What the pirate ship told me
The pirate ship was part of a small game set up as a temporary build in Second Life (MMORPG, for those who like impressively bad titles). Here is a link to a description with pictures. http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/09/burning_life_05_3.html
The game consisted of a complex of caves and the pirate ship. The goal was to find three keys and open a treasure chest. The keys were hidden somewhere in the caves or on the ship. The game was appropriately simple, well suited to its context of something like a state fair. It could be completed in a couple of hours. Most of that time would be spent searching the cave and the ship. I played it and enjoyed it. I also checked on it several times and saw that it had many visitors, all searching for the keys.
What the pirate ship told me was that you learn more from the question than you do from the answer. I easily found two of the keys. The third key was more difficult. A clue suggested that it was in the ship. So I searched the ship thoroughly.
The ship was an elegant piece of work. It may not have been technically accurate, but otherwise could have been a museum piece. But if I had found it in a museum, I would have given it nothing like the careful examination I gave it as I searched for the key.
Suppose, instead of a pirate ship, the construction had been drawn from technically accurate physiology. The cave, I noticed, could have easily been done as a blood vessel or an axon. I imagined a new version of “Fantastic Voyage” in which players traveled through parts of the body to identify and repair some problem. The same build could accommodate a large number of problems. Just a matter of changing the script.
The ship also offered a large number of talking objects. You could click on these and get comments. The comments were interesting, but not helpful. But they could have carried partially helpful information. In a physiological build, appropriate objects (macrophages, for example) might offer potentially information about their function. Whether the information would be useful or not would vary with scenarios.
More generally, the pirate ship told me that it was doing something quite different from the usual paradigm of discovery learning as found in education. That paradigm usually calls for a special instructional plan for each element to be learned (discovered). That may well be the best for instruction, but it costs a lot in time or money. In the pirate ship model, the quest is for something trivial. It can easily be redirected for different elements of the subject.
These observations seem particularly appropriate for a virtual reality like Second Life, which could accommodate any subject that will yield to “concrete” representation. I wonder how such notions could apply to more abstract concepts like Cognitive Engineering?
The game consisted of a complex of caves and the pirate ship. The goal was to find three keys and open a treasure chest. The keys were hidden somewhere in the caves or on the ship. The game was appropriately simple, well suited to its context of something like a state fair. It could be completed in a couple of hours. Most of that time would be spent searching the cave and the ship. I played it and enjoyed it. I also checked on it several times and saw that it had many visitors, all searching for the keys.
What the pirate ship told me was that you learn more from the question than you do from the answer. I easily found two of the keys. The third key was more difficult. A clue suggested that it was in the ship. So I searched the ship thoroughly.
The ship was an elegant piece of work. It may not have been technically accurate, but otherwise could have been a museum piece. But if I had found it in a museum, I would have given it nothing like the careful examination I gave it as I searched for the key.
Suppose, instead of a pirate ship, the construction had been drawn from technically accurate physiology. The cave, I noticed, could have easily been done as a blood vessel or an axon. I imagined a new version of “Fantastic Voyage” in which players traveled through parts of the body to identify and repair some problem. The same build could accommodate a large number of problems. Just a matter of changing the script.
The ship also offered a large number of talking objects. You could click on these and get comments. The comments were interesting, but not helpful. But they could have carried partially helpful information. In a physiological build, appropriate objects (macrophages, for example) might offer potentially information about their function. Whether the information would be useful or not would vary with scenarios.
More generally, the pirate ship told me that it was doing something quite different from the usual paradigm of discovery learning as found in education. That paradigm usually calls for a special instructional plan for each element to be learned (discovered). That may well be the best for instruction, but it costs a lot in time or money. In the pirate ship model, the quest is for something trivial. It can easily be redirected for different elements of the subject.
These observations seem particularly appropriate for a virtual reality like Second Life, which could accommodate any subject that will yield to “concrete” representation. I wonder how such notions could apply to more abstract concepts like Cognitive Engineering?
posted by Selby Evans at 1:16 PM
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