Paste your essay in here..When I was thinking of my essay theme, educational games attracted me the most. It is commonly accepted that a good game engages players in a level where they temporarily forget every aspect of the real world. In education, we know for effective learning to occur, high levels of commitment are vital. So, it seems quite natural to try and examine the potentials of good educational games to enhance learning. However, as a former school student I can recall several learners feeling uncomfortable in times of game playing in class, because certain educational games were inappropriate. The ones the class used to regard unsuitable were mainly related to family representation and cultural differences. This situation made me agonize over various questions like what should teachers keep in mind when designing games, what are the ethical dilemmas when designing an educational game and if the representation of family for game purposes is ethically approved. Besides, the reason why I chose to make a research on the “Interactive Family Tree” is because it has its roots on the traditional family template. Interactive family trees are a subset of curriculum-based game interventions with a substantive educational purpose. The genre includes a variety of different games like the ones that explore moral issues, games to educate ethically, and games to present alternative views of the world. In my essay, I want to explore games that have elements of family representation. Therefore, I desire to find philosophical evidence as to how effective or significant such games are in presenting alternative representations. In addition to this, my goal is to prove whether these representations are desirable or inevitable and if games and technologies should try to influence young learners.
Firstly, it is a fact that as we move into the twenty-first century, nontraditional families make up a progressively large percentage of the population, supporting a diversity which goes beyond social classes, regional differences, racial groupings etcetera (McAdoo, 1993). However, although living in a pluralistic society, not every member approves and respects this diversity. When it comes to education, generating a learning environment which respects diversity sets the scene for fostering children’s positive attitudes towards themselves and others, creates circumstances under which students begin discussions about differentiations and provides the setting for forming fair and comprehensive communities (Santora, 2004). Having said that, what grounds game designers should work to in terms of such differences?
Design is all about vision. Game designers usually have played a great variety of games; they are responsible for statistics and rules that go into a game and tend to equalize the elements to make a game successful (Saltzman, 2000). The oldest form of serious game is the educational game whose goal is to be appealing to learners-players. Educational gaming has developed considerably since its first steps, as designers have established ways to motivate players to learn or to teach them without their even being aware that they are being taught; this trick is called stealth learning (Adams, 2014). Crucially, as Mitchell (2003) supports, learning games need to adopt many characteristics commercial games have, because to maintain engagement in the classroom, you need fun, a great variety and ease of use. From my experience, students ask for novelty, surprise and amusement, so instruction should be clear and flow with the game.
However, before we move on to instruction, it is necessary to create a classroom background open to pluralism and diversity. Teachers should appreciate the similarities and differences among the students’ cultures, because positive identification is fundamental to effective communication. Secondly, another good tactic would be to focus on the way students absorb knowledge and observe them to identify their task orientations. Once these orientations are known, it will be easier for the educator to design tasks to take them into account. Also, offering a variety of learning activities and considering students’ cultures and language abilities when developing learning objectives, are two excessive approaches in educating young people from diverse backgrounds (Burnette, 1999). After recommending teacher behaviors which can create a respectful classroom, it is now appropriate to make suggestions towards the planning and designing of educational computer games.
Educational games software should represent a rigorous educational philosophy and should have clearly stated educational intentions and content (Becta, 2001). What Becta meant by saying that, was that games should offer the learner the opportunity to understand through collaboration, experience or investigation whilst on the same time, the design of learning assignments should make the students feel confident and inspire individual accountability. In my opinion, the role of the teacher should be acknowledged in every occasion and as Becta (2001) supported, “design teams should include teachers, with feedback from child evaluator incorporated during development”. Researches have shown that when designing educational games the focus should be set on structure rather than content. In further depth, designers of educational materials should study game characteristics that make them efficacious and popular (Randel et al. 1992). There are three main aspects of games that are considered appropriate for incorporation into educational software; the technological, which contain graphics, sound and interactivity, the narrative, which include a story-line, novelty, curiosity and fantasy and finally the personal aspect which requires logic, memory, mathematical skills and visualization (Becta, 2001). Generally, designers should take note of innovative developments in game design, which may involve new graphical techniques, character and plot development and making the player learn continuously (Kirriemuir, 2002). Also, another important factor when designing an educational game is challenge. Commercial designers make longer and more challenging games instead of keeping them short and simple and this is how the manage success (Gee, 2003). Per Gee, challenge is accomplished when learning is active and critical thus when the images, words and symbols make the system complex.
Additionally, a new design approach named “Edugaming” has advanced and as Fabricatore (2001, p. 16) supports, in edugaming there is “no unnatural barrier separating learning from gaming”. He therefore suggests that teachers should emphasize on how to create a virtual learning environment and an educational game in which the subjects they wish to teach can be embedded with some relevance in terms of the game playing (Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004). This means that all the learning tasks should be noticed by the students as a true element of the game-play and not as a school assignment. Conclusively, educational game designers should keep in mind many significant factors before creating classroom computer games. Prensky (2001) advocates that designers of learning games should ask themselves if the game is fun enough for their target audience, if people regard themselves ‘players’ instead of ‘students’, if the experience is addictive and if the game encourages reflection about what has been taught for successful designing to occur.
Main Body
A. Is representation important?
There is a variety of reasons why the presence, absence or type of depiction of social groups matter in a diverse society, starting from social fairness and power imbalance to reproductions of effects and stereotype development (Williams et al, 2009). Commonly, there are two main arguments for the importance of representation; first, people want to see people like them and second, it is significant that people see people unlike them (Shaw, 2013). The second argument is the educational version and I will analyze further on.
From my point of view, aspects of everyday life and especially the media, keep reminding us that groups or people who appear more often on our screens are more powerful, “vital” and have a greater impact on the rest of the population. For gaming, groups repetitively seen or even seen in certain roles, will begin to be more ‘attractive’ and accessible to the viewer or player (Williams et al, 2009). However, I believe that if a group emerges more in a game than in real life then it is over-represented which has also its negative side. Is there good and bad representation? If yes, what makes a representation good or bad? Is representation important? These questions will be answered in the next few paragraphs.
At first, good representation educates whilst bad representation is harmful. In both cases, there is a sense that researchers and marketers can predict how people identify themselves and how they will place themselves vis-à-vis a given text (through identification), and this is way representation is important (Shaw, 2013). However, to argue that representation is significant, we first must define why and for whom it is noteworthy. Katz’s model for analyzing minority representation directs us to examine whether a text is by, of and for the minority or majority (Dayan, 1998). Discussions and researches connect the lack of portrayal of sidelined groups in computer games to the fact that creators of such games are not members of these groups. Thus, these researches argue that if the industry used a wider definition of their audience and respected pluralism, then more diverse representation would follow (Shaw, 2013). This point takes us back to the beginning of my essay, where I thoroughly supported that nowadays not everyone respects diversity; a fact that asks great impact on gaming as well. In my opinion, media representation is essential, but in what ways depends fundamentally on the researcher’s point of view. However, there is a general assumption that representation is mainly desired and important to people who derive from marginalized groups and minorities, because they care about representation of the people and identifiers who contribute to their marginalization (Shaw, 2013).
In addition, the importance of representation is not just an issue of whether people find it vital or not. It is the distinction between realism and fiction, between play and serious which form the greatest divides between the people who regard diversity in representation as an obligatory goal and the ones who find it rather trivial (Shaw, 2013). The argument I used at the beginning of this section saying that people need to see people like them, leads to pluralism and globalization. This is happening for when players find similarities with the game characters and realize that this is the only ‘natural’ model that should be promoted, diversity is far from being understood and respected.
On the other hand, it is commonly accepted that identification and representation are purely not equally important for everybody.