Trek Thoughts

One of the more interesting surveys was released this summer by the Entertainment Software Association. In July, they released The 2008 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry. The survey documents the growth of women and older adults as consumers of computer games. (25% of gamers are over 50.) Even more surprising, 85% of games sold last year were rated “E” for Everyone, “E+” for Everyone 10+, or “T” for Teen. Only 15% of games sold were rated “M” for Mature.

The research also shows how involved parents are in how their children buy, rent and play games:

• 94 percent of parents are present when games are purchased or rented.
• 88 percent of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their children play.
• 63 percent of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.

TeamTreks: Glacier Bay is not designed as “entertainment” but it links into the growing consensus of the value and contribution games can play in education and skill development.

One of our great discoveries this past summer was Frances Karnes, Ph.D., who has run the Frances Karnes Center for Gifted Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. The center recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary!

Their website includes some important resources on Leadership training that you should check out.

One book listed in the resources is Leadership Development Program Manual. It includes materials for the Leadership Skills Inventory. The inventory divided Leadership Skills into 9 areas: Fundamentals of Leadership Skills; Written Communication Skills; Verbal Communication Skills; Character-Building Skills; Decision-Making Skills; Group Dynamic Skills; Problem-solving Skills; Personal Skills; and Planning Skills.

One item in the inventory for Decision-Making Skills: “I am aware of how my decisions will affect others.”

The second book is Leadership for Students. It organizes thinking, talking, and writing activities for individuals and groups.

Both are great resources. You should check them out. (We get nothing from this referral!)

TeamTreks is a learning game that introduces and practices these core leadership skills in a challenging outdoor survival simulation.

Hi,

It’s been 7 months since I entered anything on this blog. I’m ashamed. But here’s a quick breakdown of some things I was doing as a way of explanation. We’ve been busy!

• 4 versions of the HP/Kung Fu Panda Activity CD in 11 languages including a CD distributed to Scholastic, one in LatinAmerica, one in the Asia Pacific in Simplified, Traditional, and Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.
• 2 versions on Interscope’s Enhanced Kung Fu Panda Soundtrack CD.
• 9 online projects on Yahoo.com/kids, on nick.com, in Buenos Aires, and Singapore.
• Took TeamTreks to NECC in San Antonio in July.
• Began taking our webshell publishing framework and started creating Portazo publishing projects.
• Went to Lake Superior in August.
• Began work on the new HP/Monsters vs Aliens in September. Got my 3D glasses!
• Signed a letter of agreement in September and a contract in October with Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company to become the exclusive seller of TeamTreks in the K12 market. They will focus their sales effort initially in the Talented and Gifted area. Pricing is also changing to a basis of $1/student/month.
• We are here to be Kendall/Hunt’s partners. We will continue to support TeamTreks, improve its performance, and help customers.
• Starting with the new deployment that should go live in the next 24-48 hours, all orders will be on the all Purchase Orders will be received at: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company
  Attn: Customer Service Department
  4050 Westmark Drive, PO Box 1840
  Dubuque, Iowa 52004-1840
• I’ll be demoing the TeamTreks Toolkit and MinneDemo, Minnesota’s monthly web application developer. “No PowerPoint, only functions sites or apps.”
• We’re going to unveil our new Portazo publishing projects at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis in December 8 & 9.

A training organization,White Stag Leadership Development, has been involved in leadership training for the scouts since the early 1960s. Their leadership training involves 11 leadership skills that were adopted by founder Bela Banathy.

It’s interesting to look at. The first skill is “Understanding the Needs and Characteristics of the Group”. They say, “It is essential that we first understand ourselves and our own needs and characteristics. Only then can we know and understand other people’s.”

This is the basis for teamtreks: a basic skill of a leader, in making decisions, is to assess, and be sensitive to, the needs of others. Here are their bullet points on this topic:

• A leader should understand his or her own needs and characteristics.
• A leader should understand the needs and characteristics of each participant of the group. This helps the leader to deal with each person as an individual, to treat that individual with respect, and to help the person grow.
• This understanding helps in planning the program and in getting things done.
• This understanding creates trust and builds confidence among group participants.

Playing TeamTreks: Glacier Bay Players try to earn a TeamTreks Kayak Certificate. Dropped off somewhere near Glacier Bay, you try to lead your team to the TeamTreks cabin before anyone calls for a rescue. At the end of your trek, the teammates rate your leadership skills in 5 areas of decision making. In order to be successful at playing TeamTreks (in order to earn your certificate), you need to play with a sensitivity to the needs of your teammates.

In the Classroom Integration Guide for TeamTreks (available in the store as a PDF or as a printout), there are lesson plans for Discussing Teammates and Talking about Team Leaders. These lesson plans integrate game playing with discussion and evaluation.

TeamTreks.com was mentioned in “What’s New” section the December/January 2007-08 issue of Leading and Learning with Technology, a membership publication of ISTE – The International Society for Technology in Education.

Last week, February 4 through 6, we were in St. Charles, Missouri at the Midwest Educational Technology Conference. We were in the exhibit hall demonstrating TeamTreks. In the program, there were four highlighted “scheduled demonstrations” for TeamTreks.com.

See how TeamTreks.com and kids can practice leadership and literacy skills while playing a game to earn a Kayaking Certificate. We’ll show how with the Teacher Toolkit you can customize learning & game content, track performance, and report on progress against state standards in Reading and Math.

We had lots of interest and positive feedback from teachers around the region. Thanks for your time! We also had drawings for one year subscriptions and have arranged some pilot programs in St. Louis, greater Missouri, and Illinois.

I love this quote from Steve Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You:

Start with the basics: far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions.  Novels may activate your imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding.

TeamTreks  offers a game-play scenario where you need to lead a team back to the TeamTreks cabin before anyone melts down and quits. Decision-making is the key to our learning game. There are  navigational decisions, morale decisions (Should we stop and look at wildlife? Should I do what she wants because she’s angry?), health decisions (Should we take care of this hypothermia now or wait?),  stamina decisions (Should we stop for the day and camp?), and so on. In the end, your TeamTreks teammates rate your leadership skills based on your decisions.

In David Warlick’s book, Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, he says in the final chapter on Ethics and Context,

Characteristics of the future workplace that will certainly impact lifelong learning are teamwork and collaboration.

Teamwork and collaboration. In designing the game, Glacier Bay, on TeamTreks,  we wanted to introduce kids to some fundamental leadership skills.

Good leaders have a social competence. They understand how groups work. They can communicate a vision. They can balance goals, schedules, and the group’s abilities. They’re sensitive to the needs of others. They’re empathetic.

When students are playing the game, they’re also practicing those fundamental leadership skills.

This becomes a kind of game-playing literacy: to pay attention to the status of their teammates and their opinions about decisions and choices.

One of my favorite books that I read in 2007 was Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

In it, he articulates very succinctly, I think, the difference between traditional games and computer games.

Most video games differ from traditional games like chess or Monopoly in the way they withhold information about the underlying rules of the system. When you play chess at anything beyond a beginner’s level, the rules of the game contain no ambiguity: you know exactly the moves allowed for each piece, the procedures that allow one piece to capture another…

In the video game world, on the other hand, the rules are rarely established in their entirety before you sit down to play. You’re given a few basic instructions about how to manipulate objects or characters on the screen, and a sense of some kind of immediate objective. But many of the rules — the identity of your ultimate goal and the techniques available for reaching that goal — become apparent only through exploring the world. You literally learn by playing.

In TeamTreks, players have a clear objective: lead your team back to the TeamTreks cabin before someone calls for a rescue. But the details of how to achieve that goal require practice and a certain amount of trial and error. This practice leads to discovery about how to lead the team, how to use maps and GPS coordinate to find the cabin, how to navigate, what decisions to make,  how to deal with hungry, angry, or tired teammates. In playing the game on repeated tries, players learn to be more sophisticated about the attributes of teammates: stamina, risk aversion, diet, activity preference. In playing multiple times, they begin to see how decisions effect the moods of their teammates and their scores.
So, when students ask “What should I do next?”, the appropriate questions might be “What do you think you should do?” and “What have you tried?”

We’ve completed the testing for the new content that’s available in the Toolkit. So, if you already have a Toolkit, no updates need to happen. The addition of the content should “just work”. When you go to the Settings section of the Toolkit, you should see:

Science in Interpreting Charts and Graphs. We’ve added160 new questions related to scientific charts and graphs about Glacier Bay.

Geography in Maps and Cardinal Directions & Maps and Estimating Distances. We’ve added 315 new questions related to map reading.

Those questions will also show up in the Details report for any student in your group.

Sometime later in 2008, we plan to add the standards reports for Geography and Science.

Thanks to all the folks who’ve helped make these great suggestions.

Happy New Year!