Leaders and Innovators
Below I've posted some of the leaders in game-based learning, including James Paul Gee, Jane McGonigal, and Katie Salen. I have also included several sub-sections that you might be interested in checking out:
Jane McGonigal
- Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
James Paul Gee
- Games and 21st Century Learning: This talk will explore how video games can organize deep conceptual understanding, as well as a variety of 21st century skills rarely offered in schools today. Gee will discuss the different learning theories that underlie different approaches to games for learning. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.
- (Note: Gee's introduction is really quiet, but it gets louder when Gee comes out)
Paul Anderson
- Science teacher Paul Anderson says video games teach kids that failure is okay — that it’s part of the learning process. “Trying something, failing, trying something again, that’s something we aspire to see in kids,” he says. So he created a class around the premise of a video game — without a video game. Anderson honestly talks about what worked and what didn’t.
Gabe Zichermann
- Can playing video games make you more productive? Gabe Zichermann shows how games are making kids better problem-solvers, and will make us better at everything from driving to multi-tasking.
Katie Salen
- Salen is a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design. She is also an executive director at the Institute of Play, and the founder of the Quest to Learn school (see Campaigns, Movements, and Interest Groups Page). Here she talks about the value of games and the empowerment of play.
Ali Carr-Chellman
- Ali Carr-Chellman spells out three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.