Einstiegsvortrag "Liber Ludens: Debates, Practices and Challenges for Games in Education" von Andrew Burn (GB)

Der britische Professor für Medienbildung Andrew Burn beschäftigt sich an der University of London mit der Medienkompetenzförderung von Kindern und Jugendlichen, insbesondere im Bereich digitaler Spiele. Als Leiter des DARE Collaborative (Digital|Arts|Research|Education) ist er an einer Reihe von Projekten zum kreativen Umgang mit Code und Computerspielen in bildungsbezogenen Kontexten beteiligt. Zusammen mit Magical Projects entwickelt er in leitender Position computerspiel-basierte Software, wie beispielsweise Missionmaker, für den Einsatz in der Bildung.
In seinem Einstiegsvortrag „Liber Ludens: Debates, Practices and Challenges for Games in Education“ thematisiert Andrew Burn aktuelle Möglichkeiten für eine praktische Auseinandersetzung mit digitalen Spielen im Bildungsbereich – im Allgemeinen sowie im Speziellen für das Beispiel Großbritannien – und gibt einen Überblick über seine Arbeit. Der Vortrag wird in englischer Sprache gehalten.

Andrew Burn is Professor of Media Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, based at the London Knowledge Lab. He is teaching and researching in the field of media education, especially regarding to computer games. As director of DARE (Digital|Arts|Research|Education) he is conducting numerous projects using digital games for creative and artistic expression in context with education. At last he is director of Magical Projects and develops game-based tools for education, such as Missionmaker.
The umbrella term ‚gamification‘ has always had problems, and has now outlived any value it may once have had. It oversimplifies pleasures of learning as ‚fun‘, and claims an unfair monopoly on such pleasures. It is insufficiently critical of its own rationale. It is over-literal about the application of game technologies to learning. It is blind to the significance of games themselves as media, as cultural forms, as artistic artefacts, as programmed entities.
Instead, Andrew Burn wants to collect up and reframe what seem to him the six best arguments for games in education internationally, exemplify their early uses, and project them into the future a little. They include the relationship games have with literacy, with educational play in different areas of knowledge and skill, with the performing arts, with narrative forms like literature and film, and with computer science, especially in the recent explosion of coding, code clubs, and maker faires. His aspirational call will be for games to function as an honest broker between the arts and sciences, challenging the persistent and damaging disjuncture in educational curricula between these two aspects of human endeavour.