serious games for learning

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Serious Games for Learning

Presented at Jilin University November 2014Alice Bedard-Voorhees, PhD

+Games and Gamification for Learning

We can add engagement, motivation, interest for learning by using game principles for both academic and workplace situations.

+Applying the Characteristics of GamesGoalRulesFeedbackAcceptance of the Rules of the Game (Voluntary Participation)

Source: Jane McGonigal. (2011). Reality is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and Can Change Our World.

+Serious Games: What Makes Them Different?

Serious games are about a purpose other than pure entertainment.

+Serious Games:

“Used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game

+Simple Example of Current Workplace TrainingGoal:

Organization needs to have employees complete training on a yearly basis about safety regulations, diversity, violence in the workplace, disrespect of others (harassment), and customer service or they will be considered out of compliance by some government agencies.

Former way:

All go into a room and listen to presentations on the policies. Employee attendance is noted.

Did they actively participate in showing their knowledge?

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+More Elaborate Training ExamplesAviation SimulationsGames for Military Training

+Extensive List of Serious Games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game

+Food Force: Mission 2

+Foldit: Protein Folding

Top Scoring Solution to the Mason Pfizer Monkey Virus

+Phylo: Matching Nucleotide Sequences

+Basis for Phylo

“The goal of multiple sequence alignments in phylogenetics is to determine the most likely nucleotide sequence of each species by comparing the sequences of children species with those of a most recent common ancestor. Producing such an optimal multiple sequence alignment is usually determined with a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the most probable evolutionary outcome by minimizing the number of mutations required.”

+Phylo: Matching Nucleotide Sequences

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Thank You!