Summary of Barab’s Paper

Barab, S., Zuiker, S., Warren, S., et. al. (2007)  Situationally Embodied Curriculum: Relating Formalisms and Contexts Science Education, 91 (5), 750-782.

Gaming environments (MUVEs) provide educators the tools to enrich the teaching of science education by providing a rich context for students who are dealing with concepts and complex ideas for e.g in this paper ecological principles. Situative embodiment is defined as  ”immersing student in rich, interactive narrative about serious ecological problems”. The researchers used a design-based research approach whereby the researchers are part of the design “experiment” and taking a lead from a particular theoretical approach of situated learning, the ongoing research provides feedback to researchers to make changes in the research study and design of the curriculum. The challenge for the researchers was how to design a MUVE that will allow students to learn the formalisms (implicitly and explicitly) and then abstract to other context.

Here’s my CMAP of some of the key ideas from the paper.

Illustration of key concepts from Barab

If you are familiar with this work, feel free to comment about the cmap.