Today’s Plan:
- Extra-Credit
- Discuss McGonigal
- Homework
Extra Credit
I hope everyone has filled out check in #1! Keep meditating! Keep journaling! Check in #2 is coming on Sunday.
Discuss McGonigal
Reading Questions (address 2 of these in your gaming journal):
- How/why can games help block pain or anxiety? What scientific concept does McGonigal introduce to support this claim?
- What is flow? What conditions have to be in place to achieve it?
- Why are games “better” at managing pain/anxiety than books or movies?
- What is the relation between casual games and mindfulness?
Read McGonigal 77-130; address 4 of these in your gaming journal:
- What happens when we play together?
- What is “theory of mind”?
- Tell me about social empathy
- What is the “equalizing nature of games”?
- What are the 3 dimensions of social online games?
- What should we know about First-person shooters?
Starting SuperBetter
Once you have set up your account, you need to add me as an ally: marccsantos@hotmail.com.
Given the personal nature of SuperBetter, I won’t force anyone to share their account or ally with anyone else (and if you set a secret identity, I won’t necessarily know who you are). But I will make a space for you to do so on Monday. At the end of the project, I will need to know who everyone is for awarding participation (30 points).
For the next four weeks, I will expect you to complete your SuperBetter activity every day. Start by completing a PowerPack.
Homework
I’ve made a change here from the schedule I supplied last week. Rather than continuing to read McGonigal, I want you to begin thinking about your final research topic. To do this, I would like you to read one of the articles that we identified on Wednesday. Take a shot a writing an “annotation” in your gaming journal.
If you google “how to write a research annotation,” you’ll get a lot of different approaches. Here’s my general expectation:
- Paragraph One: the first paragraph covers the purpose, findings, and recommendations of the article
- Paragraph Two: the second paragraph details the methods, including how many subjects were in the study, how subjects were found, the location of the study (if relevant), the length of the study, how data was analyzed/synthesized, and any other significant details
- Paragraph Three: the third paragraph does some thinking by connecting the article to other research (this thinking can compare or contrast). This is the hardest part, since unlike the other paragraphs you are called upon to invent material rather than simply summarize it. This is also the part that helps you begin to write the research paper
At this point, you might not be ready to write a third paragraph–you haven’t read much else, and might struggle to make a connection. Try anyways–consider it a free-writing opportunity. At the very least, you can compare what you find there to McGonigal, or connect it to one of the studies/sources she mentions/cites.
