Sasha barab games

I judge the success of a learning environment on how well it builds a relationship between the player and the content, the player and the world, and the player and a more productive self… Games are powerful because what you know, what you can do, and who you become are all interrelated….

Games, Learners, and Innovation! The Doctors Cure is a 3D immersive game that positions players as protagonists in a virtual world where they must use persuasive writing and evidence from complex texts in the role of citizen investigator. The Mystery of Taiga River takes place in a 3D immersive world where students become environmental scientists who lead a scientific investigation to save a virtual park with ecological problems causing the fish to die out.

Barab: Vita Contact. Storied Truths This work adopts the stance that contemporary scholarship must reflect the prevailing paradigm of knowing as participatory—as situated and distributed, and reflecting an interpretivist epistemology.

Another key tenet of our theory of change is that game-infused experiences are most effective when treated as services that are integrated, managed, and continually optimized for ecosystem integration, ongoing sustainability and scaled impact — as opposed to products that are released and remain static. Building a game-infused ecosystem requires building trust and strong communication across multiple stakeholders with a flexible design process that iterates in relation to how well the system is meeting impact goals.

Continual optimization of the system requires ongoing data collection, including data mining of community usage, creating specific assessments focused on key priority areas, and examining real-world participation to ensure outcome achievement.

A successful rollout would include processes and technologies to ensure implementation fidelity and allow for local optimization of products and services to maximize sustainable and scalable outcomes.

This service-based model not only enables responsiveness to teacher, student, and other stakeholder feedback, continually maximizing engagement and learning outcomes, it also enables responsiveness to shifting dynamics in the ecosystem of implementation.

An additional benefit of an on-going service is that it offers an expandable infrastructure allowing for the addition of new modules and capabilities. This appeared in Educational Leadership. Design Innovations About Sasha A. Barab is an internationally recognized Learning Scientist who holds the Pinnacle West Chair of Education, and who has researched, designed, and published extensively on the challenges and opportunities of using games for impact.