press, 2000)

Access alone is not enough. The goal must be fluency for everyone. That will require new attitudes about computing – and new attitudes about learning. If computers are to truly transform our lives in the future, we must treat computational fluency on a par with reading and writing.

Mitch Resnick Communications of the ACM (2001)

Computer Literacy vs. Computational Literacy


Media Computation in Game Design, Digital Storytelling & Animation

Design applications such as Scratch, Game Maker and Alice serve as “tools to think with” much like the blocks and puzzles that teach preschoolers about shapes and numbers.

The experience of creating games and digital stories with these applications engages youth with important math and programming concepts, and provides valuable experience creating and editing audio and graphic content, andconstructing meaning within a rich multimedia environment.


Media Computation in Game Design, Digital Storytelling & Animation

Math Concepts:

AdditionSubtractionMultiplicationDivisionAnglesCoordinatesX,Y PositioningVariablesTrigonometryCalculus

Programming Concepts:

Iteration (Loops)Conditional ExpressionsVariablesArraysCastingBoolean Logic (and, or, not)RandomnessEvent HandlingStringsUser Interface Design


“Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call ‘Gaming Literacy.’ Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.”

Eric Zimmerman

Retrieved July 23, 2007 from http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/12/an_interview_with_eric_zimmerm.html

Game design as a context for promoting media literacy



“When kids learn to design games they not only learn how to explore the possibility space of a set of rules but also learn to understand and evaluate a game’s meaning as the product of relationships between elements in a dynamic system . . .

“Educators and education advocates have recently acknowledged that the ability to think systemically is one of the necessary skills for success in the 21st century. We believe that game-making is especially well-suited to encouraging meta-level reflection on the skills and processes that designer-players use in building such systems, be they games or communities of practice.”

Katie Salen, Gaming Literacies (unpublished draft, 2007)




Game Maker Academy

Began in 2006; first programs offered at the Wilmette (IL), Evanston, and Park Ridge Public Libraries

Typical program included 4-5 separate workshops of 2 hours where participants created two or three games based upon classic console games of the 70s and 80s

Each program could accommodate 10 – 12 teens; demand was such that we doubled the number of programs during the first summer.


Game Maker Academy

Initial programs were built around Game Maker, a freeware game-development IDE created by Mark Overmars of Utrecht University in 1999.

In early 2007 we began offering programs built around Scratch from MIT. These programs consisted of two workshops: the first offering a guided introduction to the Scratch design environment, and the second devoted to open experimentation and collaboration between participants.

The Scratch programs became immediately popular and we began to offer them on a regular basis, about 2 programs were scheduled for each 2-3 month period.


Game Maker Academy

Additional workshops offered under the program include Alice, Starlogo TNG, Greenfoot, and Robocode.

By late 2007 some of the participants of the previous Scratch and Game Maker programs established a club (the “Game Design Club”) to plan advanced game design workshops, create tutorials and host game related events.

Some of these club members participated on a panel at the 2007 ALA Games, Learning and Libraries Symposium in Chicago.


Game Design Club

The original Club members met once each month to plan additional workshops and competitive events (design competitions and gaming tournaments).

Past Club-hosted workshops include HTML and CSS programs, 3D demonstrations,Sketchup workshops, demonstrations on how to use microcontrollers and how to map game controllers to Game Maker and Scratch projects.

Guest visitors including game designers, game programmers and artists have frequently visited the group. Ricarose Roque of MIT's Scratch team visited with the group twice and helped out with our 2010 Scratch Day event


Game Design Club

. The Club frequently hosts gaming tournaments and design contests. We've collected a number of retro (Atari, SNES, N64, Sega) game consoles and frequently host well-attended retro game nights.

A twice-yearly Robocode tournament is hosted, and an annual summer game design contest is sponsored by the group in which members compete to create games based upon predetermined themes.

Members of the Club participated in Media Mashup, a 2008-2010 IMLS-funded research grant that put Scratch into a number of library systems around the country. Some of the older Club members earn money in the summer facilitating programs at neighboring libraries.

The Club's greatest accomplishment is its establishment of a creative culture and a community that continues to engage new members as the older members graduate and go on to college. Members think of the club as their legacy and they are very protective of its values: imaginative play, creativity, collaboration and shared responsibility for learning


www.gamemakeracademy.org


Game Design Club


Game Design Club



Sample Projects

Hopper by Molly (age 12). Created in Greenfoot


Alice

www.alice.org

3d animations

Simple games

Cross-platform

Free download

Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, version 3.0 is under development in partnership with EA.

Programs that nurture creativity and computational literacy

http://www.alice.org/




Scratch

scratch.mit.edu

Animations

Games

Simulations

Includes built-in graphics & sound editors

Cross-platform

Open source/free download

Developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

c





StarLogo TNGeducation.mit.edu/starlogo3d simulations

Uses “programmable blocks” coding environment, similar to Scratch.

Cross-platform.

Free download.

Developed by researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, in collaboration with the Teacher Education Project.





Game Makerwww.yoyogames.com

2D/3D games Includes built-in graphics & sound

editorsMac version released in 2010Free downloadRegistered version: $20

Developed by Marc Overmars of Ultrecht University for freshman computer science students.


http://www.yoyogames.com/




Robocoderobocode.sourceforge.net

Virtual battlebots IDEJava or .NET Cross-platformOpen source/free downloadUsed in school-based coding tournaments

worldwide

Developed bt Matthew Nelson at IBM, has been open source since 2005. Project now maintained by Flemming Larsen and Pavel Savara.


http://robocode.sourceforge.net/




National STEM Videogame Challenge


National STEM Videogame Challenge


Questions?

[email protected]

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]