Mini Games… are there any left to make?

Well, I’ve been at my new position at Athabasca for only a day and a half and I’m already getting into the groove of things… or so I would believe. Why do I say that? Well this is a new venue, but I’ve got an old problem to deal with. A prof wants interactivity, I’m going to suggest mini games, prof will say “cool”, but then find that for every game that is presented, s/he’s already “seen that one”. So what are we to do?

Well I’m not sure. I’ve been reading some of the new material on the subject from Epistemic Games (Graesser, Olney & Cade, 2009; Graesser, Conley & Olney, In Press) as well as Frazer, Argles &Willis (2007) and the venerable Mark Prensky, and it all seems quite compelling – we have the systems and the background to do amazing things! But… we don’t.

It comes down to how much time can an individual or team put into rolling their own game out (either a copy or a new concept) when in reality, the game is only going to be one small piece of the instructional puzzle. If the game is in reality, an engine, then you might be able to commit more resources to it and use it across multiple situations, but then it likely is going to suffer some for that compromise. Now, if we accept that these games will have compromises built in, but then understand that they are not really for direct instruction, we might be able to think of them more as distractions (Prensky). So if we can cook up a quick little game that is able to give a student a “brain break” while learning “directly” about a given topic, the break only needs to be superficially related to have some manner of impact. And not always on the pedagogic side, but perhaps more on the engagement side.

If we start to get “bang for the buck” there, then we can start into cooler things like tutoring systems and the like, but in the mean time, there is another way to deal with many of the topics that one might want to explore using some new fangled pedagogy – good old COTS (commercial, off the shelf) and some creative thinking…


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