Dave McDivitt

I am up early doing my morning surfing before I head out to The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, The Indy 500.  I haven't been for a few years and I am looking forward to it.  My father has been to somewhere around 48 of the 90 runnings of the 500.  It has always been a family tradition to go.  My mother will have a warm blueberry coffee cake on the table when I arrive at my parents house.  It is good all year round, but on race day, it is like a gift from heaven. 

Anyway, here is a link to an article from USA today that disucsses the world of Serious Gaming.  One of our Serious Games supporters is quoted at the end,  Bill MacKenty whom I met at SGS @ GDC in San Jose this year.

I think Alice Cooper said it best.  I did not compile the rest of my retention level of the two multiple choice questions on my final.  I will get to it next week when I am back in the building.  Today I didn’t even want to think about school work.  I spent the day with my father at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  Watching the likes of Danica Patrick, Sam Hornish and Dan Wheldon run 220 mph.  And looking for Mario Andretti (found him), Al Unser Senior (found him) Parnelli Jones (found him) and many others from 500 fame.  However, the best part of the day may have been the loaded chili cheese dogs and rootbeer at a local drive in. 

Today was a final exam day and after grading the first set of exams I have some more data to share.  First, I used the exact same multiple choice questions that I used from my post test.  They were inserted chronologically into my final exam.  Question 1:  What was the Munich Conference?  and Question 2:  What are the similarities between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia?  You can scroll down to earlier post if you want to see the questions and answer choices word for word.  67 exams have been graded at this point 60% of them got the question about the Munich Conference correct.  79% of the students got the question about Nazi Germany and Russia correct.  Conclusions:  retention rate is well above average.  Especially on question 2.  I was expecting a higher percent correct on question one, especially since they scored considerabaly higher on the post test.  I have two more sections yet to take the final.  I will post those numbers tomorrow afternoon.

Here is an article on gamasutra’s serious game site about my use of Making History.

School is approaching the end here at Oak Hill High.  We have 9 days of school remaining.  As I have been working on my final exam for the year I figure I will continue with the testing of my kids about the information that they were exposed to by playing Making History.  Of course since both of my groups have now played the game I have lost the control group and game play group status.  However, I am going to test all of them on the final exam.  I am going to use the Map of 1938 Europe and the two multiple test questions that I put in an earlier post.  Then we can check for some retention of that material. 

Muzzy Lane posted this press release yesterday.  It gives a short summary of the testing I did in my classes.

Today I ran into a fellow teacher that I don't chat with very often.  That is mainly due to logistics more than anything.  But as we were discussing that state of the world our discussions turned to the problems with teenagers today.  I said very little in this conversation and just listened and occasionally posed a question for consideration.  In the conversation things were said like "I hate those darn iPods."  and "I tell my kids don't come in here wired."  One question I did throw out there was "what if you could podcast a lesson about Shakespear?"  The response included "how do I know they will be listening to it?  Well, what makes you think that all of them are listening to you anyway?"  My friend did say that podcast and the like are probably in the future but right now they are bad, bad, bad!  I never did mention my computer gaming in the classroom.  I was getting the idea that I would have to defend myself and I was afraid that portion of our conversation would be long and arduous.  Defending myself is something on most days I love to do but it was 4:30 and a gloomy, rainy Monday and I didn't have it in me today.