All posts by Robert O. Duncan

I'm an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences at City University of New York, with joint appointments in Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience. I also have an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at New York University. My research interests include cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging, glaucoma, neurodegenerative disorders, attention, learning, memory, educational technology, pedagogy, and developing games for education.

Save the date! CUNY Games Conference 8.0 this Feb 27-28, 2022

The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce The CUNY Games Conference 8.0, to be held fully online January 27 & 28th, 2022.

The conference will consist of idea exchange sessions held in breakout rooms and a handful of organizer-led workshops. The sessions will discuss interactive learning techniques, playful learning, design challenges, with a likely focus on how to adapt our best in-person activities for the online classroom. Therefore, no attendees will need to prepare a presentation—just be ready to listen and contribute your unique knowledge! On Day 2 we will likely reserve to play together online tabletop and digital games and debrief their learning potential.

The CUNY Games Network promotes game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities faculty can use in the classroom every day. We aim to bring together all stakeholders: faculty, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and game designers. Both CUNY and non-CUNY participation is welcome—and completely free of charge.

Stay tuned for our schedule and more information.

https://games.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cgc2022/

New article published in JITP

We are happy to announce a new publication in issue number fifteen of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. The editors kindly scribed the following pithy summary:

The need for critically examining how the medium influences the agenda behind digital material is also examined in another piece in this issue. In “Confidence and Critical Thinking Are Differentially Affected by Content Intelligibility and Source Reliability: Implications for Game-Based Learning in Higher Education,” Robert O. Duncan of York College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, presents a study on how the intelligibility of information and reliability of sources influence performance and confidence among participants in a critical-thinking game. The results indicate the more environmentally induced difficulty in reading text, the more critically students engaged with it. The type of information source, however, appeared to be less influential on students’ performance, with little variation between conditions in which participants were or were not told which information was derived from a reliable source. These findings point toward a few practical implications for instruction and game design around information literacy, and help to increase awareness regarding opportunities to teach students how to evaluate the reliability of sources, before critically evaluating and using the information they provide.

New Site Dedicated to Citizen Science Games

Check out Claire Baert’s cool web site dedicated to citizen science games! A description of citizen science from her site follows:

What is Citizen Science?

Citizen science is where volunteers, in collaboration with scientists, get involved in science. This can be collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, classifying and transcribing information, conducting experiments or by playing citizen science games.

Citizen scientists can help experts who are overwhelmed by big data and new technology to gather even more data, solve complex problems and make discoveries using new technologies! At the same time, the participants have fun, learn about science, develop skills, and gain a greater understanding of the scientific process.

Whether you are passionate about birds, the environment, quantum physics or bio-hacking, you can always find a citizen science project that matches your interests. Citizen Science Games is dedicated to feature… well, citizen science games! citizensciencegames.com is both a news website and a rich collection of citizen science games, articles from scientific magazines and publications from scientific journals.

https://citizensciencegames.com/