This course immerses students in the process of building and testing their own digital and board games in order to better understand how we learn from games. We explore the design and use of games in the classroom in addition to research and development issues associated with computer–based (desktop and handheld) and non–computer–based media. In developing their own games, students examine what and how people learn from them (including field testing of products), as well as how games can be implemented in educational settings.

This class addresses important, current debates in media with in-depth discussion of popular perceptions and policy implications. Students will engage in the critical study of the economic, political, social, and cultural significance of media, and learn to identify, analyze, and understand the complex relations among media texts, policies, institutions, industries, and infrastructures. This class offers the opportunity to discuss, in stimulating and challenging ways, topics such as ideology, propaganda, net neutrality, big data, digital hacktivism, digital rebellion, media violence, gamification, collective intelligence, participatory culture, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, etc., from historical, transcultural, and multiple methodological perspectives.

This class will investigate the ways in which the formal aspects of Western storytelling in various media have shaped both fantasies and perceptions, making certain understandings of experience possible through the selection, arrangement, and processing of narrative material. Surveying the field chronologically across the major narrative genres and sub-genres from Homeric epic through the novel and across media to include live performance, film, and video games, we will be examining the ways in which new ideologies and psychological insights become available through the development of various narrative techniques and new technologies. Emphasis will be placed on the generic conventions of story-telling as well as on literary and cultural issues, the role of media and modes of transmission, the artistic significance of the chosen texts and their identity as anthropological artifacts whose conventions and assumptions are rooted in particular times, places, and technologies. Authors will include: Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Christian evangelists, Marie de France, Cervantes, La Clos, Poe, Lang, Cocteau, Disney-Pixar, and Maxis-Electronic Arts, with theoretical readings in Propp, Bakhtin, Girard, Freud, and Marx.

Students will practice exchanging opinions on certain topics related to social media and technology.

Students will practice exchanging opinions on certain topics related to social media and technology.

This course provides a critical analysis of mass media in our culture. Various types of media such as books, films, video games, and online interactions will be discussed and reviewed. This course will also evaluate how information and ideas travel between people on a large scale.

This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of videogames as texts through an examination of their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while reading current research and theory from a variety of sources in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Assignments focus on game analysis in the context of the theories discussed in class. Class meetings involve regular reading, writing, and presentation exercises. No prior programming experience required. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

This is the recipe for workshop, where participants hack the rules of existing videogames in response to topical issues, and prototype new games that are vessels of alternative values and messages.

he Inheritance is a video game that uses storytelling to teach the ACRL framework Information Creation as a process. The game can be an engaging way for librarians to teach the abstract concept. The objective is not only about reaching the end of the game safely, but also, about gathering the necessary items along the way to solve the mystery. You will have a checklist of items that you must gather in order to make it through the game. We used Twine, an application made for game creation, to visualize our concept. This game gets quite complex as you go, so it is recommended that you keep a piece of paper on hand to track your progress. Also, if you do not make it through the game on your first play-through, it is recommended that you try again! Finally, if you choose to listen to the narration clips throughout the game, it enhances the immersive experience. Overall, have fun playing our game! The goal was to allow the user to enjoy the process, rather than putting so much emphasis on reaching the end. Now you can simply download the zip file, open it, and click on index.html. Created by students in ISI 6372 Information Literacy at the University of Ottawa, Winter 2020.

This plan helps students identify expository writing and learn how to draft their own expository essays.