Learning Situations in Game Play: Leveling the Playing Field With Modification by Adaptation

• In Event: Situated Learning in Physical Education: Four Teaching Initiatives From Teaching Games for Understanding

Abstract

Overview

This paper presents research from a scholarship of teaching and learning project investigating the educational possibilities of using game modification through adaptation as a pedagogical innovation within a physical education teacher education program. Preliminary data suggest that as participants engaged in adaptation games, they were transported back to the freedom of childhood games and identified how this play elicited an emotional response rooted in their past experiences. The adapted games elicited a strong sense of ownership by teacher educators as they spontaneously developed and refined their own enabling constraints.

Theoretical Context

Complexity thinking provides the theoretical lens to understand how pre-service teachers experience game modification through adaptation. The focus of complexity thinking is on the adaptive, self-organizing systems in which learning emerges from experiences that activate transformation in the learner (Davis & Sumara, 2006). Adaptation games are games modified to increase the challenge to a successful player based on the outcome of the previous game. Changes can be made to game constraints including space, scoring, rules to ensure the outcome of the game is close (Hopper, 2010). Key to this approach is creating a system of players that, through adaptation, engage in a game that is close, where play engulfs players with delight (Kretchmar, 2005).
Method

The project included two physical education teacher educators and 10 pre-service teachers concurrently enrolled in a game theory course and an advanced methods course. Human subject approval was granted and informed consent provided. Teacher educators co-taught selected lessons and developed shared adaptation assignments. Qualitative data collection included a) pre-instruction open response questionnaire, b) exit cards, c) instructor evaluation of teaching, d) lesson plans, e) 45-60 minute audio-recorded semi-structured focus group interview, f) video recording of adaption games teaching, and g) class observations. Flow scale responses were also collected.
Analysis
Data were analyzed using constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) between interview data, written documents and artifacts, observations and video recordings. Descriptive statistics were calculated for flow scale responses. Categories were created, merged, and adjusted as the analysis proceeded and emergent themes were identified which related to teaching and learning as part of the inductive reasoning process (Goetz & LeCompte, 1981).


Findings
Preliminary data suggest that as participants engaged in adaptation games they were transported back to their childhood experiences with games and the freedom (i.e., to modify rules; to feel the flow) these games represent. Participants noted that particular game forms (e.g., volleyball) elicited a negative emotional response based on past experiences, which the adaptation game negated. Adaptation games became the students’ games when they spontaneously developed additional enabling constraints for their games to create their own unpredictable and fair games.
Significance
The study provides insights into how the adaptation game serves a critical tool to create the autocatalytic space where learning emerges from inter-actions of the players, rules, space and equipment that adapts to maintain the ability of the system to play (Barab, et al., 1999; Mason, 2008). Adaptation allows students with disparities in skills to engage in meaningful, yet unpredictable, gameplay.

Authors

• Karen Richardson, Bridgewater State University

• Deborah A. Sheehy, Bridgewater State University