Failure to Disrupt Book Club with Scot Osterweil and Constance Steinkuehler

For TeachLab’s fifth Failure to Disrupt Book Club episode, we look back at Justin’s live conversation with regular Audrey Watters and special guests Scot Osterweil, a game designer and creative director for the MIT Education Arcade, and the esteemed games researcher Constance Steinkuehler. They discuss the history of learning games, their current work, and Failure To Disrupt’s Chapter 4: Testing the Learning at Scale Genres: Learning Games. “I've been studying kids in games for a long time. And oftentimes, when you try to tackle issues of how to treat other people online, how to deal with conflict, how to manage your screen time and also stay physically fit, it's very hard to create interventions around games, that kids just don't spit right back out. They just don't take because there are often layers added on top. They're not authentic to the space. In my efforts, and I'm sure people have done better than me, but in my efforts, it always seems to be colonizing and the kids will ignore me, and it comes off as, mom is wagging a finger saying you need to get up off that screen and go stretch.” - Constance Steinkuehler