More info on Salen

Academics are now arguing a completely different case regarding digital games and their influence on learning and education, academics such as Prensky (2007) who writes “It is possible to combine computer and video games with a wide variety of educational content, achieving as good or better results as traditional learning methods in the process.”  The arguments against video games  and it’s adverse influence on children’s learning has been long ongoing but in later years these arguments such as “Digital games can cause the child to be more isolated and anti-social” [online, 2011] are becoming weaker as researchers look into ways that digital games can actually increase the social interactivity in children. Indeed in 2010 a school called Quest2Lean has been set-up by Katie Salen et al and partially funded by the Gates Foundation which uses digital games as core tool with which all subjects are taught. The aim of the school is to prove that game-based learning can be used as an intelligent way to engage students and get them to think creatively and technically without the need of traditional methods. According to Salen “The school has really been designed as a school that uses games as a pedagogical kind of structure.  [online, 2010] Salen continues to explain that children engage with the subject lesson and context far greater as they are designing digital games revolving around it rather than simply reading about it. Therefore it becomes a kind of technological multi-role play instead of a cold text-book.  Unfortunately it is hard to compare the grades of the Qiest2Learn students  against other 6-8^th graders in others schools as the pedagogy is not the only thing different about the school, they also grade differently. Students are awarded a scale from pre-novice to expert depending on their attainments.

It would have been interesting for my research to look into comparative grades but the school's unconventional way of grading makes that impossible.

Below is an interview with Salen on Game Design and learning...