Just this past weekend, PAX hosted their 6^th annual East Coast gaming convention in Boston. We were onsite to attend some of the conference sessions, ones you probably don’t find offered at your normal teaching conventions. Here are the sessions we thought were most impactful for educators, especially in the K12 space.

3: The Year In Psychology and Gaming

Dr. Kelli Dunlap and Josué Cardona host a PyschTech podcast where they cover the intersection of psychology and technology. They started off with a bunch of stats, in rapid succession:

Average age of gamers is 35, meaning if you’re reading this ed-tech blog, you’re probably closer to the average gamer age than most of your students. In addition, “there are twice as many adult female gamers as there are young male gamers,” so throw your stereotypes aside. You’re probably more representative of a “gamer,” one who plays 3+ hours a week, than many of your students.

They presented Philip Zimbardo’s piece on how “Video games are destroying young boys” with a bit of disdain, where therest of the research and game-culture seems to think he’s a bit out of touch. As a counterpoint to this, Jane McGonigal’s book and game SuperBetter is entirely worth considering. There’s a lot of research (including some funded by the NIH,) indicating how it can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. If not for yourself, consider it as a motivating tool for your students. Take her statistic of “gamers spend 80% of their time failing,” and wonder how they’re so inclined to continue. If your students failed even remotely as often, how motivated might they be to come to class or be involved?

2: You’re a Games Journalist! Now What?

The panelists absolutely made this session, particularly Ken Gagne. Getting your students to write, especially non-fiction, can be challenging. Writing about video games? That seems like a great motivating tool. Across the board, the panel emphasized that despite the medium, there’s a wide variety of tasks and skills necessary to be in the games industry, especially in the media. There’s real reporting going on. Writers should expect to spend a lot of time copy editing, as the task isn’t performed by specific copy editors for most publications. It’s similar to traditional journalism, and the trend has been moving away from copy editors for a while.

They recommended some hard skills to “level up” and be successful in the industry: script writing, editing video, editing audio, and doing layout. (If you’re looking to hone your own skills on these, you can check out these OPD courses: Going Further with iMovie, and Audacity). As for soft skills you can work on with your students, “the ability to write an email and sound like a person” is, apparently, a sorely needed skill. Additionally, peer review seems to be fairly lacking, at least in terms of feedback. The panel stressed that critiquing work is not a reflection of a person as a human being, and critique isn’t meant to hurt someone’s feelings.

We had a quick chat with Ken after the session. He’s a professor at Emerson College, and a majority of the skills he requires from his students in his course curriculum and syllabus are same we emphasize here. We’ve posted about blogs through WordPress, editing in Audacity, and clipping video in both iMovie and Adobe Premier Pro. It’s validating to learn that college professors are requiring their students to use the same toolset!

1: You Have Died of Dysentery: Meaningful Gaming in Education

By far, this was the best session of the event for anyone in the education sphere. When asked how many people in the audience were teachers, more than half raised their hands. 75% of the post-session questions were from teachers too. Despite its name, this was not focused on using games in class at all. The idea is to take what makes games motivating and applying that to the classroom setting.

In general, teachers don’t integrate games into education because there’s a perception that games have negative effects. Most teachers who encounter something new and outside their personal experience question its perceived value or relevance. These same people don’t play as many games as their peers, and thus they’re missing a connection with their students. However “there is hope” as 81% of adults 18-29 played games (based on 2011 data), which represents 42% of pre- or beginning service teachers.

Gaming has an intrinsic value, and that’s the ultimate goal of education. Both games and education push students to get into the “flow,” where challenge and skill level mesh. No challenge with high skill creates boredom, and high challenge with no skill creates anxiety. The presenter talked a lot about self-determination theory and the 3 components that make it up – autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These all relate to classroom functions, especially our upcoming course on gamification of the classroom (Edit: You might also check out Jessica’s blog on gamification and game-based learning)

Have you attended a PAX event in the past? What did you bring back to your classroom? Sound off in the comments.