Tuesday 6 March 2007

Building on my last post

An interesting post to the serious games list from Curtis Conkey that builds on my last post:

"Very interesting article from the "Digital Game Based Learning"
Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium for Information Design -
June 2005 - Stuttgart Media University

If you go to the
http://www.uvka.de/univerlag/frontdoor.php?source_opus=144 you can
download the proceedings.
In the proceedings is a report (page 85) on research being conducted at
the University of Edinburgh by Fiona Littleton, Jeff Haywood and Hamish
Macleod on "Influence of videogame play on a students approach to
learning".

They are researching the proposition that the Digital Game generation
learns fundamentally differently that previous generations due to their
exposure to gaming.

Key finding so far:
1) students who had a low engagement with videogames in their
formative years are currently more organized in their study, as opposed
to students who had a intense engagement with videogames in their
formative years.
2) students who had the intense engagement with videogames in
there formative years exert the least amount of effort in their study,
as compared to students who had a low engagement with videogames in
their formative years.
3) students who had low engagement with videogames in their
formative years reported finding it more difficult to concentrate in
lectures, as opposed to students who had intense engagement with
videogames in their formative years, a key finding that would seem
contrary to US based research ...
4) in relationship to a students willingness to collaborate with
their fellow students, no difference, significant or otherwise, was
found between low gamers and high gamers.

The study was conducted on 1239 fulltime, undergraduate students at
University of Edinburgh.
Rest of the statistical details are in the report which you can
download. It's a quick 14 page read.

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