Listen to the full interview with Dr. DeVane below. Subscribe to Excelsior Life: Distance Education on Demand.
By Mike Lesczinski, Excelsior Life News Staff--
Although passionate about the idea of education, as a child Dr. Ben DeVane never liked school, in particular classes built around memorization. Instead he preferred exploring the worlds found in contemporary computer games like Oregon Trail and Civilization.
It wasn’t until he earned a degree in computer science and accepted a job with an afterschool program using games to teach history and other subjects did DeVane realize the potential of gaming as an educational tool.
Following the program, DeVane went back to school to study for his doctorate, eventually becoming assistant professor of digital arts and science at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. Today, his research focuses on the design of ‘serious games’ and game-based learning environments and how they can be used to solve public health, environmental science and financial literacy problems.
Gaming Against Plagiarism, which is funded by National Science Foundation, is one such project. The game focuses on research ethics and plagiarism – a growing problem within the academic and science fields as the opportunity to cheat grows in parallel with technological advancement.
Institutions are now becoming mandated to offer ethics training, but the current learning process is flawed, says DeVane.
“This training often ends up not being very fun, it’s often not very challenging…” said the professor, noting that most are lecture-based power points.
Gaming Against Plagiarism, based on a board-game model similar to traditional games e.g. Shoots and Ladders, is divided into three individual sections each focusing on different aspects of academic research, plagiarism, and ethical conduct. As players work to secure a research grant, as they do in Cheats and Geeks, or act as an Ethics Detective in Murky Misconduct, they are presented with complex scenarios to test their knowledge and ethical problem solving and learn the extent to which plagiarism impacts not only them but their institution.
The games act to differentiate short-term and long-term outcomes too. For instance, as I played Cheats and Geeks I took a short-cut, in this case a single instance of data fabrication, and was still able to secure the research grant. However, my “win” was short-lived. The hammer soon came down in the form of a story in the local paper about my misconduct and the ensuring reputational damage to my institution.
“What we are trying to do,” said DeVane, “is give a safe space to learn about plagiarism and learn the consequences of plagiarism.”
The games themselves are homage to famous video games of the past. Frenetic Filing has the look of an 8-bit Atari game, while Murky Misconduct feels like Carmen San Diego. These aesthetics tap into emotions and help keep the player engaged.
While DeVane is focusing his time currently on ethics, there are many more problems to explore.
“We don’t make games to just make games. We want games that solve real problems and address them in a meaningful way.”
The gaming process is equally intriguing in itself. First, designers like DeVane identify a problem. Together, their teams develop rough models – prototypes of games based on certain principles – and pilot the environments to their intended audiences. The focus group will discuss the issues surrounding the games, evaluate the “fun” aspects, and provide feedback on the learning process. This information helps the design team adapt the game before the next focus group, and so on and so forth, until a final version is reached.
“Game layers in the classroom, or digital computer games, or even role-playing games, each has its place in the dialogue with education,” said DeVane. “The purpose is to engage (the student) on their level.”
To listen to the full thirty-minute interview with Excelsior Life, in which DeVane discusses a variety of topics, from the ability of games to foster essential skills such as computational thinking to the role games can play to recruiting and retaining more women to the STEM fields, listen below.
To watch the livestream of Excelsior’s upcoming May 17 symposium, “Games and the Curriculum: Towards a New Educational Model” visit our Excelsior Life events page.
The moment Kate Elder received her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree this past July, it marked the culmination of an improbable journey for the Cobleskill, New York teacher. She is, after all, a civil engineer by trade – someone who looked towards Silicon Valley after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
