Recent Changes

Assessments may be a completely natural, endogenous part of the game - in the form of choices that you make or inputs that the game might use to judge your skill or preference - or they might be posed as data that you input directly: things that you enter into a keypad or based on the kind of clothing that you wear or the sort of race/class/profession that you chose at the start of the game.
The idea is that if we are to full understand the many kinds of assessments in games and how they work - we need to start collecting and cataloguing them! This will, of course, be a bloody, messy business. There may be casualties and heartbreak to be sure - BUT! nevertheless if we are to fully understand the nature of fun and learning in games... it is Deep into the Heart of Assessment where we have deemed it most likely that we'll find such knowledge.
view the evolvinglist of candidate beasts submitted for inclusion in this Assessment Bestiary HERE!
Assessment Media & Tools
Evaluator's Practice
Simulating the Physical World
Building 21st Century Literacies through Game-based Assessment

Building 21st Century Literacies through Game-Based Assessment

Simulating the Physical World
reacted to.
To
To the degree active settings.
How
How do Games World"? --
World
World of Warcraft trading -
What other instances of game-based play do you know of or intuit might be a good candidate for transferring that experience to other areas of Students' Lives -- or even, gasp!, on Standardized Tests?

Simulating the Physical World
Many games create an "artificial world" with its own set of rules that players voluntarily agree to abide by (or hack if they can). One of the aspects of a game is this suspension of roles imposed by reality and/or our particular culture - where we try out different roles and different ways of being perceived and reacted to.
To the degree that we wish our games to have an impact on students beyond the screen, it's useful to consider in what ways the game might TRANSFER to the physical world out into intercultural transactions or other active settings.
How do Games "map" to the "Real World"? --
World of Warcraft has been used for teaching economics - not because of its one-to-one correspondence with trade in the "real world" - but because of its complexities as an actual working economy and all of it's complexity. It's better than Monopoly and better than many of the computer simulations that one can buy for Business Classes... by the very nature that there are several thousand (?) players on a given server / instance of WoW - each selling and trading -
What other instances of game-based play do you know of or intuit might be a good candidate for transferring that experience to other areas of Students' Lives -- or even, gasp!, on Standardized Tests?

Assessment of Disciplinary Knowledge in Games
Language-based Game?
Taking
Taking a tour of actions:
Biology:
Physics:
Language:
Language:
History:

Assessment of Disciplinary Knowledge in Games
In what ways can you imagine that a Game of Physics might utilize different game mechanics than a Language-based Game?
Taking a tour through each of the Disciplines, one frequently encounters certain clusters of actions:
Biology:
Physics:
Language:
History:

Assessments on Your Character: Your sense of "self" in game
One special sort of class of assessment comes from how and how much your avatar or character in the game is modified or customized.
If your toon has a "Life Meter" or "Progress Bar" or even just a CountDown Clock on how much time you have to finish a level... you have instant on-screen feedback
giving you an at-a-glance in game monitor for your efforts.

Progress toward goals in a game
Instant Feedback Loops
Progress Bars

Evaluator's Practice
What is the job of an evaluator? How do they do it?
How are those tasks reflected in Games?

Assessment Media & Tools:
Different sorts of games allow us to exist in certain ways - other games, in other ways.
World of Warcraft
Second Life
Civilization