Classrooms as “living labs”: the role of commercial games

One of the challenges facing us when we try to use commercial materials in the classrooms, i.e. video games at the moment, is to identify appropriate strategies of collaboration with designers, creators and distribution agents. Recently, we are working on a collaborative project with Electronics Arts to introduce specific video games to classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools by teachers and families. We create multimedia contexts, where children turn into active participants in a digital universe in which multiple technologies are present so that video-games are just one of several digital tools. We understand these media context as “living labs”. Moreover it is important to consider much more than jus the technology part; we also need to take into account the specific content. This is where the concept of popular culture turns out to be particularly interesting, especially when we consider that schools have traditionally worked according to an established curriculum that is very detached from everyday life. Several preliminary results are clearly appearing in these workshops. For example: a) multiple media and platforms need to converge in classrooms; b) in collaboration with teachers, we are discovering progressively certain specific educational uses of games c) a big attitudinal change is taken place in teachers and families as they learn to appreciate digital games or other media as educational agents. Our main goal at this moment is to design digital materials capable of supporting teachers’ and families’ use of games, and specially to reveal the rules that organize their structure, codes and symbolic universe.