Failing Creatively in the Classroom

Anastasia SalterUniversity of Central Florida

@anasalter

Video games don’t just carry the potential to replicate a sophisticated scientific way of thinking. They actually externalize the way in which the human mind works and thinks in a better fashion than any other technology we have.

James Paul Gee

People know that there's something magical about games. They don't always express that opinion positively, but even condemnations of video games acknowledge that they contain special power, power to captivate us and draw us in, power to encourage us to repeat things we've seemingly done before, power to get us to spend money on things that seem not to exist, and so forth. While not everyone agrees that games are culture, or media, or art, everyone seems to agree that games are powerful. And that power is mysterious and wild, like black magic. You don't have to like games to want a piece of it.

Ian Bogost

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/

persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?page=2

Games InvasionAlternate Reality Games, THATCamp Games Conferences

The Gamer SocietyAlternate Reality Game, NASAGA 2014

Playing the Future: An Asteroid AdventureWith Kalynn Brower and Chuck Needleman, 2013

Secret Societies of the Avant-gardeWith Keri Watson, 20th Century Art History Alternate Reality Game, 2014

Russia to America Culture Gamew/ Alla Kourova, Rudy McDaniel, and the UCF Russian Club, 2015

Procedural literacy entails the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems, not just on the computer, but in general.

Ian Bogost

Computers should not be black boxes but rather understood as engines for creating powerful and persuasive models of the world around us. The world around us (and inside us) is something we in the humanities have been interested in for a very long time. I believe that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures — rules, models, algorithms — in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education. Our students will need to become more at ease reading (and writing) back and forth across the boundaries between natural and artificial languages.

Matthew Kirschenbaum

http://chronicle.com/article/Hello-Worlds/5476

Critical making : “making as a way to ask better questions”

Daniel Chamberlain

“I think given how pervasive computers and the internet is now, and how fascinated kids are with it, I want to make sure that they know how to actually produce stuff using computers, and not simply consume stuff.”

“There are a whole bunch of young people out there I suspect who, if in high school are given the opportunity to figure out 'here's how you can design your own games', but it requires you to know math, and it requires you to know science”

Barack Obama

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/186830/Obama_Lets_give_more_kids_the_opportunity

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Anastasia Salterhttp://anastasiasalter.net@anasalter