I was very impressed by the presentation given by James Laurie and Mary Ann Mengel. It was a thorough presentation and showed both their implementation and research before starting the process.

One resource that I need to read is The Gamification of Learning & Instruction. Just added it to my google book library to read.   

Based upon their reading and research, James and Mary Ann mapped their learning objectives. I noticed that their objectives were found on higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Definitely an idea to adopt.

A great point made by Mary Ann was that games work great for situations where there are multiple factors. In this example, there were several factors that influenced profit. Making a game was a great way for students to study the effect of these factors in a way that they were able to make choices or be at the whim of circumstances in order to better understand the concepts presented.

As James and Mary Ann spoke, I could tell that there were many team members involved Team approach, constantly checking with multiple experts to make sure the game made sense. They also shared their timeline.

It took awhile to get this going, and that is because of all of the additional responsibilities that each team member had to accomplish besides this project. Also, they were handling the whole process from scratch. It would be nice if we had more easily accessible templates in an engine that we could leverage to cut down the timeline.

As I mentioned earlier, the team working on this project did much analysis and design based upon research. Here is a slide that they shared about their analysis and design.

 

 

With the proper ground work and team established. They were able to move into storyboarding. Here are a few slides on storyboarding.

It may be difficult to see, but this above slide starts the process of determining scenarios for the game. It lists different cases for round 1 and reasons for decreases in sales price.

Once an overall storyboard and ideas have been developed, it is time to drill down into each component. This is a slide on storyboarding for round 1.

Here is another slide, this time for round 2 of the game.

Mary Ann talked at length about accessibility. An unanticipated event that happened in the middle of this project was that NFB had filed a complaint against Penn State. This complaint encouraged them to think about how to make the game more accessible. If they would have known about this, they would have taken a different approach from using flash.

 

At the end of the discussion, Mary Ann talked about the benefits of gaming relating to skill sets that matter to workforce and mapped what games help to develop. Here is a slide on game dimension aspects of games. They went into detail on what elements were highlighted in their game.

 

Interesting to think about implementation. Should this be prefaced with instruction or considered as an anticipatory set that will lead to more engagement before introducing a topic. Sounded like the latter worked well this semester.