Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

by Yasmin B. Kafai

Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves. In this book, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke discuss the educational benefits of constructionist gaming -- coding, collaboration, and creativity -- and the move from "computational thinking" toward "computational participation." Kafai and Burke point to recent developments that support a shift to game making from game playing, including the game industry's acceptance, and even promotion, of "modding" and the growth of a DIY culture. Kafai and Burke show that student-designed games teach not only such technical skills as programming but also academic subjects. Making games also teaches collaboration, as students frequently work in teams to produce content and then share their games with in class or with others online. Yet Kafai and Burke don't advocate abandoning instructionist for constructionist approaches. Rather, they argue for a more comprehensive, inclusive idea of connected gaming in which both making and gaming play a part.

297 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 16, 2016

About the author

Yasmin B. Kafai, Ph.D., is a Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, past president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), and an executive editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.