Eureka! I finally found one! Post from 6/19/08

After reading

dozens of articles on game play and learning I have finally found one article that discussed “transfer.” Stevens, Satwicz and McCarthy (2008) address this concept of transfer from game play to “the rest of kids’ lives” as a plea of sorts encouraging gaming researchers to consider the importance of ethnographic studies of gaming and transfer. Their goal was to describe how in-game activity is tangled up with in-room and in-world activities (in-world meaning their daily lives). Their ethnographic study included thirteen children between the ages of 9 and 15. They observed how the children interacted during and after the games and discussed their in-game, in-room and in-world interactions. They concluded that the children did in fact transfer some of their moral in-game practices to their in-world thinking. What was most interesting to me was the fact that these researchers are encouraging the focus of gaming on transfer, not just on learning and how games are not just good for learning because they contain well-designed principles of learning, but rather because they provide the setting for children to interact and share their knowledge, thus empowering them. I hope to contribute to this seemingly new area of interest in digital gaming as it applies to real life. Therefore, I will continue to focus my attentions (for now) on how environmental or science based digital gaming may effect how children interact with their surroundings.