ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

McCabe and Wise,  It’s All Fun and Games until Someone Learns Something: Assessing the Learning Outcomes of Two Educational Games discuss whether educational games can be designed for both learning and entertainment. It involves the evaluation of the game Tic Tac Toe and comparing it to relative achievement levels of students who played the game and players who did not play the game. They questioned the degree of the students’ proficiency in identifying citations improved as a result of playing. They had seven sections of a GCOM 103 class which is a mandatory communication class for first year students and had them take a thirty- five multiple choice test to test the student proficiency. The students were asked by their instructor to take the citation test twice, at the beginning and the end of the semester. The Magnetic Keyboard game was also tested having pre-programmed tasks for the user to complete and the amount of time it was completed, at the end the researcher could dete...

Green and Bavelier's  Learning, Attentional Control, and Action Video Games  discuss video games and the study on how action video games especially and the learning that is produced can train tasks. They suggested that game play may not have an immediate advantage rather a true effect of enhancing the ability to learn new tasks. This article focuses on a review on factors in learning and the connection to video games The review mentions ‘brain fitness’ and studies an approach where an individual goes through a practice of tasks and shows it is less clear that training can benefit, but a gamified version promotes more of an increase in memory and planning. This could increase performance and benefit in other learning situations. Throughout the article, it began to discuss how learning in school focuses on content , and a task for school is to remain focused and still. They brought up games like a statue game where students remain frozen and the young students learn from that...

Gumulak’s article, Playing video games: learning and information literacy on learning and information literacy and video games role in students lives. She is looking into the values the games have and why students decide to play and how teens interaction affects education and what the criteria of a good game includes. Also this study  looks into how teens are taught within games. They reviewed the types of games teens were interested in and how they correlate to learning.  They begin this study by interviewing young teens who play video games and enjoy playing them . They recruited five schools in proximity to Gumulack and 28 students volunteered. First they identified why they like playing games and what genre they prefer. Gumulak mentions that two reasons for playing are for challenge and entertainment. The interviewers mentioned games like first person shooters, Call of Duty, GTA, and sports games. They concluded that 89% of people said they have learned something f...