Tag Archive for: gaming

Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Games for Muslim Appreciation, Emotional Intelligence, Diversity and Masterbation

/in /by

globaloria-overview-10-728Gaming holds huge money-making potential for crony capitalists as they seek to capture an $8 billion-textbook publishing industry and transform all textbooks into video game format. For the U.S. Department of Education and progressive educators gaming promises to end “achievement gaps” and to transform students into social change agents.

Games of challenge involving fighting, racing, or sports once offered young males a release valve to hours of stultifying political correctness and feminine modes of teaching in schools. Now educational games will impose politically correct lessons.  As the Games for Change event revealed, game developers, with financial support from the Department of Education, are producing games that provide lessons on Muslim cultural appreciation, bullying, slavery, Native American culture–and masturbation.

Such politically correct games are being promoted by politically connected people, such as the “powerhouse couple” of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (as they were introduced). They produced the celebrity-studded PBS documentary (and accompanying game), Half the Sky, about women who hold up “half the sky” globally.  Kristof claimed that such entertainment can change behavior by closing the “empathy gap,” which is at the root of racial and gender biases.

The couple praised the Department of Education’s early childhood education efforts. Kristof explained that this redirection to the “zero to five” age range came because Common Core is “toxic” and has polarized education reform.  He noted that Obama’s early education initiative was the only one applauded by House Speaker John Boehner at the State of the Union.  Kristof repeated his call for early education in his column the next day, writing, “Education inequity is America’s original sin.”

Ken Weber, Executive Director of Zinga.org and a board member of Games for Change, then introduced Saudi Arabian prince, “HH Prince Fahad Al-Saud,” a technology entrepreneur.  Weber noted that it was not often that he got to introduce a prince, whom he referred to repeatedly as “His Highness.”

The Stanford-educated prince, who spoke without an accent and was dressed like a hip-hop mogul, displayed his familiarity with lessons in academe about the “other,” as he repeated the word in reference to how the West sees the Arab world.

His games, he said, are intended to “build a celebratory narrative about diversity” and to end stereotypes about the Arab world: Osama bin Laden, Aladdin, the “evil and oppressive dictator of the day,” and especially the treatment of women. Claiming that 35 percent of tech entrepreneurs in North Africa and Arabia are women, he took the opportunity to point out gender inequalities in the U.S. While women might experience “movement restrictions” in Saudi Arabia, women in the United States earn less than men, he said.  (He did not specify which “movement restrictions,” but presumably they involve driving a car.)  According to Wikipedia, the prince has two wives, both princesses.

One of his companies, Na3M Games, part of the Arabic Renaissance, aims to develop the “culturally sensitive individual.”   It is operated out of Jordan and Denmark (the latter because it has the largest population of Arabs in the northern European countries).

A 2013 Business Insider article praised Fahad Al-Saud for foregoing the “high life” of a Saudi prince for the life of a “tech entrepreneur and social media evangelist” who had an impact on the Arab Spring uprising.  Most of his start-ups have focused on spreading Arabic culture through games, although he also developed a casino game.  He was quoted as saying, “In 10 years I want to see countries in the Arab world in their rightful place as global leaders and contributors.”  (Later, Rami Ismail, of Vlambeer, also made a pitch about appealing to an Arabic audience.)

Next was the Well Played Series with DePaul professor Doris Rusch.  While some of the games her lab has developed, such as understanding mental illness, seem good, others, for developing “social and emotional intelligence” and dealing with bullying, seem too psychologically invasive for children.  These games “assess” such things as empathy, social skills, impulse control, and cooperation, and are in line with recent efforts to teach social and emotional intelligence, and the Education Department’s focus on “non-cognitive skills.”

The session with Nordic LARP (Live Action Role Play), which originated in the Nordic countries in the late 1990s, continued the theme, as Bjarke Pedersen promoted emotionally “engaging stories” about racism, alienation, and oppression, and Cecilia Dolk likened their game, Celestra about fighting fascism in Europe, with familiar lessons in police violence and attacks on unions and workers rights.  Martin Ericsson of the same group promoted Inside Hamlet as an educational game (in three acts) of the Shakespearean play that has been interpreted in multiple ways, including as a Marxist parable of power.  The company is looking for a place in the U.S.

Michael Gallager, President and CEO of The Entertainment Software Association, as previously described, made an appearance again and waxed enthusiastically about the potential of transforming classrooms.

The “Pitch”

The afternoon featured a “pitch event” for prizes.  Emcee Jesse Schell of Schell Games presented an image of a game-dominated future, where teachers become “dungeon masters,” tracking their students as they play games. Among the five judges were two representatives from U.S. government agencies: Laura Callanan, Senior Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (since November 2014), and Dr. Marc Ruppel, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs.  Ruppel, who holds a Ph.D. in Digital Studies, once worked on sponsor Tribeca Film Festival-funded “Robot Heart Stories,” and held positions at the Maryland Institute in Technology for the Humanities and NASA.  Callanan had been a senior consultant, specializing in “social innovation,” with McKinsey & Company (former employer of Common Core architect David Coleman).

The other judges were Ron Goldman, co-founder and CEO of Kognito, a technology company serving state and federal agencies, and colleges and universities; Carl Robichaud, Program Officer in International Peace and Security at the Carnegie Corporation, focusing on “strengthening nuclear governance”; and Weber, of Zynga.org, a nonprofit that promotes “the use of social games for social impact.”  According to the website, from 2005 to 2011, Weber had been COO of The ONE Campaign, “a global grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization founded by Bono, Bob Geldof, Bobby Shriver and others” that worked “in partnership” with the Gates Foundation (the major funder of Common Core) and international development NGOs for “poverty alleviation and global health issues, particularly in Africa.”

Unsurprisingly, the games pitched advanced the progressive agenda: Thralled is about a runaway slave; Never Alone is about Native culture in Alaska; The Sun Also Rises has nothing to do with Ernest Hemingway or Ecclesiastes, but focuses on the traumas of soldiers in Afghanistan; We Are Chicago “draws from real experiences to give a brief glimpse into the average life of a teenager living in the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago”; and Happy Playtime is “a sex-education game which aims to eliminate the stigma attached to female masturbation.”

Never Alone took away most of the prizes, but Happy Playtime, which has been banned by the Apple App Store, won the $10,000 dollar surprise prize from Schell Games.  Happy Playtime principal Tina Gong told the judges that she wanted girls ages 10 to 16 to know that women’s bodies “belong to themselves.”  She described in sexually explicit terms how points are awarded, and claimed that this game would produce good body image, less unwanted pregnancy, less abuse, and better sex.  Her plans include a multi-player format with data-gathering.

This event received virtually no press coverage.  Other similar events on university campuses and at conference centers have also gone on with little notice.  Game designers are courted with grants from non-profits (aligned with for-profit companies) and federal agencies. All are intertwined.

What they promise is a future of teachers as “Dungeon Masters” tracking students as they navigate games, games whose lessons parents are ignorant of.  Profiting are the techno-gurus, progressive educrats, and a political regime seeing the fruition of a plan to completely transform education.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.

PARENTAL WARNING: Gaming is Coming to America’s Public Schools

/in , /by

The U.S. Department of Education is partnering with the gaming industry to bring their products to the classroom. This effort, like textbooks, can become a billion dollar industry.

If every public school in America integrates gaming into the public school curriculum what will be the positives and negatives?

In her column “Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Crony Capitalists Promote Gaming in the Classroom“, Dr. Mary Grabar writes:

It is true: the technology can offer promising results in many applications, for example in medicine or flight simulation. But the overall thrust [of the U.S. DOE Games for Learning Summit] was that games provide advantages in “cultivating dispositions” – games for “social change,” as the name of the group and festival indicates. As for such subjects as history, one wonders: can we really go back in history, or just the history that the game designer decides to create for us?

[ … ]

One of the reasons for the widespread opposition to Common Core has been the cost of buying new Common Core-aligned textbooks.  But the speakers enthused about replacing textbooks with games, and not only to teach such subjects as science, but also history and civics.  Games would “transform” education, taking the idea of “flipped classrooms,” where students watch videos at home and do homework in class, to a whole new level.  Virtual reality and augmented reality would produce amazing results.

The U.S. DOE Office of Educational Technology website states:

Video games are important learning tools that provide immersive, interactive, and creative spaces for students to learn and explore in the 21st century classroom. The U.S. Department of Education recognizes the proven power of digital games for learning and is committed to fostering the broader adoption of high quality games in schools and informal learning settings.

What are the pros and cons of this growing edu-entertainment complex?

Perhaps it is important to note the Department of Defense experiences since introducing gaming in 2002. In the column “Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games: A new book unfolds how the “military-entertainment complex” entices soldiers to war and treats them when they return” Hamza Shaban writes:

According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry out all-too-real rampages. Much like discussions surrounding the Internet, debates on video games carry the vague, scattershot chatter that says too much about the medium (e.g. do video games cause violence?) without saying much at all about the particulars of games or gaming conventions (e.g. how can death be given more weight in first person shooters?).

I recently had an extended conversation with John Jorgensen, founder and CEO of the Sylint Group, and USAF Brigadier General (Ret.) Charly Shugg, Sylint’s Chief Operations Officer, on where we are on cyber security and where we are headed. Both John and Charly understand that technology is ubiquitous. It is present, appearing and found everywhere. As technology expands so does the possibility of those with the necessary skills to use it for both good and evil.

The more we tune in, turn on and hook in to technology the greater the threat to individual privacy and freedom.

Gaming is becoming mainstream in education. But are we creating an environment where public school children will become addicted to gaming, if they aren’t already? One example of game-addiction is that of Clifford Davis. Davis, who lived with his mother,  in 2005 killed her, had sex with her dead body, then lured his grandfather to his mother’s home and killed him. John Jorgensen was called into the case to determine the sanity of Davis. He did a forensic study of Davis’s computer and found that Davis gamed 16+ hours a day. Jorgensen said that Davis became one of the characters in one a the games, a woman. Davis took on this female character’s personality. Gaming may have played a role is Davis’s bizarre and deadly actions in 2005.

The greatest threat is when a gamer takes on the values of the game, which are not necessarily societies values. What happens if your child or grandchild is required to become part of the edu-entertainment complex? Will your child become a character in the game or not?

That is the question. Time will tell.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

White House OSTP: The White House Education Game Jam

USA Today: White House “game jam” lures top video game developers

Wolf Sharks, energy drinks and learning standards: Reflections from White House Education Game Jam

Toward a better culture of games

Cyber Security: Where are we now and where are we headed?

/in , , , , /by

I recently had an extended conversation with John Jorgensen, founder and CEO of the Sylint Group, and USAF Brigadier General (Ret.) Charly Shugg, Sylint’s Chief Operations Officer, on where we are on cyber security and where we are headed. Both John and Charly understand that technology is ubiquitous. It is present, appearing and found everywhere. As technology expands so does the possibility of those with the necessary skills to use it for both good and evil. The Sylint Group is focused on combating the evil – the cyber war being conducted at every level from the individual to the nation state every moment of every day.

The more we tune in, turn on and hook in to technology the greater the threat to individual privacy and freedom.

Mr. Jorgensen believes the greatest future threat is from “chipping” but more about that later.

What is the current threat?

What most individuals think about when you say cyber security is protecting their personal information (e.g. credit cards, medical records, telephone and email conversations). For corporations it is about protecting their data, corporate processes and networks. For nation states, like the U.S., it is about protecting national assets such as the electrical grid, nuclear power plants, government websites and government secrets. Each sector has its unique needs but are these needs to provide cyber security being met? According to Mr. Jorgensen they are not. Mr. Jorgensen in his column “A New Age – The Cyber Information Age” wrote:

We are connected to each other electronically through communications systems that we don’t understand and to people we don’t know personally, and maybe don’t know that they are connected to us. Our lives bleed out through on-line personal accounts and everyone knows our foibles and sins. Our hard earned money is stolen from our bank accounts by somebody in a mid-eastern country, which we didn’t know existed. And all of this is accomplished using 1’s and 0’s in a nanosecond of time from thousands of miles away.

I notice that the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is held a conference titled “Road Ahead to Cybersecurity”. I don’t think that there is a “road ahead” for cyber security. There isn’t a road at all! The whole playing field has changed and there are no defined roads in or out.

I firmly believe that we are stuck in a quagmire alongside that “road” to the playing field and it dead ended at the entry to a new age called “the Cyber Information Age”.

What are the future threats?

bio chip embedded in hands

Sub-dermal chip implants.

Restorative and enhancement technologies, biohackers, cyborgs, grinders and sub-dermal technology (chipping). Restorative technologies include devices used to help individuals medically. They are devices, that include a computer chip, used to restore the lives of individuals to normal or near normal. Restorative technologies include devices such as: heart pace makers, insulin pumps and prosthetic devices.

Enhancement devices are those which the individual implants into their bodies outside of the medically approved arena. Individuals can for just $39 buy a glass-encased embeddable chip that works with some Android smartphones.  A full DIY cyborg kit, including a sterilized injector and gauze pads, runs about $100. Amal Graafstra, a cyborg who creates and sells biohacking devices, said, “Some people see the body as a spiritual vessel not to be tampered with.  And some people understand their body is their own, treating it like a sport utility vehicle. I see [biohacking] as, I got fancy new fog lights on my SUV. “

Some of these enhancement devices are being designed to be used with computer games. The idea is to give the gamer a more realistic experience by using sub-dermal technology to provide pleasure and pain as the game is played. Mr. Jorgensen states that the gaming industry is “spending $300 million annually” to provide sub-dermal gaming chips, effectively turning gamers into cyborgs.

If a gaming chip is implanted in an individual and it can impact that person emotionally or physiologically, then someone (biohackers) could access the chip and use it to control the individual. Mr. Jorgensen calls this phenomenon “chipping.” Mr. Jorgensen notes that the U.S. military used to use games to train our soldier but dropped the program. The reason was that games are all about the individual and not the team. The gamer games to win, regardless of the impact of those around him or her.

How will this impact society?

Jim Brandon in his column “Is there a microchip implant in your future?” wrote:

Like any tech advancement, there are downsides. Concerns about the wrong people accessing personal information and tracking you via the chips have swirled since the FDA approved the first implantable microchip in 2004.

Naam and Pang both cited potential abuses, from hacking into the infrastructure and stealing your identity to invading your privacy and knowing your driving habits. There are questions about how long a felon would have to use a tracking implant. And, an implant, which has to be small and not use battery power — might not be as secure as a heavily encrypted smartphone.

Troy Dunn, who attempts to locate missing persons on his TNT show “APB with Troy Dunn,” said a chip implant would make his job easier, but he is strongly against the practice for most people. “I only support GPS chip monitoring for convicted felons while in prison and on parole; for sex offenders forever; and for children if parents opt in,” he says. “I am adamantly against the chipping of anyone else.”

Using chip implants to locate abducted children could actually have the opposite effect. Pang says a microchip would make a missing person easier to rescue, but “Kidnappers want ransoms, not dead bodies. The most dangerous time for victims is during rescue attempts or when the kidnappers think the police are closing in.”

And beyond the obvious privacy issues, there’s something strange about injecting a chip in your body, Lipoff says. Yet pacemakers and other embedded devices are commonly used today. “People might find it a bit unsavory, but if it is not used to track you, and apart from the privacy issues, there are many interesting applications,” he says.

What happens if you, your child or grandchild decide to implant a chip in their body. What would you say, think, do?

RELATED ARTICLES:

Cybersecurity warnings: Will we ignore all of this?

‘Smart Cities’ Will Know Everything About You

Hack of security clearance system affected 21.5 million people, federal authorities say

Here Comes the Birth Control “Implant Your Daughter” Crusade

German ‘Romeo’ drugs girlfriend to keep playing video games for hours on end

The OPM breach: Can the U.S. respond to the “Pearl Harbor” of cyber-attacks?

Schools Implant IUDs in Girls as Young as 6th Grade Without Their Parents Knowing

Strategic Risks of Ambiguity in Cyberspace

Cliff Davis: Startling confession peels back layers of a murder suspect’s mind

RELATED VIDEO: Video courtesy of Grinders: David Forbes and his column “Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are here Today” [NSFW]

Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Crony Capitalists Promote Gaming in the Classroom

/in , , , , , /by

It is true: the technology can offer promising results in many applications, for example in medicine or flight simulation. But the overall thrust was that games provide advantages in “cultivating dispositions” – games for “social change,” as the name of the group and festival indicates. As for such subjects as history, one wonders: can we really go back in history, or just the history that the game designer decides to create for us?

The Games for Learning Summit, part of the four-day Games for Change Festival, began with opening remarks by Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, and then by industry representatives.

This event came two weeks after the annual ASU+GSV Summit (Arizona State University and GSV capital investment firm) in Arizona.  Arne Duncan himself addressed the 2,000-strong meeting of investors and technology start-up companies.

In New York City, the Games for Learning keynote speaker, Michael Gallagher, President and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the trade association representing U.S. computer and video game publishers, acknowledged the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and the sponsorship of Glass Labs (Games, Learning, and Assessment Lab, which ESA co-founded).  According to the company bio, since Gallagher joined the organization in 2007, “ESA has heightened awareness and appreciation of the value of video games as next-generation teaching tools.”

The site also reveals the intricate connections between profit and nonprofit organizations and government.  ESA’s spin-off, Glass Labs, boasts “a ground-breaking collaboration among ESA, Institute of Play, Electronic Arts, Educational Testing Service [producers of AP and SAT tests], Pearson’s [the multi-billion dollar international textbook publisher], Center for Digital Data, Analytics & Adaptive Learning as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – to research and develop game-based learning and assessment tools.”

Gallagher heralded the industry’s progress, as evidenced by 5,000 teachers using “[Common] Core curriculum-compliant games,” in over 10 million learning sessions.  The technology will create the “workforce of tomorrow,” as kids, naturally drawn to video games, will be even more so as they learn about the $100,000 wages.  The eight-billion-dollar textbook industry is sure to grow, as books are adapted to the game format.

After his speech, Gallagher took questions with Rafranz Davis, an “instructional technologist and educator.”  Davis attested to the wonders of gaming, and to those who might feel threatened said it is “our responsibility to change how we teach.”  Teachers are “saying” that games are a better assessment tool than multiple choice questions.  She suggested letting students be “advocates” to overcome parental resistance.

A question about the lack of evidence for claims of educational attainment was met by Davis’s testimony about learning about football by playing the game Madden with her 15-year-old son.  Gallagher disputed the negative claim, although he did not go into any detail.

When a concern was expressed about supporting students of color, Gallagher replied that the industry-aligned ESA foundation awards 30 scholarships a year for young women and minorities, supports making games for “social purposes,” and gives challenge grants to teachers doing “pioneering things.”

Another keynote speaker, Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games and professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, then looked to the future, 2025, which is “coming at us faster and faster.”  Although the marketplace for educational games is terrible, game sales for preschool and SAT preparation are “vibrant,” as parents seek to ensure children’s readiness for school and college.  He suggested developing teacher networks in the manner of music social networks to provide a way for teachers to buy games.  Gaming’s advantages include immediate feedback on homework and better assessments as teachers become empowered as “dungeon masters,” able to see which student is falling behind.

On Day Two, Gallagher continued his pitch, even though the official collaboration with the Department of Education was over.  He noted that ESA represents 146,000 employees of an industry that has been growing at four times the rate of the U.S. economy.  Located in Washington, D.C., ESA has access to policy leaders and opinion makers, such as Debbie Wasserman-Schulz.  He encouraged audience members to apply for grants for “social impact” from ESA’s non-profit.

This invitation for grant applications came on the heels of the first day’s to apply to the Small Business Innovation Program at www.tech.ed.gov-developers.  For such things as demonstration prototypes, attendees were directed to www.edprizes.com, a Department of Education site that offers a sign-up form for announcements about competitions for prizes for helping students compete in the “global economy.”

One of the reasons for the widespread opposition to Common Core has been the cost of buying new Common Core-aligned textbooks.  But the speakers enthused about replacing textbooks with games, and not only to teach such subjects as science, but also history and civics.  Games would “transform” education, taking the idea of “flipped classrooms,” where students watch videos at home and do homework in class, to a whole new level.  Virtual reality and augmented reality would produce amazing results.

It is true: the technology can offer promising results in many applications, for example in medicine or flight simulation.  But the overall thrust was that games provide advantages in “cultivating dispositions” – games for “social change,” as the name of the group and festival indicates.  As for such subjects as history, one wonders: can we really go back in history, or just the history that the game designer decides to create for us?  As proponents discuss taking “textbook educational content media” to the next level of “interdependent simulation,” one wonders about students’ reading skills and abilities to contemplate and think independently.  Proponents, insist on the value of such technology-based learning even though the one controlled study by Kaplan showed that videos were less effective than text-based problems.

But there is money to be made in developing games for “social change.”  The kinds of lessons to be imparted through this interactive learning are scarier than the biased textbooks and teacher harangues we’ve become used to seeing in the news.  These lessons will be described in the next installment.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.

Transforming Education beyond Common Core: Getting the Word Out About “Gaming for Social Change”

/in , , , , /by

The dangers of indoctrination become clearer when one considers the fact that the games being supported by the Department of Education focus on “social change.” Most of the presentations at the four-day Games for Change event involved lessons about tolerance of the Muslim “other,” global warming, sustainability, bullying, Native American culture, nuclear disarmament, and sexuality.

As recounted in my previous article, gaming, or the use of video games for classroom instruction, aligns with the goals of the current Department of Education and the Common Core initiative.  Gaming helps to overcome the “achievement gap” by enabling students to proceed at their own pace.  Poor readers have less need to improve their reading skills as they are given access to curricular materials through images and sound.

Abstract thought is replaced by presumed “real-world problems,” and proponents tout gaming as a way to give students experience in solving such problems.  Realistically, the problems are pretend problems, and students give pretend solutions.  There can hardly be an objective evaluation for a fourth-grader’s proposal for solving world hunger or global warming (the stuff of lessons these days).  Instead of measuring a student’s knowledge of the subject matter, points are given for such things as “creativity” and “critical thinking.”  Such subjective criteria give teachers greater leeway in evaluating students and closing the achievement gap.

But through constant auditory and visual stimulation, gaming stymies independent thought.  The constant noise and moving images make it impossible to reflect in the way one can with books.  Thus, gaming allows even greater opportunities for indoctrination.

The dangers of indoctrination become clearer when one considers the fact that the games being supported by the Department focus on “social change.”

Such common sense observations are supported by the facts: the research does not show that gaming has a positive effect on learning.  The lack of credible research, of course, has had no bearing on the Department of Education’s push for the increased use of “digital learning.”  For years now the Department has been doling out grants to game developers to teach everything from math and science, to social and emotional intelligence, to ethics, and history.

This year it took the step of co-sponsoring the “Games for Change” festival in New York.  This first-day session, attended by Department of Education representatives, was called “Games for Learning.”  The theme of gaming in the classroom continued, though, into the following days, when government employees continued to participate.  At the event, developers were invited to apply for grants from non-profit arms of technology companies and associations, as well as from the U.S. government.

The Department of Education also used its resources to promote the event.  An announcement was made by Chad Sansing, who “teaches technology and project-based learning at the BETA Academy in Staunton, Virginia,” and Antero Garcia, a “Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education” and Assistant Professor at Colorado State University, at medium.com, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had promoted the event himself.  Sansing and Garcia announced that The U.S. Department of Education and Games for Change, “with support from the Entertainment Software Association,” would be hosting “the Games for Learning Summit April 21 at the 2015 Games for Change (G4C) Festival.” Expected participants (over 250) included “nationally recognized educators, the designers of some of today’s most popular video games, and members of the U.S. Department of Education.”

Sansing and Garcia recalled participating in the White House “Game Jam” with teams of game designers and some “amazing teachers” at the beginning of the school year.  Sansing’s game-design project, they claimed, demonstrated the benefits of game-based learning: “media literacy, soft skills like collaboration, and technical skills like managing an online repository of A/V assets, to say nothing of the logic, math, reading, and writing skills . . . in navigating tutorials, communicating online, and building . . .  games.”  They added excitedly, “Students even discussed gender norms in character design and traditional gaming narratives.”  They listed the same benefits of gaming as commonly ascribed to Common Core: “critical thinking, persistence, and problem-solving to master, critique, play, and make.”

Who participated in the event?  What kinds of skills were promoted?  Industry spokespeople, government officials, and game designers came together to discuss “partnering” with each other as they uncritically promoted the benefits of gaming. The partnering is much like the “partnering” that has been revealed in the production of Common Core curricula and assessment, the crony alliance between the U.S. Department of Education, technology companies, and their non-profit arms (that serve to advance sales of the for-profit companies).

In spite of Sansing and Garcia’s claim that games would teach “logic, math, reading, and writing skills” most of the presentations at the four-day event involved lessons about tolerance of the Muslim “other,” global warming, sustainability, bullying, Native American culture, nuclear disarmament, and sexuality.

The cronyism and disturbing indoctrination lessons will be discussed in following installments.