CLRN Blog
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Not long after I first participated in the StarCraft community, I fell in love with it. I admire its members’ activism, congeniality, and camaraderie. The players built the community infrastructure including organizations, learning ethos, social networks, and other programs. The StarCraft II community reveals one possible model of how peer-supported and academically... read more
By Lone (right) and mitosis (left) on TeamLiquid.net
Consider a circle drawn on a track field to have a radius of 5 feet. If you had to run across the circle within a span of 1.5 seconds, what is the maximum cord length that you could traverse within the span of that time?
Or rather - can a zergling run past a widow mine without blowing up?
This was a... read more
In early February of this year, I visited a middle school near a historic district in Chinatown. The school is one hundred years old with a rich colonial history. I met Gary, the head of information technologies at the school, who is also a math teacher. Gary mentioned to me he wants to develop an app to help their 800 students learn about the school’s heritage... read more
Guest blogger biography: Stephen Paolini is a junior at Winter Park High School in Winter Park, Florida. His interest in the concept of interest-driven community stems from his experiences with his unique family structure and the International Baccalaureate program, an internationally constructed college prep program created to provide a rigorous all-around... read more
When we discuss learning, some people attend primarily to the learning content, such as physics or math. They may raise their eyebrows when the content to be learned is a game. But it is not learning content that concerns me in this blog. It is about how we can learn to learn. In many contexts, take StarCraft II for example, there is no assigned teacher whose... read more
The StarCraft 2 community and the surrounding eSports phenomenon embraces learning approaches that can be directly applied to improve understanding of high-level strategy. Real-time strategy games, such as StarCraft 2, are the opposite of traditional turn-based strategy games, such as chess, as each unit in StarCraft 2 functions in “real time” and both players... read more
According to a StarCraft self-reported community survey, only 1.8% of respondents are female.1 That is a very small number. Why are female gamers nearly absent from the StarCraft community site?
Among the female participants in StarCraft II, some are doing very well - both as competitors in the game and as community leaders. Among them, I interviewed Mona Zhang, the... read more
As a learning scientist one of the first things I was trained to consider is my underlying epistemology—the theory of knowledge, or what it means to know—and how that relates to the learning environment being studied. Seymor Papert (1980) discussed epistemology as what “reflects and reinforces a particular way of thinking and knowing that is aligned with the norms... read more
Most parents would agree that competitive sports like soccer and football are good for kids. How about competitive video games? In my research, I interviewed kids who not only share video game interests with family members and peers, but they also derive academic and social benefits from their gaming experiences.
Alex Giovanni is a 15-year-old high school student... read more
When I was a kid my dad used to come home from work and greet me by asking, “So what do you know, kiddo?” It was his way of saying hello. But as an seven year-old obsessed with World Book Encyclopedia’s way of sorting knowledge into alphabetized volumes of varying thickness I missed the obvious and instead took up his query at face value: What did I know? Each day I... read more
On October 22, 2011, I found myself in a full capacity crowd at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. We eagerly awaited the appearance of two superstars. The stars, with aliases MVP and NesTea, were professional gamers--among the very best in the world. They have team coaches, impressive skills, and fans. About 10,000 fans attended, and 200,000 more watched... read more
“[T]here is something huge about that [moment] in education where the most powerful person is the student, where they just suddenly realize that, ‘even if I don’t get this fancy course, nobody is going to stop me being [what I desire to be].’”-- Kareem Ettouney, Media Molecule, Art Director“Many of us [game designers at Blizzard], you know, grew up on Dungeons and... read more
