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My academic and
professional research has two main threads:
1) The creation of (educational) games by
children. I originally began my Ph.D. research with a 3-month study following forty 7-11 year olds as they made their own educational games. This was Inspired by Yasmin Kafai's similar work (Kafai, 1995) and focused on the children's ability to integrate learning content into their own computer games. The children created 34 game designs, 29 finished games and we transcribed over 5 hours of interviews. This work yielded a number of papers and articles which are listed below, but didn't actually make it into my final thesis. I could probably have done an entire Ph.D. just using the research data I collected from this one study - but my research eventually took another course. |
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Habgood, J. (2005) Passing On the Family Trade. Develop Magazine March 05. This work eventually led to teaming up with Prof. Mark Overmars to write "The Game Maker's Apprentice": a beginners text on game development. From the outset we were intent on producing a book which did justice to our own rose-tinted memories of home computing. We certainly wanted the book to be something special to own (in full-colour and with clearly explained examples which were fun to play), but we never really expected it to be a commercial success. Fortunately we were wrong, and if the publishers get their way then we may get around to a sequel at some point! Habgood, J.(2006). Compulsory Game Development for Everyone: Gamasutra Education |
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It
was actually the second thread of my research that became the main focus of my Ph.D. I was primarily concerned with the perceived failure of
"edutainment" products to harness the motivational potential of
computer games. Edutainment has been likened to "chocolate-covered
broccoli" (Bruckman, 1999) with a superficial "extrinsic"
relationship between game and learning content. My research sought to find
an approach which would create a more integrated approach between
educational games and their learning content, in the hope that this would
produce more effective products.
One of the earliest and most frequently cited explanations offered for the contrast between effective and ineffective educational games is that of intrinsic and extrinsic fantasy (Malone, 1981) later relabelled endogenous and exogenous fantasy by Malone and Lepper (1987). |
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If you are at all interested in games and learning then you really should read Malone's work. Although we went on to argue that the underlying research was empirically flawed (Habgood, Ainsworth and Benford, 2005), Malone and Lepper's "Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning" is undeniably an insightful and seminal work. It's certainly worth an inter-library loan just to get your hands on it! Anyway,we set out a slightly different perspective on "intrinsic integration" (Kafai, 2001) based on integrating learning content within the core-mechanics of a video game. It was this theory that we would put to test in the design and evaluation of Zombie Division. Zombie Division was created as a 'gaming episode' specifically designed in order to empirically test the value of a more integrated approach. |
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We created three distinct versions of Zombie Division. The intrinsic (integrated) version included mathematical division within the combat mechanic of the game; the extrinsic (unitegrated) version had no learning content in the combat, but included identical mathematics questions at the end of each level, and a control version contained no mathematical learning content at all. These different versions were used to examine two central questions: 1)
Are intrinsic games more motivating to play than extrinsic
games (as measured by time on task). We carried out a number of randomised trials in schools and collected a large amount of process data from the different versions of the game. All this data was collated and statistically analysed (in some depth!) in my thesis, providing a rich and fascinating insight into the workings of the game. You can download my thesis through the link below, but we were indeed able to show statistically that: 1)
Children had a significant preference for the intrinsic version in a
direct comparison between the two versions of Zombie Division. We are in the process of putting the key studies from my thesis into a paper for journal publication, but in the meantime you can read the complete thesis here: My thesis was submitted to the Department of Psychology at The University of Nottingham in July 2007 and was examined by Professor Rose Luckin (external), and Professor Claire O'Malley (internal). I passed my viva in September 2007 and graduated in December that year. Key References:
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