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Epistemic Games Encourage Innovation

August 14, 2006

With the current U.S. focus on testing and accountability, we have made sure that our schools are better equipped than ever to produce commodity workers, but not innovative ones, writes UW-Madison education professor David Williamson Shaffer. But the high end of the value chain in a global economy is the knowledge needed to design innovative products, services, and technologies that let people share information, work together, and do things in new ways. Williamson Shaffer promotes the value of epistemic games in education – games requiring students to make, apply, and share knowledge. Epistemic games are rigorous, motivating, and complex, just like the professional training on which they are modeled. Instead of learning facts, information, and theories first, and then trying to apply them, the facts, information, and theories are learned and remembered because they were needed to play the game – that is, to solve some real world problem – in the first place. An example of an epistemic game is Madison 2200, a computer-based game in which high school students work as urban planners to redesign a popular downtown pedestrian mall.

See David Williamson Shaffer’s faculty page for links to papers on this and related topics.