EDU 5863 Digital Games and Learning

Famously, Friedrich Schiller (1794) claimed that persons were ‘most human’ when they were at play. More recently, digital media and learning theorists have suggested that learners may learn best when they are ‘at play’, where serious play and educative/learning action coincide.

‘Serious Play’

Starting with foundational work on play, this course will trace links and relations between ‘serious play’, informal (digitally-mediated) game-based learning environments, and significant educational aims and creative accomplishments (making and design).

Although computer gaming represents, for many people, something unfamiliar, potentially subversive and antithetical to education’s intellectual and social goals, play has always been a powerful vehicle for deep sustained and meaningful learning. There is little doubt that young people today, who represent computer gaming’s largest and fastest-growing audience, are learning a great deal in and through computer-based play, but what is it they are learning, and how? And how do digital games and ‘serious play’ learning environments model principles and forms of ‘good learning’? And what are the possible links and relations between serious play and serious forms of creative cultural production – and critical cultural re/design? And how do we ‘do things’ with video games as complex narrative and procedural systems?

Finally – what and how do people learn through creating and coding their own games?

And as we enter the age of generative AI and algorithmic culture, new questions emerge: how can game based play and game making help us critically navigate the challenges of AI systems?