how my name is richard may run from the university of california at santa barbara
and i've been
a find a study instructional methods that promote
deep-learning or transfer for
probably the last thirty forty years so i my interest is in how can you
teach people in ways so that they can take what they've learned
and applied to new situation so that's really the classification how what is it how
can we promoted what instructional methods are really effective in
i helping people want so they can transfer
well i've been interested in
instructional design principles for multimedia learning for quite awhile so how can you design a
multimedia presentations so that it can be most effective how should you designed the graphics
and the words
and
more recently have gotten very interested in may be trying to apply the same ideas
to how can you design educational games so that they will promote
learning
or learning outcomes because
i think in education
for us the a are interested in promoting learning
game designer is designed games probably for entertainment and
and we know they're very motivating
so
you know an obvious question is can we harness the motivational
attraction of a games and use it for
and educational purpose so that that's an idea of bin
wanting to explore that's what i explored in my talk
there are a lot of very strong claims made for
for the power of educational games visionaries in this field kind of envision a future
where educational be revolutionised
based on video games and
and that
new generation of learners
using
video games and the principles of video games and education will help them learn much
better than we're doing now a if you look at the research evidence there's really
not evidence to support
that addition the ad there's there a lotta claims but
there's only weak evidence
so what i tried to do an might talk is
to look at research on the effectiveness of video games try to systematically look at
how you might study this and just based on the research of my layout try
to summarise what we have found so far
one very interesting question is
do people learn better from games than just from
the conventional instruction that we're using now and what we have found in our research
is that
well
not usually a most we've looked at adventure games where for example you
again a desktop come a desktop computer game where you
one called cast seventeen where you
are going through a bunker you're searching for some stolen or
and you have to open doors that are stock you have to in order to
do that you have to build this electrical mechanical devices so you're learning about all
electrical mechanical devices work by building them
i mean you're going through the main you going through the bunkers
we compare that to
just
explaining to people how there's devices work in a powerpoint presentation you an exact same
words as or in the game
and people actually on a transfer test about how those devices where do much better
from a powerpoint presentation
then from playing the game
so even though the game is fine and it's really
cool and it
took a urine a have to make
a powerpoint presentation that took us like three hours to make was more effective so
i
i think
in spite of all the enthusiasm we have to look at the research evidence and
kind of base are
based what we're doing on the evidence because
ultimately all the enthusiasm is gonna evaporate if we can't develop games that actually do
faster learning