dance dance education games learning society 2008 dubbels

Dance Dance EducationBecause kids won’t let an education get in the way of their learning

Brock DubbelsThe Center for Cognitive SciencesThe University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

BackgroundToday's children have grown up in a remote-control world never knowing the days of having to get up

off the couch to change channels on the TV. In an era when the term "couch potato" is now part of our lexicon, health care professionals have observed a skyrocketing increase in levels of childhood obesity. This increase has been attributed in large part to physical inactivity. Physical inactivity not only leads to obesity and poor cardiovascular health, it also has negative effects on bone health. Moira Petit, assistant professor of kinesiology, studies the role of physical activity for optimizing bone health during growth, particularly during adolescence. Petit's work is helping to redefine thinking about what constitutes bone health and to find better ways to build bone strength.

Obesity & Bone Density• Importance of mechanical loading in promoting

bone health. Activities such as jumping and gymnastics exert the kind of high impact force that develops bone.

• having school children do just one minute of jumping (10-20 jumps) three times a day, three to five times a week caused the children to gain more bone mass.

• The downsides of such an activity is that it is not sustained enough to improve cardiovascular health or to promote weight loss.

Because it is difficult to motivate children to participate in the type of cardiovascular activities that adults engage in (running, cycling, aerobics), new strategies must be developed.

• In Dance Dance Revolution, a participant responds to a series of directional arrows displayed on a video or TV screen to perform choreographed dance steps or hops synchronized to music. Song tempo and degree of difficulty increase as the player successfully progresses in the game. Because of the game's popularity and its cardiovascular exercise and jumping (bone-building) components, it could represent an appealing model for reducing physical inactivity in children.

Regular & Sustained High Impact Force

But do we have to force them?

Not just for Dancing

How about formal learning?

No Child Left at School?• Choosing to participate and engage in the classroom is the

most important thing that children do in school, and choice seems to be the heart and soul of engagement. When an individual chooses to engage, they are in control of that choice and they are powerful in the choice. If we reduce learning interaction to compliance, premade decisions, and enforced diligence, we may eliminate the pleasure of learning and interaction, possibly leaving students to mostly learn that they do not like school. Deciding that they aren't interested may lead to the development of identities outside of the institution of school (Eckert, 1996). But even if they do choose to disengage in school, they continue to learn in non-academic spaces with different texts, and different teachers, choosing such things as games and play.

Sustained Engagement• When looking to measure growth or change, or even to understand whether

a learner has truly engaged, an educator should also look for evidence of commitment and positive attitudes related to the activity and subject matter.

• Engagement is not just doing the work, it is a connection and an affinity to an activity supported from the affective domains (Chapman, 2003).

• Skinner & Belmont (1993, p.572) report that engaged learners show sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone and select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration.

• Pintrich and & De Groot (1990, in Chapman) see engagement as having observable cognitive components that can be seen or elicited through exploring the learner’s use of strategy, metacognition, and self-regulatory behavior to monitor and guide the learning processes.

http://5th-teacher.blogspot.com/2008/03/dry-dock-movie.html

Sections• Theory

– the importance of choice in learning; – the centrality of identity construction through and activity and

group membership that began to align with views on self-determination and group membership;

– the importance of choice and the role of self-determination;– and the role of play as a portal to encouraging engagement,

practice, and performance--otherwise known as work.• Methodology• Findings

– Emergent themes and Analysis• Future Research

Guiding question: How does identity construction inform motivation and engagement in a play group?

Is the process of identity construction as explanatory of the how and why Ellen developed into an expert at DDR, and more importantly, why she sustained her engagement in learning: in essence, that identity Informs motivation and engagement. Perhaps the concept and act of Play is important in identity, and may be powerful in learning and engagement.

Ethos of Activity

Play is a portal to Self-Determination and Work

Working hard at play?

Identity informs motivation & engagement

To be truly engaging the activity must, in some way be linked to how the person identifies themselves and how they want to be identified by others, and their relationship to others. This context of learning and group interaction is an important part of our identities.

According to Buckingham (2008, p. 3):8Identity is developed by the individual, but it has to be recognized and confirmed by others. Adolescence is also a period in which young people negotiate their separation from their family, and develop independent social competence (for example through participation in “cliques” and larger “crowds” of peers, who exert different kinds of influence).

PlaygroupsCommunities of Practice• The domain: shared

domain of interest and shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.

• The community: members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.

• The practice: They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

Affinity Groups• Semiotic Domains

are the key feature that make members recognizable:

– a set of practices, a set of common goals or endeavors, and a set of values and norms

– oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts

Autonomy Supporting Groups

• Self-Determination Theory

• learner-led• Autonomy• Belonging• Competence

PREDICTION

Hypothesis: With this in mind, it would seem possible that as the group eventually changed, or the activity changed, motivation would change and thus, group identity would change and affect the degree of engagement. In essence, identity would have informed motivation and engagement.

AndPlay may represent an important portal to engagement and recruiting the work ethos for learning acceleration—choice may be more prevalent in Play.

Methodology: The modified phenomenological interview

The phenomenological interview methodology was modified to gather descriptions of the described lived experience in terms of what van Manen (1996, p. 101) called Fundamental Life Themes, or as they will be referred to for the sake of brevity: F.L.T.s. F.L.T.s are elements of human experience. They are structural elements of the phenomena of the experience of living in the world.

These are really experiences of the self in the world from the traditions of in the world from Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre; also affiliated with the analysis built from Marxist traditions

Experience by DaSein (of the Self)

Play as Portal, Autonomous Environment, Belonging, Activity/Semiotics/competence

Well, it was me and a lot of guys. It was really silly. We were dancing so much that we had steamed up all the windows in this room. It was kind of sweaty and it smelled bad but we had the music blaring. Itkind of funny because it was kind of like a dance party only we’re playing a video game. There was a big group of us, maybe at most 10 different people, and it was kind of funny because I was one of the only girls, if not the only one. So we all started playing this game—we’re all in this kind of small room and people are challenging each other to play and people are just trying to beat their personal best with songs. The music, for what it’s worth, it’s kind of catchy and it was fun to watch. So we would just all sit around and dance until you’re tired and then someone would sit down and then the next person would get up. We just were driven to be better and so we all went out and bought all the equipment and the game.

The first time I ever played Dance Dance Revolution was with my friends Tyler and Ben. They had it at Devon’s house and everyone was playing this game. Really, I wanted to hang out with them, I wanted to participate and so that’s when I started learning. Then it was after playing with those guys for so long that I really started to enjoy the game. I actually didn’t have a play station before that, so I went out and bought a play station just so I could play DDR, yeah. . . yeah, I didn’t want to be left out of it. Games are fun and I just wanted to spend time with my friends and this is something that they were all doing.


I was excited because this was something I could participate in. I’ve played Halo and I’m not that good at it and everyone was starting out on this for the first time, so I thought I could be one of those good people at it and get respect from people. I was really excited. They have this huge TV at Devon’s house and everyone’s around you. I was kind of nervous too because you have to do this in front of people. Well, we were all kind of sitting on the couch watching the men and I was like I want to try it. I mean, some of them were interested in seeing me probably because they knew I never played before and they made me where I was probably going to fail, but then I actually really wanted to do it, so I was like I want to do it next! I thought I was going to be better at the game than I thought I was because I’m thinking oh these guys they don’t have any coordination. This’ll be easy for me. I’m kind of in shape, so I was thinking it would be pretty easy and then I do some of these songs and I was like oh, I need to go down a level! I thought I caught on fairly quickly.


I have a lot of friends who play Counterstrike and a lot of . . . almost every guy I know plays Halo. You can enjoy watching those games. I don’t enjoy it as much. Like I said, it’s just way more serious.

They get more serious. Well, it’s like everyone is more quiet and focused, like they really get into trying to hunt these people down and kill them before they are hunted down and killed. DDR, you are playing against someone but then with Halo and Counterstrike you’re against all these people and you have to be like watching your back all the time. Even the people watching, they zone out and just watch it. For me it’s not as fun. As for DDR, it’s more like people jumping around and are less serious but it’s still a lot of fun.


I knew some of them well but then I made friends that way through playing because we shared this thing, so it would be like oh so who’s house are we going to go to tonight to play DDR? Okay. Well, my friend Devon, his house was the main DDR house just because he had a great room for it and everything and his parents didn’t really care how much noise we made or how late we stayed there, so his house is generally the DDR house. Tyler, who was my friend prior, we would get together and practice a lot. Michael, he bought DDR around the time that I did and we were basically kind of on the same level and I got to know him better that way just by spending time with all these people. Nick, all these other guys, I had kind of known beforehand but now we spent all this time together. So it was basically we all met at Devon’s house and that’s what we would do for weekend after

weekend after weekend.


Well, I’m standing kind of awkward on the pad. Most beginners, what they do is they feel confined to the circle. Once you’ve stepped on an arrow, you want to bring your leg back to the circle. It was difficult because what I’m seeing and what I want my body to do wasn’t matching up with the time. There is like a reason to the arrows. They do go with some kind of part of the beat to the song, whether they’re taking the really simple baseline or they’ve got this kind of syncopation that it does the song. Sometimes like the higher levels it’s hard to figure out where it fits with the song and you won’t do it on time because you can’t find that rhythm within the beat. I felt really awkward. My movements were really kind of broken. You’ve already missed one arrow and then you have to start thinking about the next one and it was like. . .

____Yeah, I was pretty focused on the screen. I was just getting confused because I hadn’t figured out the arrows really yet. After awhile you get a sense of where the arrow is because you can kind of move around on the pad so sometimes you won’t be hitting an arrow but you’re stepping with the right foot. Yeah. Well, I’m watching these two people kind of jump around on these dance pads. I guess it was pretty easy to figure out eventually what they were doing but then like watching it on the screen and then actually doing it yourself was completely different than that. Oh yeah, so there’d be two people playing at once but then at any given time there would be others who had just played because you get kind of tired fairly quickly, especially if you haven’t played in awhile. So people would be just kind of lounging around. There’d be some people who would watch the screen and stand behind you. I mean, you can still do the steps, just not on the pad, practicing, I guess. So I mean we weren’t just like you know sitting there just watching the screen. We were taking part in it even if you weren’t in it.


Yeah, we’re all just kind of getting into it. The music is kind of poppish and happy, so we’re just kind of enjoying it. People are talking. It’s not like a normal game situation where people are kind of like quiet and like really serious, like when they play Halo or something like that. They’ll get kind of serious and kind of zone into the game more. This was just more like jumping around. And, oh, I don’t know, talking to the people who are dancing—it’s part of the game, though. You’re talking like oh you haven’t missed a single step or you’re on your way to all these perfects and all this stuff. It was just like a lot of times you’d be in kind of awe of these people like oh my gosh, they’re doing so amazing. I didn’t feel so bad because I was with these people who are my friends. I mean, no one expected me to do good. They weren’t mean about it. They were trying to be like helpful because sometimes people will clap the rhythm to help you out, which does actually really help because—


I PROBABLY FAILED. So how did you do that first time?

What defines failure? Well, you have this allowance of how many mistakes you can make between all of the steps that you do make. I don’t

know how to describe it, just this bar and for every step you miss, this bar gets smaller and for every step you make it kind of gets bigger. It reaches the point where you don’t have anything left in this bar, then you’ve just failed the song and you didn’t get enough steps to get a passing grade. I wasn’t expecting to do so badly but then immediately I wanted to do better because all these other people had learned how to do it, so I wanted to get better. I think by the end of that night, I passed some songs. Yeah. So it was easy enough to get better.

And then somebody else wanted to play? Yeah, someone else wanted to play and I sat down and I’m like trying to watch these people, trying to figure out how

they’re doing it. I was really excited to play more because even though I wasn’t doing that well, it was still fun because for that little brief moment you’re playing this game. So I wanted to do it again, a lot actually.

So how many times did you play that game ____? Oh probably not as much as everybody else did just because I was still trying to figure it out but we would play for

hours, just straight hours. You just kind of would lose track of time. I would play right up until my curfew and then had to run back down the hill to my house. We were just so caught up in having fun. I don’t know, we were just so focused on one thing, it didn’t really seem like time was passing at all. No one was bored. I was like Tyler, Tyler, I want to play with you guys again! I brought some friends with me the next time. I brought some other girls. They were a little bit more hesitant to play and neither of them really got into DDR as I did.


• I never felt compelled to play a lot of the other videogames. I really like dancing. I figured out the dancing isn’t necessarily a huge part of DDR. With non-DDR dancing it is really what you are making up and what you choose to do and you’re kind of leading. With DDR dancing, you’re following. But then also you’re moving towards a certain goal, like you’re trying to achieve something, get something, and you’re getting rated on it.

• Well, I just really enjoyed playing it. I had a lot of fun playing it. So what followed was me just trying to find where I could go to play. Then I kind of got eventually frustrated with it—well, not frustrated but I wanted to play more, so I decided to buy it for myself


• You play by yourself to get better to play with other people. I mean, it’s always fun to play by yourself and unlock new songs and things like that.


Identity outside of spaceSo was it easy for you to get the setup, like go out and buy the equipment and such? Well, actually I got it for Christmas from my parents, so I didn’t have to buy it but I had to persuade

them and make sure they got me what I wanted. What did they think about it? They didn’t really understand but they felt okay about it because it wasn’t something violent or

anything like that. Then I was like look what I can do! They watched me. They thought it was kind of interesting. This was

with my family on Christmas. Then my uncles and my little cousin who was maybe like seven, they all got really interested by it. So my fifty-year-old uncles are trying it and they’re getting really excited. My little cousin, she’s getting excited too. She doesn’t even really understand what’s happening on the screen but she’s like jumping around on the pad.

I don’t know, it feels kind of interesting how I think people find it a lot more interesting because it’s a different type of game. I think that people feel that they can try to do it more. It’s something they could try other than just the regular type of video game

There were some times that for a project, when I was in 10th grade (so this would have been two years ago, I guess)—in tenth grade I had to do this project to like explain some things, like how to play it to people. So I brought in all my equipment to school and I explained to my class how to play it and the timing and the levels and the difficulty levels and stuff like that, and so then I played it in front of my class. Yeah, we did it a lot. Oh, and then I went on a trip to New York for band and Tyler and I brought DDR to our—we played it in the hotel room. We didn’t go out sight-seeing one night because we stayed in to play DDR.


you couldn’t stop playing? Oh, I was probably late back to my house a lot just because I

wanted to finish my song! I wanted to stay out a little bit longer or I wanted to play a little bit longer.

Have you ever done anything like not done your homework or missed work?

No, not missed work. I mean, maybe put my homework off. I do my homework always so I wouldn’t not do my homework for anything but there’s probably been times when I’ve played too much, but I found out how to balance that.

What was that like, that finding the balance? Could you explain what was going on?

Well, it was hard. What I would do is I’d be at school all day and then I come home and then I’d play DDR until about dinner.

How long would that be? That would be like a couple hours, a couple hours from like 3:30 until six-ish. I

would go to school and get that all out of the way. I’d get out at three, three-thirty I’d be home usually. Then I would play DDR mostly by myself. Sometimes people would come over to my house after school and play. Then I would play until dinner or until I had a flute lesson or sometime, some other obligation. I would do that and then eat or whatever. Then I got my homework out of the way finally. Then the rest of the night I would be playing DDR. It varied but that’s how some days were. I generally would want to come home and play.

• Well, at my work it’s kind of similar too. We’re all stuck working together and so then we get talking. Soccer and sports a lot. Any kind of group that you all come together and you have something to talk about and then we just eventually expand on that and that’s how we became friends.

Did you get to know people pretty well through this? Yeah. What ____ Dance Dance Revolution? I see myself still doing it. It was funny because my boss went

on a trip; I think he was in Germany. So I talked to him about Dance Dance Revolution and he was like oh they were playing something just like that in Germany and they all did it. I mean, he is like 21, kind of early 20s but all these people were doing it. It was funny because I think DDR is like really a big word of mouth game because that’s how you kind of invite people to play. I had this doctor and I told her about it and she went out and bought it. My 45-year-old doctor, she was playing Dance Dance Revolution too.

I’ve probably been playing—oh, I can’t remember how long ago this was. I think it’s been two years now. I play less now just because I have a job and school has gotten more intense but if I do play games, it’s DDR.

Do you still get together with friends and play? Yeah. Whenever I play now, it’s only really with friends.

It’s something we do to enjoy and then sometimes who have never seen it before see it and be like oh you have to show me, oh you have to do this, like we have to try this, I’ve never tried it before. So then that’s when I’ll do it.

Autonomy supporting communities of affinity?

• What seems to be central to sustained engagement is identity construction, and that is essential through the acts of:

• Doing• Relating & getting feedback• Reflecting and thinking

• Identifiable aspects include:• Semiotic domains

Sustained Engagement

Analysis:For educators, we should pay close attention to the experience of identity construction, where the

healthy mature individual is one who has attained a stable, integrated identity. Continuing "confusion" about one's identity is a mark of incomplete development, and may result in deviant or antisocial behavior. From this perspective, adolescence is seen primarily as a state of transition, a matter of "becoming" rather than "being". Adolescents’ key dilemmas are to do with what they will become, particularly in terms of their future occupation and their relationships: their current experiences are only significant insofar as they help them resolve the crisis and hence move on. (Buckingham 2008, p. 3)

Choice

Motivation

• Intrinsic• Extrinsic• But Self-determination theory may be a better

descriptor of why motivation emerges, and self-determination seems to be motivated not by the descriptors, but identity construction

hypothesis

• With this in mind, identity did inform motivation and engagement. Desire to be part of the group, as well as the fun of the work that was attributed to play helped to create the group identities.

Why Play Groups?

• This experience may be an example of young adults forming a play group, which is dependent upon sharing mutually original feelings without getting too deep or real, which represents an opportunity to try on and project different emotions and create what Corsaro (1985) called the Actors Dilemma.

The Center Bet and Deep PlayClifford Geertz , Jeremy Bentham

Networks & CommunityFor Balinese cockfighting is not just a game, it is a social activity with complex system that an outsider will find it difficult to understand but for Balinese it is run in their blood. There is a complex social system in a cockfighting game. All Balinese values and codes of life is translated into this game. There are traditional ethical codes in a cockfighting game that a Balinese will obey unconsciously, maybe it is not appropriate to call it ethical code but rather a set of behavior that all Balinese will do in every cockfighting match without any outside pressure, it is their social instinct. Here are some examples of Balinese social instinct in cockfighting.

What this means for schoolsMaybe we need to motivate and engage through recruiting play for developing work-like competencies. You can go to:http//:5th-teacher.blogspot.comwww.vgalt.com/blogwww.videogamesaslearningtools.com

http://www.vgalt.com/blog

Where are we now?

We have taken away play in school

We’re late, we’re lateYears ago

We’re really late and fearfulNow?

Which do you like better?

We’re late We’re really late

What happened?I am a gamer

http://wcco.com/local/Dance.Dance.Revolution.2.355440.html

Play as Portal to work and identities

• Through this we see that there is some fuzziness between work and play, and that perhaps it is an act of attribution based upon playful-autonomous-practicing-communities- of-affinity.

• Play is a portal to practice, community, and represented a desirable activity and an important part of Ellen’s identity construction.

• She went through a rite of passage typical of group entrance and gaining the semiotic badges of membership.

• What we need to concern ourselves with is the regular negotiation of identity construction, and in order to sustain the engagement, it may be important that align activities with identities important to motivation that promote self-determination in autonomous learning environments, and also understand the importance of groups and feedback, as well as the necessity to perform and risk in Deep Play for the credibility of the semiotic domains.

Identity

Situation model FLTsSemiotic Domains

Id = M + SEngage

• In this way, we can create kind self-determined learning.• Utilize semiotic domains and FTLs, as well as the event indexing model for

evidence of gains.• Understand the importance of risk, and self-evaluation in safe group

contexts for membership and sustained engagement.• Play is essential in creating these environments through creating structure

for shared experience and reducing the threat of Freudian meltdowns• Games are a structured form of play• Work can be playful / play can be a lot of work• Play is powerful learning, and an important part of our identities.