Winter 2004

Featured Educator - Kurt D. Squire

Our first featured educator is Dr. Kurt D. Squire from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Biography
Dr. Kurt Squire is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. His research focuses on video games and learning, cognition, and culture. Along with Jim Gee, he runs the Room 130 research group examining games, learning, and literacy.

Squire is also a research scientist at the ADL Academic Co-Lab and a visiting research fellow at MIT, where he co-directs the Education Arcade and was previously a research manager of the games-to-teach project. He earned his PhD from Indiana University in Instructional Systems Technology, where his dissertation research examined learning through playing Sid Meier's Civilization III (developed by Firaxis Games) in a classroom and after school center. His research has continued since then to include new subject pools and new interactive game products, including the recently released Sid Meier's Pirates!, (just re-imagined and released by Firaxis Games) which he has been playing since middle school.

He is the author of over 30 book journal articles and book chapters as well as a former elementary and Montessori teacher. In 2000, he co-founded joystick101.org, a web community studying game culture.

Kurt is well known for the extensive research he has done with Civilization III in the classroom. Here's a link to an abstract of that dissertation, awarded from Indiana University: http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/dissertation.html.

A Pirate's Life for Kurt! Kurt's stories about how Sid's original Pirates! game, released in 1987, changed his life as a middle school student are well known in the industry; MIT has so kindly given us permission to excerpt that story below. As the story opens, Kurt's high school history teacher has asked a fairly-obscure question about 16th century history: Mr. Squire, do you care to answer?" "Well, the Spanish Armada hit its peak in the late 16th century. They dominated the larger islands with sizable forts in Havana and Port Royale. For a brief time, the English had a colony here or there in Jamaica, and of course the French had their string of islands in the -- what is it, the lesser Antilles - the ones right below the English ones -- right below St. Kitts." I was starting to get warmed up. These obscure names and dates were flowing out of my mouth, but I had no idea where they came from. Jim Douglas, my high school history teacher, was surprised if not impressed. I was a fair student but not known for "reading ahead" or anything. "Go on. What kinds of ships did the English have?" "What kinds of ships did they have? Oh, well, only the Spanish ever had galleons, although you might see an occasional Dutch fast galleon -- not that the Dutch had many possessions, other than Curacao. It made for a great trading base though...Oh yeah, English ships...I can't remember, but they were definitely smaller, merchantmen / trading vessels" Again, rambling about the Caribbean. My best friend at the time, Jason, shot me an incredulous look. "Where in the hell are you getting this...is this some sort of joke?" Well, no, it wasn't a joke. It was, however, the result of a boy with a Commodore 64 who spent way too much time playing Sid Meier's Pirates! growing up. For an increasing number of people, this kind of story is not unique. Computer games have now been with us for over 30 years. The Atari 2600 is nearly 25 years old. Civilization is now nearly 10 years old. Yet, many Americans fail to recognize these complex achievements as more than fads or child's play. Ask most people what they think about video games, and many will respond that they're a waste of time. Extracted from Reframing the Cultural Space of Computer and Video Games - Kurt Squire. © Squire (2001) Used with Permission. http://cms.mit.edu/games/education/research-vision.html.

Current Work
Kurt's scholarship continues. Check out a new paper called ‘Video games and the future of learning 'released by Dr. Squire et al at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (2004): Video Games and the Future of Learning

Write us at any time about how you use Sid's games in the classroom:
Webmaster@firaxis.com. Please put "Teacher Features" in the subject line.