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What are epistemic games and how they help in the learning process?

3:42 PM |



    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

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Posted by Unknown

Categories Of Epistemic Games

2:26 PM |





            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

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Posted by katanova

Epistemic games for learning innovation

1:57 PM |



   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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Posted by katanova
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