Office Hours details a current course offered at U-M, exploring what students are learning, how they’re engaging with the material, and the ways the course material relates to professors’ research.
EDUC 602: Videogames, Learning, and School Design with Christopher Quintana, MS’95, PhD’01
THE BASICS
Offered through the Marsal Family School of Education, “Videogames, Learning, and School Design” is a graduate course that also has an undergraduate version, and is open to students from any school. During the fall semester, professor Christopher Quintana, MS’95, PhD’01, had 24 students enrolled, including those from the Ross School of Business, the School of Information, and a chemistry Ph.D. candidate. While the class has video games in its title, the course also examines board games, escape rooms, simulations, and virtual reality games.
WHAT STUDENTS ARE LEARNING
1. Games as a lens for theories about learning, motivation, and engagement.
2. Educational games as learning tools, including board and simulation games.
3. Issues in gaming to consider when designing a learning environment, such as inclusion and accessibility.
EARLY ASSIGNMENT
Play a new game in an unfamiliar genre, and write a reflection on how they learned the game. The students explore how theories about learning, motivation, and engagement might be reflected in their own learning experience.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Design an educational game or create a piece of curriculum that incorporates games into the learning environment. In the final days of class, students present their projects to their peers, who offer peer-to-peer feedback and even play the games that they are developing.
INTERESTING LESSON
Students read about Azteca Chess, a chess-like board game developed by U-M professors Ivette Perfecto, MS’82, PhD’89, and John Vandermeer, PhD’68, that helped small-scale Mexican coffee farmers better understand the complex ecological interactions between the insects and fungi that live on their plants. This educational game facilitated learning about natural pest control and ecological relationships through gameplay.
PROFESSOR QUINTANA’S RESEARCH
With a background in applied computer science, Quintana became interested in how we design educational tools and evaluate their usability and suitability as learning interventions. He helped develop different tools for middle school students to learn scientific topics, researching how to identify and describe ways that technologies can provide educational “scaffolding” to learners — a teaching method by which educators provide temporary, structured support as students master new concepts, strengthening their understanding through individual competence.
“The focus is on helping students learn to create good educational tools.” — Christopher Quintana, MS’95, PhD’01
