About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design : 2007
Alan Cooper
“ If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likable person: respectful,
generous and helpful. ” Alan Cooper
Summary: This book is an In depth study of interaction design, emphasizing the importance of goal
directed design in product development. This is a very well written and easy to understand
book that greatly helped me better understand the importance of goal oriented design through personas,
models and testing as a very essential part to the product success.
What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy | 2003
James Paul Gee
“ An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that ‘content’ is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading. ”
Summary: The books discusses how video games can actually help people regardless of the age, to obtain knowledge through different methods of learning. He argues that the educational systems can learn a lot from the techniques used by video games to keep students interested in playing the same game over and over again, and
facilitate the process of analytical thinking, and problem solving through ” self directed learning.” This book has particularly been helpful in my research process in developing my prototype that promotes higher level thinking and learning through direct manipulation and interaction with an application.
Design for How People Learn : June 2012
Julie. Dirksen
“ Having a skill is different than having knowledge. To determine if something is a skill gap rather than a knowledge gap, you need to ask just one question: Is it reasonable to think that someone can be proficient without practice? If the answer is Yes, then it’s not a skill.”
Summary: An engaging and visual book on the fundamentals of interactive design principles and how we can learn more efficiently by matching our past knowledge to create new knowledge and thus have a more effective learning outcome. Julie Dirksen also uses a lot of metaphors in learning that have been helpful in my research on the visualization tools and promoting higher order learning.
Video Games and The Future of Learning | 2003
David Shaffer, Kurt Squire, Richard Halverson & James Gee | PDF
Summary: This article proposes using games an a learning tool in education by connecting the social and experimental aspect of playing games with it’s learning properties.
This article proposes using games an a learning tool in education by connecting the social and experimental aspect of playing games with it’s learning properties.The paper discusses how video games are changing the way that we learn by arguing that we lean best when the
activities that we engage in, are those that we personally feel meaningful. He argues that by connecting the educational game values to the theory behind those games, the players can become more actively involved in the process of analytical thinking, problem solving and learning. This article was particularly helpful in my research as my camera application promotes higher level thinking and learning through ‘ self directed