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What are epistemic games and how they help in the learning process?
As a basic
concept the Epistemic games are reflective, knowledge-generating activities
that can be used in any classroom, and can be created for any knowledge domain.
Instructional designers realize that not all students need explicit support for
knowledge construction. Also, an epistemic game is a set of movements, entry
conditions, constraints, and strategies that guide the construction of the
epistemic form. The rules may be complex or simple, implicit or explicit.
Epistemic games teach students how to
construct and organize their own knowledge. When students create their own
epistemic forms, they are analyzing the material and synthesizing new
structures that show the relationships within the material. Seeing how
information can be organized into various structures promotes fluency in
pattern recognition, a skill that is associated with expert behavior and
creativity. Epistemic fluency is essential in our complex, multicultural
society. People who are familiar with many ways of viewing things are more
likely to communicate clearly across cultural boundaries.
However, many students struggle with abstract
concepts, and also with the intermediate steps in problem-solving which the
textbook leaves out, considering them to be intuitively obvious to the casual
observer. Epistemic game-playing enables students to create explicit epistemic
forms, knowledge structures such as matrices, block diagrams, decision trees,
etc.
Once students begin the process of building
knowledge structures that visually illustrate the rules of the domain, they
start to consider education as fun and enjoyable rather than a mindless chore,
and learning inevitably follows.
Epistemic forms and games are powerful aids for
algorithmic reasoning and for the design process. They also provide us as a
students and future teachers a theoretical basis for a great variety of
knowledge-structuring activities that can be used in any classroom. Moreover,
the same principles generalize to software development, instructional design,
and potentially to any academic, corporate, or workplace domain where knowledge
construction and representation is involved.
Héctor Ed. Rondon Rodríguez.
English V section 01
English V section 01
Categories Of Epistemic Games
Epistemic Games as its own name says, it is related to
knowledge, it is a kind of game mostly used to improve in a cognitive form our
brain by using memorial and analysis structures, in this game form it is given
a certain information to be completed by ourselves, its characteristics and
categories as structural, functional and process analysis games have made an
appropriate game to children since 1993; And I think it is important to use it as
a learning method, because this way many students could learn logic, follow
rules and all those characteristics that this game offers.
In
fact the epistemic field has been mainly focused on game matrices, on the uncooperative
branch of the theory of games. These ones have been designed to teach people
about certain subjects and a numeral educational purposes or values, mostly used
to provide foundations for existing uncooperative solution concepts, and also
to uncover new solution concepts. Their function is to provide a method of
analyzing different cases in a determinate point in the game, to expand
concepts, learn and develop some skills.
In 1993, Collins and Ferguson
categorized them into three types: structural analysis games which determine
the elements and components of a system, this game helps people to improvise
and complete some simple goals by doing different things as making a list,
creating a timeline, filling in a matrix or even drawing a map. The functional
analysis game shows how the elements in a system are related to each other,
this one include creating a hierarchical chart, deriving an equation,
diagramming a sentence, or making a casual chain diagram. And process analysis
games that describe how a system behaves, including drawing a program flowchart,
determining a system of equations, graphing the change in a system over time or
creating a spreadsheet to project business profits, that is why it is consider
the most difficult of this three types.
Also another way to group the epistemic
games is by their physical attributes for example tables, graphs, time charts,
diagrams, maps and others, they can be combined in more than one type of
structure such as a game for depicting the role, function, structure, and
mechanism of a model computer, this games help children to know how to follow
rules, increase their memory, logic, learn what something is, how works, why it
works and fill some slots to accomplish to complete a goal inside the game.
I
consider that this kind of devices play an important role in the actuality, young people usually spend their free
time in computers, and we as future teachers could apply these kinds of games
in the formation of our students to make them improve cognitive and
computational knowledge and skills, because technology advances and we have to
advance along with it, these games can make teenagers use that time in an
appropriate way and help them use their abilities productively.
Jedrileth Gonzalez
English V, section I
Epistemic games for learning innovation
Will video games change the way
we learn? Video games are important because they present players simulated
worlds. Worlds which, if well constructed, are not just about facts or isolated
skills, but embody particular social practices. Video games make it possible
for players to participate in communities of practice and as a result develop
the ways of thinking that organize those practices. Games that are currently
available are going to replace schools as we know them any time soon, but
because they give a glimpse of how we might create new and more powerful ways
to learn in schools, communities, and workplaces. Even though, they are wildly
popular with adolescents and young adults, they are more than just toys, new
social and cultural worlds can be created, and these might help people learn by
integrating thinking, social interaction, and technology, all in service of
doing things they care about.
Years of research on epistemic games have
shown that players can learn concepts and principles, and acquire practices and
ways of thinking by learning to solve real problems the way professionals do. Epistemic
games players develop skills not by playing as experts, but by playing as
novices training to be experts of a particular kind: engineers, urban planners,
journalists, and so on. Educational games are powerful learning environments because
they recognize that students need to be a part of rich activities that build on
their own goals, backgrounds, and interests.
Epistemic games can be used to help
students achieve success through simulations and models. They have attracted
players for whom English is a second language given that they can practice
grammar by selecting games that maybe instruct to move words around to make
sentences. If they use the right structure then the game gives the player high
points. In that way, an English student will learn how to put the words together
in order to create coherent speech which eventually will be used in the
classroom or in another social environment. The point of these games is to help
English students improve vocabulary and even pronunciation depending on the
type of game selected by the player.
Epistemic games are an
interesting way to enhance the teaching process as well. Many schools in
foreign countries already support epistemic teaching. Current teacher
preparation programs do their best to prepare students through method courses,
which often include a mixture of lecture, hands-on activities, and lesson plan
development assignments. Before becoming licensed and getting classes of their
own, future teachers observe classrooms and get a chance to practice teaching
briefly. Observing a class, however, does not give beginners an access to the cognitive
decision-making process a teacher uses when questioning students, making
suggestions, or noticing signs of understanding.
In conclusion, epistemic games
make it possible to take good practices for learning and make them more widely
available and more powerful to learn by doing, and emphasize the value of
implied as well as abstract ways of knowing. They may not be the only way to
accomplish these ends, but epistemic games lower the cost of failure by placing
action in a simulated world, and thus make it possible to learn to innovate
without risk, to step into other cultural and intellectual settings in a guided
and protected way.
Esther Ramos
English V section 01
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