Sammendrag
Digital games have become a part of the cultural and social reality in the Western world today, largely shaping the lives of those who have open access to them, children and young people in particular. In recent years digital games have been gathering acknowledgement as teaching facilitating tools and resources. This means that games are increasingly being applied in educational situations and within various educational contexts, which again requires that teachers not only understand both the potential and the limitations of digital game based learning – but also the fundamental coding logic that is the bases for all digital gaming, as well as numerous other things in our daily lives. In February 2013, 3 University Colleges in Norway started a cooperation project, creating a new University college course, titled “Gamebased learning” (n. “Spillbasert læring”). The goal was to prepare teachers at different levels of the education system to employ digital games in their various forms, as learning tools. Programm g is an important part of game‐based learning and in this project the Microsoft programming tool Kodu Game Lab was utilized. The course was first tested out at The Nord‐Trøndelag University College (HiNT) in the autumn semester of 2013. This paper analyses the reflections of the teachers who participated in the first digital game‐based learning course on how they experienced the employment of the Kodu coding tool in the classroom. Inspired by domestication theory and engagement theory, this paper presents the experiences of the teachers when they got to learn to teach basic coding skills to their pupils. We identify several themes that came up in their reflections, such as first impressions, reflections about digital natives and digital immigrants, the concepts of learning to use versus using to learn, the status of the teacher, prejudice, attitude change and IT‐challenges.
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