What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy & Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture — Kylie Peppler & Yasmin Kafai

new effort concentrating on creating games and what is learned when creating them
divided between modding and making

situate making games for learning within the current debates on the participatory culture (Jenkins et. al., 2006)
- viewing, playing, and producing content are all instrumental to the new participatory culture

challenges:
1. participation gap
2. transparency problem
3. ethics challenge
use these challenges as a framework to view the video games that youth are already producing at the Computer Clubhouse

The Game Design Studio
- storefront location
- Computer Clubhouse
- participants, 10-14 years old, minorities
- available resources
- activities
- theory of constructionism; learning is best done through design activities

media art archive - quantitative analyses
participant observations/case study analysis

Scratch users in their survey
- 40% male, 29% female, 9% group designers (22% unknown)
- more than 10,000 documents stored on server
- 643 Scratch projects over 2 years

top 5 most popular software programs used by these kids
1. scratch
2. microsoft word
3. bryce5
4. kai's supergoo
5. movies/animations

what kinds of things are kids creating with scratch?
a wide variety of things

case study: jorge
15-year old, Latino male from Mexico
excited about Egyptian art and the pyramids
original member of group but attendance sporadic until scratch was introduced
good in school
oldest of five kids
works independently and is described as a "loner"

events:
1. first introduction: Mortal Kombat Chess (January 2005)
2. second project: Metal Slug (January 2006)
maintained some design conventions (key strokes, startup screens, avatars, smooth animation, but also reformulated the genre - noise is absent, music, no antagonists, and no violence; zen-like qualities instead)
3. elaboration: metal slug hell zone X (June 2006)

participation shift in the 3 challenges that gaming addresses
1. participation by English Language Learners, girls, urban youth of color, etc.
2. transparency - what are youth learning about? jorge wrestles with elements of recreating and programming something akin to a professional video game
3. ethics - are youth dealing with issues of copyright? emphasis on repurposing but also on personalizing

what can video game making tell us about learning and literacy?
- rich context for learning programming, arts, and media literacy
- context for learning how to collaborate with others
- context for becoming a member of an affinity group
- context for developing sustained engagement
healthy counterpoint to the culture of consumption

gls2007