The plenary session, “Serious Games: Digital Game-Based Learning in Higher Education” drew a large crowd to the BryanCenter’s Griffith Film Theater. Three panelists, including Jeffrey Sarbaum from UNC-Greensboro, highlighted efforts to develop and incorporate learning games that are as compelling as those used regularly by today’s students for personal entertainment.

State of the art 3-D graphics create the post-apocalyptic game environment used in Sarbaum’s Econ 201, an introductory economics course he will teach this coming fall at UNC-Greensboro. The game will take the place of a standard introductory economics course. In it, students play characters in a game involving aliens who have crash landed, and have to use economic principles to survive. In the course of doing so, they develop a society and engage in daily struggles of supply and demand.

The student allocates different gathering and consumption requirements to solve the problem correctly. If the student does so, he gets to the next day, and there is a discussion about the economic principles involved. If the student fails, his character is chased by a wolf through a 3-D maze.

“The hope is that by identifying with characters, the learning will stick,” Sarbaum said.

Duke’s Jeffrey Taekman and Richard Lucic joined Sarbaum in the plenary session. Lucic is developing Game2Know, a fall 2006 program centered around gaming and education that features hands-on laboratory investigations of gaming, modeling and simulation.

Taekman, an assistant professor of anesthesiology, is involved with a classroom simulation center using mannequins that breath, talk, make urine, have a heart rate and blood pressure. Medical school students take care of these “patients” independently or with other small group. The student’s care is videotaped and reviewed with faculty members.

“Players play games by trial and error. They find out what works, what doesn’t work, then make adjustments and try again,” Taekman said.

He is taking this approach of “practice without risk” in working with the U.S. Army to develop a 3-D interactive game platform to teach teamwork and communication skills to healthcare workers. Through intense and engaging role playing where players invest in character growth and advancement, Taekman hopes to encourage independent learning.

“Today’s students are different; they’ve grown up with computers, multimedia, and MTV – like it or not, that’s the way they learn in these media-rich environment. They can become very focused if you can make a learning game as compelling as mainstream games,” Taekman said.

The 12 other Showcase sessions and poster session provided numerous examples of technology driving students’ focus on course material.

For example, Krystle Merchant produced an eight-minute video for her final project in Professor Deb Reisinger’s French 76 course. In producing the video, she revisited old essays and textbooks for help with grammar, inflection and how sentences are supposed to sound. This same course used iPods to match text with audio and video, helping students perform closer readings of content.

“Most of us don’t read in another language we don’t know very well, and it gets frustrating for students, especially for a course at this level which is not easy,” Reisinger said, adding that her students using iPods reported that they stopped translating in their head and could focus instead on performing the reading.

Lisa Heutel, presenting “Using Tablet PCs to Promote Student Engagement and Course Integration,” said the PCs – in addition to being used for simulation and modeling and as notebooks in labs – provided the ability to broadcast slides to all 20 students in her Fundamentals of ECE classroom. This allowed both her and her students to annotate the slides on the tablet PCs to highlight correct responses, clear up common misconceptions, and share work with one another in the classroom to solve engineering problems.

During the session on “Instructional Technology and Service-Learning,” David Schaad discussed how his engineering students used iPods to record reflections on response, recovery and reconstruction when traveling to Alabama and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina over spring break.

“The students used audio journals to share their thoughts on tough issues; whose homes do you rebuild? Do you rebuild the elderly grandmother’s or the poor single mother’s? We just scratched the surface with how the students felt about the rebuilding effort,” he said.

Many of the topics discussed at the CIT Showcase involved technologies developed through the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI). On April 24, Duke Provost Peter Lange informed faculty of the university’s plans to move forward with the DDI for 2006-2007. By the next day, Duke CIT had already received eight DDI interest form submissions from faculty in seven different departments, as well as nine iPod course applications from eight different departments. Of note, the iPod submissions were averaging seven-to-eight proposed uses for the devices, whereas in the 2005 submissions only one or two uses were being identified.

For more information on the DDI, visit www.duke.edu/ddi.