Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age (Technology, Education--Connections (The TEC Series))

Kurt's journey into Video Games and Learning is as much the 'story' of this field of study as any person's life could be. He was a child embracing the first 'computer games' and has now come of age as one of the world's leading researchers and designers of games for learning. His work over the last decade has helped define the field, shape the questions, and modeled looking at technology as a resource ready for leverage in learning. This book surveys all of it, playfully captures complex ideas, and is stock full of great stories from a storyteller. It's about time Kurt sat down and wrote this.Disclaimer: I'm a student of Kurt's at UW-Madison, my wife is "Stephanie", I'm Seann.

Kurt Squire was a teacher, a game designer, and is now an academic. These three areas of experience inform his approach to the design and implementation of digital games for learning. Additionally, his Montessori experience give him additional sensitivity and understanding of the importance of crafting a supportive environment for learning and for offering choice and voluntary engagement to students. A caution: he does focus on localized, socially-conscious, participatory games that can be difficult to generalize and scale for broader implementation. On balance, I chose this text for my grad class on "Game Design for Learning," and it's better than any of the many others I investigated.

The book really just jumps all over the place, and a concrete theme isn't really noticeable. Kurt really loves to talk about himself, and a lot of the book simply centers around his own personal projects. Some chapters are interesting, but for the most part it just isn't a good read and is written rather poorly.

This was a short and interesting book about using video games in the classroom, but it left me wanting more research or more applicable advice.

have to admit, i haven't look into this at much. can't put my fingers on whether it's worth skimming through

Kurt Squire does a great job at introducing why learning and video games are worth investigating. Through real scenarios and easy to follow case studies, the reader can become excited to implement games into the classroom. A great read for many.

This is one of the most important books you shoudl have when developing or using games for learning.

It's a decent book to read after reading James Gee's work on gaming pedagogy. This book seems to be more about actually bringing video games into the classroom and/or designing educational video games, but there is some useful theory there for designing a course as a game. The book is pretty easy to read (took me about 4 hours to complete all ~220 pgs). However, I have to agree that the content does jump around a bit from chapter to chapter, and some of the personal stories can be skipped, but it's worth reading if you care about designing your course as a game. I borrowed it from the library, which is probably good enough for most people.

Es un libro raro. El autor escribe muy bonito pero no veo línea argumental. A partir del capítulo 4 parece que empieze a verse la estructura de capítulos: empieza con un ejemplo, pero luego ¿qué? Acabé desesperado. No sé donde va. El libro en general me parece malo. El autor tiene cierta fama y este parece libro principal. Decepcionante.

I bought this book for a University course. I didn't enjoy the read as I teach elementary students and this wasn't helpful for what I was hoping to do. However, I had no say in it, and others seemed to like it.