STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
Steve Brewer of the Biology Department gives a lecture entitled “Alternate Reality Gaming: A model for large-scale problem-based learning?”
A new genre has appeared in the gaming world in which participants self-organize to solve large-scale problems in an alternate reality by taking action in the real world. These games, which sometimes attract hundreds of thousands of participants, may offer some promise for engaging students in problem-based learning. Brewer will provide an overview of alternate-reality gaming, identify some of the learning goals inherent in this genre, sketch out how these might apply to scientific problem-solving, and describe a proposal for a new class based on these techniques.