Monthly Archives: February 2014

Reflection 02/17/14-02/21/14

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I’m back to my reflections. It’s been awhile for several reasons:

  • My position changed, and I am slowly but surely adjusting to my new role. I have a new program that I’m working with, and it has been a bit of a learning curve for me to get adjusted to how it works
  • The old format for my reflections was based upon me writing about my everyday tasks. I want to get away from this since I would rather have a more succinct recounting of where I am instead of having all of these items listed
  • I’m tiring of blogging to myself

As I think about the week and what I am learning and where I am at, I can’t help of think of how much has changed for me in such a short period of time. In the time that I have been at Penn State, I have changed positions once and now I’m moving into a similar but more complex role. I can’t help but feel a bit overwhelmed by the new responsibilities. But it is incredibly exciting thinking about the people that I work with and the things that I’m doing. I am so glad that I made the jump from K-12 math instruction to the world of Instructional Design (Learning Design). I am really liking the variety of roles that I am undertaking. I am an instructional designer, project manager, personnel manager, instructor, mentor, and teammate. Most importantly, I am a student. I need to learn and grow in each of my roles. This has been one of the difficult parts of my transition, I have become used to my old role and in many ways comfortable. Now, I am being challenged to grow and learn more about things that I just don’t have the background, skills, and experience to accomplish in a satisfactory way. I am also challenged by being in a place where others are looking to me officially to give them direction. It’s easy to think that you can do this easily. But I am quickly finding that this is not as easy as it seems.

Well, that’s enough for now. Hopefully, over the next several weeks, I’ll continue to reflect on where I’m at and where I’m going.

Gaming Brown Bag: Interactive Fiction

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It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged for several reasons that I won’t go into here. But I’m hoping to get back to this. Today, I attended a session by Brett Bixler on Interactive Fiction (IF). I felt like I was going back into the history before graphic and media intensive text-based games. Brett laid out the progression as well as showed us tools that can be used to create these games. Let’s start with a definition of IF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction. During the session we played a classic game called Adventure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction#Adventure.  It was an interesting exercise to talk with the group and try to figure out what we should do next. There was a prompt and we could use a terse sentence to direct the game on where we wanted to go. Later we played a game that Brett had put together using the following site: http://textadventures.co.uk/. Many of the engines that Brett proposed using are free. Sometimes, it is necessary to download free software to create games. Other times, it is possible to work in the browser. Here are a few suggested tools from the talk:

After Brett went through the meat of the content, he challenged us to think about how we could apply this to courses. Here were some thoughts:

  • Language learning
  • Scavenger hunts
  • Ways to teach elements of a game
  • Interesting way to teach a concept like surgery
  • Diagnostics – detective work
  • Problem-based learning
  • Simulations

Ultimately, this a low-cost way to introduce games and allow for them to get in the hands of students. Definitely something worth pursuing further.