Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2 Towards Educational Memes
Seen from Dawkins' perspective, didactics is the science of educational memes.
Let us begin with an almost trivial, but practical case of game-based learning.
Pervasive games are a very peculiar type of games [41] bearing unique potentials
for game-based learning [31,32]. Before becoming involved in a case study, there
is the necessity to be correct and to point to the other coin of the medal. It is
apparently dicult to design pervasive games successfully, as discussed in [31].
Some games such as
REXplorer
[7] and
Epidemic Menace
[37], for instance,
have been supported with large amounts of money, but failed badly. The one
had been developed to be a permanent touristic game, but vanished after only
three months in operation, and the other one had been played just two times.
The pervasive game selected for a slightly closer introductory inspection is named
Invisible Buildings
being designed as a game for teaching in schools [48].
Fig. 1.
Top Level Storyboard for the Game
Invisible Buildings
Figure 1 is showing some top level storyboard of
Invisible Buildings
as
investigated in [31]. The representation above reveals some educational pattern,
so to speak. There are outdoor activities followed by related indoor activities.
In some more detail,
-
there are playful outdoor activities aiming at motivation and fun providing
data of a virtual world
-
which are carried over from the virtual world to the subsequent session
-
where, in some sense, the true learning takes place indoor by processing the
data from the virtual world on a computer discussing and interpreting the
virtual findings.
This way of teaching and learning may be reused in varying conditions, thus,
possibly representing some meme of didactics.
