The Family Center on Technology and Disability

Computer games delight and distract kids – and occasionally infuriate parents and teachers – but some games actually aim to encourage students to think about their world and their place in it. That latter category encompasses epistemic games. Epistemic what? Epistemic games. Derived from epistemology – the study of knowledge -- epistemic games remain a largely unknown element in the growing gaming universe. But they have already carved out a small niche well worth examining: technology-based games that help young players, including those with disabilities, assume the perspective of a specific group of individuals, including attorneys, doctors and urban planners, among others. The objective of epistemic games is to teach players how to problem-solve like real-world individuals and, in the process, develop creative and innovative ways of thinking.

Although epistemic games can be text-heavy and require reading skills, according to epistemic game theorist and creator David Williamson Shaffer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they have attracted players for whom English is a second language as well as other children who are on the autism spectrum. “Certainly if a child has a learning difference that hinders reading ability, he/she would experience limitations in playing,” Dr. Shaffer concedes. However, he adds, “Other than the obvious generalization that kids who have better academic preparation to begin with and have better social and communicative skills will do better at a game like this than kids who don’t, we haven’t seen anyone drop off due to a learning difference, cultural background or any other factor.”

Dr. Shaffer and his colleague, James Paul Gee, create games that have been played by students from fourth grade to early college and occasionally even graduate school, although the researchers say they tend to target middle school and early high school students “in part because those are the years when kids are especially impressionable. If you want to get them enthusiastic about a certain profession, or more generally, about technology and the role that science and technology play in their lives, that’s a good time to catch them. When a student is a junior or senior in high school those attitudes tend to become more brittle.”

The games themselves, Dr. Shaffer notes, have no winners or losers. “In part that’s because these games are built by examining how professionals in the real world are trained and then making those same experiences available to kids for whom acquiring those experiences might too expensive or take too long or be too dangerous. We’d likely focus on winning and losing if winning and losing had an impact on kids’ motivation, but so far that doesn’t seem to play a significant role.” 

According to Dr. Shaffer, “there’s precedent for our posture in the world of computer games specifically and games in general. With a classic role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons, for example, there is little sense of winning or losing. Players can progress in the game. They can become better at what they do. They can acquire more skills, for example, but players don’t necessarily win at some point. In that sense, epistemic games are role-playing games.”

David Williamson Shaffer, Ph.D. Speaks
Today, Dr. Shaffer is on the cutting edge of epistemic game development and theory and is studying how new technologies change the way individuals think and learn. Getting there, however, required an educational and geographic journey. Before assuming his current position as professor of learning science at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer was a teacher, a teacher-trainer, a curriculum developer and a game designer, acquiring classroom experience by teaching grades 4-12 in the U.S. and overseas, including two years with the Asian Development Bank and the U.S. Peace Corps in Nepal. 

“My first year of teaching I taught history,” he recalls. “I’d been a history major in college and was teaching high school students. It wasn’t just that they didn’t have the background knowledge they needed or that they were or weren’t motivated. What struck me is that they had no idea what it meant to think like a historian. They envisioned a historian as someone who memorized dates, names and causes.”

In fact, he recalls, “I didn’t care about historical facts. I wanted students to understand that a historian’s perspective was a way of thinking. I realized that part of the mismatch we have in this nation’s education system is that students and others have cartoon views of what professional disciplines are like. For example, we don’t actually teach kids to think like a real scientist in science class. In English we seem to teach the kids how to write essays for literary publications.”

He came to the epiphanous conclusion, he says, “that there is a lack of authenticity that has evolved over time, despite the good intentions and hard work of teachers and administrators. What followed from that realization on my part has been a series of attempts to provide the tools to make education more about a focus on real-world thinking, which can include academic subjects.” 

The push to expose students to real-world thought is the driving force behind his study of epistemic games, he says. “In a fast-changing world the establishment of a higher level of authenticity in education can be beneficial for teachers and students – and for the nation -- given the economic conditions that we face now and will continue to face in the future.”  
 
Dr. Shaffer earned a Masters degree and a Ph.D. from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has taught in the Technology and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written numerous articles on epistemic games and is the author of a book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006 http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Games-Help-Children-Learn/dp/1403975051).
 Supporting our interview with Dr. Shaffer are resources related to computer games in general and epistemic games in particular. We also feature members of our Knowledge Net¬work. We invite you to contact these mem¬bers for further information. Please share this newsletter with other organizations, families and professionals who may benefit from it. We invite you to visit us at http://www.fctd.info. We welcome feedback, new members and all who contribute to our growing knowledge base.
 

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We’ve been Looking Where the Light Is Good”:
Using Epistemic Games to Help Change the Education Paradigm in the Digital Era
 

An Interview with Epistemic Games Creator and Theorist David Williamson Shaffer, Ph.D.
 

“Our argument,” he declares, “is that we should not be building games for learning; we should be building games for assessment.” Such an approach, he insists, “creates conditions under which the system moves in an appropriate direction.”

Having said that, he emphasizes, “there is no blame involved in the sense that the field of researchers and practitioners has had to spend some time determining what good learning with technology looks like in order to talk about what and how to assess. The time has come to make that shift. If we don’t, I think the window of opportunity will have closed for us.”

So far, he declares, many educators who study technology – “and I include myself in their number” – have focused their attention on answering the question, ‘How do we as educators use new technology to create better learning environments?’

“We’ve been looking where the light is good. In taking that approach, however, what we’ve neglected is the fact that we’re still assessing in the same way. Unless we change our approach there is only so much progress we can make in creating good learning environments because not only is there no way to measure what we most care about, there is also no way to demonstrate progress on the dimensions of learning that matter most.”

Core of the Research
The core of Dr. Shaffer’s ongoing research, he explains, is an examination of those dimensions, i.e., the ways in which individuals in a global economy and an interconnected world devise innovative solutions to complex problems.

“What young people need in order to succeed is the ability to think in new and creative ways about complex problems in an epoch in which a standardized approach to skill acquisition and problem-solving continues to remain dominant in the nation’s schools.  Fortunately, there are many examples of non-standardized problem-solving all around us among professionals. Young people ought to be exposed to these examples. Epistemic games can help provide that exposure.”

Doctors, attorneys, architects, engineers and journalists, among other professionals “operate in environments that are generically called professional practica,” Dr. Shaffer says. “These individuals solve problems but then step back from their solutions and reflect on their approach; they talk with peers and mentors about what worked, what failed and why.” The objective of epistemic games, he emphasizes, is to recreate that experience of innovative problem-solving and reflection.

To be successful, his epistemic approach requires two critical components: the presence of individuals to serve as mentors – and assessment. “We’re working on trying to build the sophistication into the computer game to provide the kind of feedback that’s necessary. The system is effective when players have access to live mentors, to real people who provide players with feedback. We’re collecting a large database of that information so that we can include some of that feedback in the computerized segment of the game, which makes it easier for parents and teachers to supervise and assess.”

“Assessment: The Tail that Wags the Instruction Dog”
Dr. Shaffer wants to make it clear that standards and accountability are not his enemy. “I have no problems with standards or with an accountability system or with assessment. The issue is not that schools, teachers and kids are held accountable; the issue is that the wrong kinds of tests are still being used to establish the context for a conversation about standards and accountability.  This is why we believe that the work Jim Gee and I are doing with assessment via epistemic games is important.

“The reason that children are tested on basic facts and basic skills is because that’s what we have done for the past 100 years and for now that’s all we know how to do in a standardized way.  However, with games we have an incredible opportunity, because games are standardized experiences. Everybody who opens a box or who connects to a game website gets the same game. By monitoring what kids do during a game we can measure the extent to which they are engaged in real-world problem-solving thinking, thereby obtaining an assessment that actually tracks what we ought to be assessing: whether or not the players are able to engage in complex problem-solving.”  

Assessments, he continues, “are the tail that wags the instruction dog. If assessments are about basic facts and basic skills, then the instruction will reflect that emphasis. If, on the other hand, assessments are actually about complex problem-solving of the kind people are engaged in the real world, then the instruction will reflect that emphasis instead. Games should be constructed to be used as assessments. My colleague Jim Gee and I just finished a paper that will be on our website in a few days making exactly this point:”  

Although much learning occurs during an epistemic game, he explains, the game creators’ objective is to link the learning with an assessment system that informs the creator/researcher about the players’ effectiveness in emulating the thinking of a professional.  

Says Dr. Shaffer: “We told the teachers, schools and districts we work with that at the end of the first year of epistemic game-playing students would be judged on their level of effectiveness in real-world problem-solving. We tested the students by giving them a specific scenario of a game to play.”

This approach to assessment, he continues, “activates the same apparatus used to drill kids on basic facts and basic skills except that when employed in an epistemic games format it instead teaches students to think in sophisticated ways.  We can actually watch the development of a way of thought derived from journalism, architecture or engineering, for example, as players participate in the game.”

If a full flight of games in which students emulate a range of professionals were to be made available in school districts, he insists, “the school system would be re-oriented in a way that would measure and account for components valued in a 21st century society in the digital era.”          

Looking Forward, Glancing Backward: Research Role Models
In his research on the relationship between games and education, Dr. Shaffer admits to a paucity of role models. “There wasn’t much of a research base. Yet many of the questions we address in our research have existed since the beginning of our current education system.”

Like so many modern educators, he names John Dewey as a role model. “When he was writing 100 years ago, Dewey tackled many of these same issues in education that still vex us and posed solutions similar to those I and others have recommended.”

Donald Schon (http://the-tech.mit.edu/~richmond/professional/jplschon.pdf), a former MIT professor, also wins Dr. Shaffer’s praise. “Schon began studying professional practices and the training of professionals in the 1970s ands 1980s. Jim Gee has been writing for several years about computers, computer games and video games in education and has been a major contributor to the knowledge base.”

What’s especially unique about this moment in time, Dr. Shaffer says, “is that the work that has come before – there’s been a lot of it and much of it has been very good – on problem-based learning, on kids learning to think in sophisticated ways, on kids engaged in extended projects – all of those efforts have suffered from a technological limitation: there were good ideas but the technology to implement them on any reasonable scale did not yet exist.”

He cites an early example that served as a template for the technology-challenged efforts that would follow through the decades.  “One hundred twenty years ago at the Cook County (IL) Normal School, Dewey’s predecessor Francis Parker developed a system of reading and writing instruction in which the older students – fifth graders – created pieces of writing that the younger students – first and second graders – would read as their primers. There were benefits for each group: the older kids were involved in writing for a real audience; the younger kids were reading authentic text. In order to make this system work a printing press was constructed in the basement of the school so the writing of the older kids could be printed. When I was in high school we actually had a printing press in the basement. I took printing as one of my art classes. I spent a semester typesetting one haiku. The same thing happened 120 years ago: the technological overhead of translating what had been written by the older kids and printing it for the younger students overwhelmed the project.”

Now, he continues, “the notion that a technological limitation would stop us from having older students write authentic text for younger kids is almost laughable. Their writing could be done and viewed on the web and nothing would have to be printed.”

Similar technological limitations, he points out, have hamstrung other attempts by educators to seek other methods of learning and assessment. “The power of computers is that they let us create simulations. The power of a game is that it lets the players live in a simulated world. Game designers can build worlds of adventure. We can build worlds of violence – we probably do too much of that – but what we can do with games is build worlds where players have an opportunity to engage with the same kinds of problems and learn to think in the same kinds of ways as  real-world professionals. These initiatives that were once too dangerous, too expensive or too difficult for middle school students to do are suddenly easy in the virtual world.”

Now, thanks to technology, “the ideas originated by John Dewey and readdressed by Donald Schon and others become much more practical in our education system. From here on our task as educators is to determine how best to persuade our schools to take advantage of the power of technology to make these good ideas real.”

Epistemic Games and Students with Disabilities
Although epistemic games appear to favor academically advanced students, Dr. Shaffer sees a clear benefit for students with disabilities as well.

“One of the advantages of epistemic games is that they are deliberately designed to connect kids with experiences of the kind that they might have in the real world. That’s especially useful for children with disabilities because much of their developmental challenge lies is figuring out what direction they want to go in given their own personalities and limitations.

“These games give kids with disabilities and those who work with them – occupational and speech/language and physical therapists and others -- an opportunity to see the kinds of activities the children might like and be proficient at as well as the activities they might not enjoy or that might have a higher degree of difficulty for them due to their individual issues.”

Unfortunately, he cautions, “Jim and I have to do some work on our end to make sure the platform for the games, and the games themselves, require less infrastructure to operate. In the short run this means finding brokering organizations that are willing to partner closely with us to provide bridging resources between practitioners in the field and the work that we are doing.”

The best example of such a brokering organization, he says, is the Massachusetts Audubon Society, his current main partner. The society, he explains, maintains several nature sanctuaries in Massachusetts and operates after-school programs for kids at the society’s nature sanctuaries and on-site in schools. .

The society collaborates with after-school centers to devise hybrid programs. “The Audubon Society possesses much expertise at bringing appropriate educational programming to these audiences, which permits us to take advantage of their expertise in the best possible sense so that our technologies can become part of that programming.”

In special education, he concedes “I don’t know yet what the comparable organization would be but I believe that if we had an organization that had connections similar to Audubon Society’s but instead in the special education world, that that organization would be an effective partner for us.”          

Differentiated Instruction and Games Research
With children in special education programs now being integrated into general education classrooms, differentiated instruction has become a high profile issue not only for teachers, children and parents but also for cutting-edge games researchers like Dr. Shaffer and Dr. Gee.    

“This is a challenge that we have been considering very closely, not specifically in terms of kids with special needs but generically in terms of differentiation. If one thinks about work in a professional context – which is what our games do – work is done collaboratively.  There’s an expectation that team members playing the game will work together and that the team needs to move forward in a way that brings all team members along.

“Using the cohort model, there are a couple of ways in which epistemic games are potentially beneficial in differentiation. One is that it’s not difficult to provide differential access to resources. When a student is struggling on a dimension there is the opportunity to detect the struggle and then provide extra help in a specific area.

“The other advantage to the cohort model is that it allows players to play to their strength. If a student is working on a final proposal as part of a team, the student may find that he/she is better at illustration, for example, than at writing the text but the team members must still work together. In other words, the student is working in an area where he/she is strong but is able to connect with the idea that the other team members are working with. We’ve seen that happen often in these games.

“Differentiation is one of the most difficult challenges in the practice of education. Anything that increases the range of differentiation across which a person or a system must work makes it more challenging. In that sense, kids who are substantially ahead of grade level are just as challenging from a differentiation standpoint as kids with special needs who need accommodations. The onus isn’t on either group. Differentiation, not the kids, is the challenge. It has rewards in the sense that we know that there are many benefits to working with kids who are not exactly at pace.

“As game designers we face a challenge similar to that faced by any designer of curriculum or good instruction in adapting to differentiation. There are advantages and disadvantages to the particular approach we are taking, but the issue of differentiation never goes away – nor does the opportunity.”

Technology Makes It Easier
As technology becomes more sophisticated, Dr. Shaffer emphasizes, pioneering projects and concepts become easier to implement in classrooms because schools are better equipped with appropriate technology. “Not long ago there was a big push nationally to ‘wire’ every school,” he recalls. “Only later did we realize that the push was meaningless because the technology had become wireless.  Today we take for granted that students have access to a fair number of web-connected computers at school whereas 15 years ago those machines were not available in sufficient numbers at many schools.”

The evolution of technology since then “of course makes our job as technology-based educators easier. For example, Jim and I now do all of our development for the web, which means that no local installation is necessary. All that’s needed is a machine that has reasonably open access to the Internet, which at some schools is occasionally an issue. This also means that when we reach the day when schools can reliably count on Internet access outside of school, students will be able to play the games as homework.

“One of the big shifts we’ve made is to be as technologically open as possible in the work that we do.  The most significant restriction issue to be overcome in that regard is systemic, not technological. By that I mean that there are all kinds of structures in place within our schools and our after-school programs. There are expectations about who is going to be where, when, and for how long and organized in what ways. All of those represent tremendous constraints that can hamper the evolution of change.”  

In fact, he emphasizes, systemic constraint – not technological or student limitations -- is the most significant issue confronting him and Dr. Gee when they collaborate with schools or with after-school programs.  He offers an example:
“We’re doing a pilot test now in an after-school program in Massachusetts. From our past research we’ve learned that epistemic games do not work well in a drop-in program. When there are six weeks of work – two hours each week – kids can’t just show up only when they want because that’s not the way a real urban planner, for example, operates. Therefore, we’re very explicit with the teachers and students with whom we collaborate. They assure us they have ‘consistency.’ Three of the kids in our urban planning pilot game changed their after-school schedules so they are out of the pilot. Another student was able to be there for only part of the day but signed up anyway. That’s OK. It’s not a criticism of the program, but it’s the sense that suddenly there’s a disconnect between the way an institution operates and the way we have to operate in order to use this specific technology effectively.”

“Thinking Is Conditioned by Technology”
Must technology accommodate the unchanging ways that humans process information or are children now learning differently due to the technology to which they are now exposed? According to Dr. Shaffer, “there is no doubt that the ways in which we think are conditioned in part by the technologies we use.”

There is now much evidence of neuroplasticity, he says. “Our brains are continually wiring and rewiring themselves in response to the type of stimuli they receive, for example, the things we do, the things we think about, the problems we solve and what we see. All of those factors alter the wiring of our neural network. Computers provide exposure to experiences that are not possible without computer technology. Constant connectivity is one example; the ability to engage in what-if scenarios, the ability to edit text rapidly a la Microsoft Word, the ability to create numerical models and test them. These are experiences that didn’t exist 40-50 years ago. Even if they did exist they did not exist on the current scale.

“It’s clear that the tools that we possess provide different experiences. More important, though, our possession and implementation of these tools has changed our criteria for what is worth learning. There is less and less justification for spending five years of kids’ mathematical lives learning to perform the same tasks a 99-cent calculator can perform.”

He is not arguing, he says, “that kids don’t have to learn basic arithmetic. Of course they do. But 50 years ago we spent a lot of time teaching long division. I suspect that if a national poll were to be taken of the number of adults who in the last year had carried out long division by hand the number would be startlingly small.  

“Not only is technology providing new experiences, it is making some of the old experiences that our schools are focused on obsolete. Consequently, the entire landscape of learning has been changed dramatically by technology.  Educators must find ways to adapt and take advantage of that landscape. We persist in our old ways at our grave peril.”

“There Has to Be a Star to Steer by”
“Our approach to research has been very deliberate: to try to create best-case scenarios,” Dr. Shaffer notes. “As in any project of navigation, there has to be a star to steer by. There has to be a sense of where one is trying to get to. Otherwise the researcher has no good guidance about which direction to take at any given time. By using these best-case scenarios, we‘ve been focusing on building a way of understanding what we can do under good conditions.”

His next step, he says, “is to take what we’ve learned and put it in forms that may be less ideal but that are more accessible on a broader scale, that don’t require the same infrastructure that we currently use in order to test best cases. We’ve moved a long way in that direction in terms of our web–based development. We’ve introduced non-player, computer generated characters to our games. The assessment system we’re working on is not only effective at discerning players’ progress but is also helping the computer system itself to steer players toward the resources we need.”  

He and Dr. Gee plan to continue to partner with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, as well as with other organizations that work with schools, and with after-school programs, to provide enrichment activities “and to put the materials we’re developing into the hands of individuals who function as brokers between the work we’re doing and parents, teachers and others in the community who want to be able to use them.”

Ultimately, he acknowledges, “we’d like teachers to have the ability to go to the website and say, ‘I’d like to play,’ connect to the website and sign on. We’re not at that stage yet but, ultimately, that’s where we want to be.”

Epistemic Games: Their Look and Feel

Currently, Dr. Shaffer is guiding a group of students through an epistemic game involving urban science. Urban science, he explains, “is an example of an epistemic game in that the players learn to solve problems as an urban planner would solve them, and learn to think about problems as an urban planner thinks about them”.

In the urban science game, Dr. Shaffer says, the players become urban and regional planners. ”In essence, the players are interns at an urban and regional planning firm that has been asked to weigh in with a management plan for a local watershed.

“The players access a virtual site where they meet individuals in a given community who have different concerns about the plan in question and who advocate for various activities within the city and region.

“As these individuals talk about their respective interests, the players of the game try to understand not only the social issues but also the underlying environmental, economic and scientific forces that are in play.  

“The students then construct an urban planner’s tool called a preference survey in which they use information software and the same practices that urban planners engage in to understand more deeply how the city and its systems work. They use models in which they’re able to change parameters and land use and see how those changes impact the issues that people in the community care about.

“The players are also able to use preference surveys and tentative plans to gather additional information from the proposed project’s stakeholders about what those stakeholders care about in their region. The players use the gathered information to produce a final proposal, which includes their plan for land use as well as the justifications and background information to support it.”  The submission of a proposal concludes the game.

During the game, he explains, players benefit from their interactions with characters in the game, including community residents, co-workers at the firm and mentors. These individuals, who are experienced  in urban planning, answer players’ questions, ask questions of the players and help the players step back from the intricacies of the game in order to better understand what works, what didn’t work and why.”

What research shows about complex problem-solving in the real world, Dr. Shaffer notes, “is that interaction between activity and reflection is what turns playing the game into knowledge that transfers outside of the game.”

RESOURCES
 

ARTICLES

Epistemic Games Working Paper 2010-01
The Bicycle Helmets of “Amsterdam”: Computer Games and the Problem of Transfer
By David Williamson Shaffer
University of Wisconsin (2010)
According to Dr. Shaffer, any discussion of games and learning has to address a fundamental question: How do we know that players aren’t just learning how to play the game? That is, can players’ game performance help them do other things in the world around them, the world outside of the game? Answering such questions, he notes, forces the responder to step on the “third rail in the study of learning today: the problem of transfer.” No term, no word, no concept is as problematic, as debated, as contentious, Dr. Shaffer declares. But the problem of transfer, he insists, is “unavoidable in a field that examines the conditions under which, and the processes by which, people learn.”
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/technical-report-Bikehelmet.pdf


Learning from Epistemic Games
By Av Magnus Hontvedt, Cathrine Tømte and Hans Christian Arnseth
ITU (2010)
The authors speculate that epistemic games might provide learning environments that students find motivating, foster the development of transferable skills and competencies and facilitate the development of students’ deeper understanding of important disciplinary domains. The authors urge more research on how games are introduced into institutional settings including how they can be integrated with or used to change schools’ assessment practices and teachers’ scaffolding of students’ learning.  

In Nordic countries, the authors note, collaborative project work has been an important part of children’s education for many decades. Norway’s national curriculum encourages teachers to engage students in project work in which they examine a loosely defined problem from multidisciplinary angles. Epistemic games, the authors claim, represent ways of orchestrating learning environments where students work in groups to solve complex and ill-defined problems by engaging in actual activities such as building a house or designing a city. Until now, they note, epistemic games have mainly been implemented outside of formal schooling.
http://www.itu.no/Learning+from+epistemic+games.9UFRnGYy.ips


Evidence-Centered Design of Epistemic Games: Measurement Principles for Complex Learning Environments
By Andre A. Rupp, Matthew Gushta, Robert J. Mislevy and David Williamson Shaffer
Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative; Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment (January 2010)
The authors discuss the development of the means to assess 21st century skills via epistemic games.  They define epistemic games as “designed to give learners the rich experience of professional practica within a discipline. They serve to develop domain-specific expertise based on principles of collaborative learning, distributed expertise, and complex problem-solving.”  

This paper describes a comprehensive research program for investigating the methodological challenges that await rigorous inquiry within the epistemic games context. The authors specifically demonstrate how the evidence-centered design framework as well as current conceptualizations of reliability and validity theory can be used to structure the development of epistemic games as well as empirical research into their functioning. They discuss the numerous decisions that need to be made during game development and their implications for amassing qualitative and quantitative evidence about learners’ developing expertise within epistemic games.  This resource is perhaps of greatest interest to researchers and game developers.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1223&context=jtla


Before Every Child Is Left Behind: How Epistemic Games Can Solve the Coming Crisis in Education
By David Williamson Shaffer and James Paul Gee
University of Wisconsin-Madison; Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory (2005)
Epistemic games of all kinds, the authors claim, make it possible for students of all ages to learn by working as innovators. In playing epistemic games, students learn basic skills. They learn the “facts” and “content” that we currently reward. But in epistemic games students learn facts and content in the context of innovative ways of thinking and working. They learn in a way that sticks, because they learn in the process of doing things that matter, the authors allege.  Epistemic games, they say, provide educators with “a new model of learning for a digital culture and a global economy.”
http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/learning_crisis.pdf


Learning with Computer Games and Simulations
CITEd.org Research Center (2006)
This article serves as an information resource for educators considering the introduction of computer gaming into a classroom environment. The authors discuss some of the ways in which games and simulations can aid students with and without disabilities in their understanding of science and improving reading skills. The article provides an overview of relevant research (in teacher-friendly language) and links to several computer-based games.   
http://www.cited.org/index.aspx?page_id=143


Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Enhance Your Child’s Learning and Health
Joan Ganz Cooney Center (2009)
This article suggests ways that games help children learn healthy behaviors, traditional skills such as reading and math, and 21st-century strengths such as critical thinking, global learning, and programming design. The authors state that investment in research-based digital games might play a cost-effective and transformative role and provides steps for developers, government, educational institutions and legislators to follow in order to harness the appeal of digital games to improve children’s health and learning.
http://www.joananzcooneycenter.org/pdf/Game_Changer_FINAL.pdf


WEBSITES

Assistive Gaming: Making Mac OS X Games Accessible
Assistiveware (2008)
The Assistive Gaming website offers information and resources for gamers with physical disabilities. The site includes game reviews, articles about computer gaming and accessible gaming tools and news related to accessible gaming. The list of resource links also includes popular gaming sites. Although the site focuses on the Mac OS X, most of the access issues that concern gamers are common to both PC and Mac platforms.
http://www.assistivegaming.com/
 
Game Classroom
Earlier Media (2009)
This site provides access to a wide range of math and language arts games for grades K-6.  Some of the games may be adapted for cooperative learning.  Helpful newsletters are provided, grouped by grade level.  The site has  intuitive navigation.
http://www.gameclassroom.com/

Autism Games
Games on this site, which feature strong social components, are designed for children with autism. The site includes print and video instructions and the games are organized by level of difficulty and learning objectives. http://www.gameclassroom.com/www.gameclassroom.com/