Research
Thinking Outside the X-Box
Playing video games on office time might get you fired — unless you're Professor James Gee. For him, joystick time is just part of his research and the basis for his course Video Games and Education.
“What got me into it two years ago was trying to understand how and why my then-six-year-old played games,” he says. “I was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to buy them, and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn't spend twelve minutes learning algebra in school. It dawned on me that good games were learning machines.”
Gee, who teaches in the School of Education, wants to find out how players learn the ropes of video and computer games and then apply those lessons to learning in schools and workplaces. He says the computer and video games encourage a variety of learning skills. They get players to think about system designs; use what they learn to design their own game extensions or new games; critique game design on a multitude of Internet sites; and think about technologies beyond the game space.
“There is no learning more central to the modern world than being able to reflect on and manipulate the design of complex systems — whether in science, society, or workplaces,” says Gee. “We can use these learning principles, even without games, to get kids to learn things like science, but too often today, schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning.”
“What got me into it two years ago was trying to understand how and why my then-six-year-old played games,” he says. “I was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to buy them, and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn't spend twelve minutes learning algebra in school. It dawned on me that good games were learning machines.”
Gee, who teaches in the School of Education, wants to find out how players learn the ropes of video and computer games and then apply those lessons to learning in schools and workplaces. He says the computer and video games encourage a variety of learning skills. They get players to think about system designs; use what they learn to design their own game extensions or new games; critique game design on a multitude of Internet sites; and think about technologies beyond the game space.
“There is no learning more central to the modern world than being able to reflect on and manipulate the design of complex systems — whether in science, society, or workplaces,” says Gee. “We can use these learning principles, even without games, to get kids to learn things like science, but too often today, schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning.”
Gee has seen seven-year-olds who play the game Age of Mythology read about mythology on the Web, write and draw about mythology, relate it to TV superheroes, and then take books on mythology out of the library. Much of the reading they do in and out of the game is “over their heads,” he says. “But they don't care — they read it anyway.”
Gee adds that preschoolers have learned English as a second language by playing games like Animal Crossing, and children with ADHD have played games with great concentration for long periods of time.
“Many young academics coming on the job market now were raised on video games and want to study them,” he says. “This will be a big area in the future, and I believe many colleges will start Game Studies programs. However, as a senior professor with an endowed chair, I can take risks that junior faculty could not. I hope this will change in the near future.”
— Candice Gaukel Andrews '77
Gee adds that preschoolers have learned English as a second language by playing games like Animal Crossing, and children with ADHD have played games with great concentration for long periods of time.
“Many young academics coming on the job market now were raised on video games and want to study them,” he says. “This will be a big area in the future, and I believe many colleges will start Game Studies programs. However, as a senior professor with an endowed chair, I can take risks that junior faculty could not. I hope this will change in the near future.”
— Candice Gaukel Andrews '77
Great Balls of Hair
Curiosity doesn't always kill the cat. In fact, Mark Cook's curiosity may turn out to be a cat's best friend.
Cook, a UW animal scientist, became curious about the contents of hairballs — well, who hasn't? — while talking with people at pet-food giant Nestle Purina. He and collaborators studied twenty of the disgusting wads, known to scientists as bezoars, and found that there's more than hair in there. The team's analysis showed the average bezoar is 30 percent fat, which led them to develop a new nutritional solution that helps cats dissolve the hair they swallow while grooming. Nestle Purina has licensed the formula and put it in a new hairball-control cat food, which hit stores this summer.
— Staff
Cook, a UW animal scientist, became curious about the contents of hairballs — well, who hasn't? — while talking with people at pet-food giant Nestle Purina. He and collaborators studied twenty of the disgusting wads, known to scientists as bezoars, and found that there's more than hair in there. The team's analysis showed the average bezoar is 30 percent fat, which led them to develop a new nutritional solution that helps cats dissolve the hair they swallow while grooming. Nestle Purina has licensed the formula and put it in a new hairball-control cat food, which hit stores this summer.
— Staff
Creating a Buzz
A couple of common fruit flies, snared in a net by a UW postdoctoral researcher, are yielding rare insight on how genetic diversity emerged in animals, one of the hot topics of developmental biology.
Nicolas Gompel, a researcher in the UW's Howard Hughes Medical Institute, noticed that the wild fruit flies buzzing around the Eagle Heights gardens had brightly colored abdomens, similar to those of an unrelated type of fly commonly studied by geneticists. When he compared the distant cousins in the laboratory, he observed similar genes that produced the flies' pigmented posteriors. He went on to identify common mechanisms among several species that nonetheless lead to a wide range of body styles and patterns.
Gompel's discovery suggests the genetics underlying complex physical differences in everything from flies to cats may not always be so complex. And that may in turn help explain the great diversity of the living world.
— Michael Penn
Nicolas Gompel, a researcher in the UW's Howard Hughes Medical Institute, noticed that the wild fruit flies buzzing around the Eagle Heights gardens had brightly colored abdomens, similar to those of an unrelated type of fly commonly studied by geneticists. When he compared the distant cousins in the laboratory, he observed similar genes that produced the flies' pigmented posteriors. He went on to identify common mechanisms among several species that nonetheless lead to a wide range of body styles and patterns.
Gompel's discovery suggests the genetics underlying complex physical differences in everything from flies to cats may not always be so complex. And that may in turn help explain the great diversity of the living world.
— Michael Penn
Yoga for the Nose
The best medical way to treat sinusitis, postnasal drip, allergies, coughs, congestion, and even the common cold may be with water — not by drinking it, but by passing it through the nose. Now, a drug-free product called SinuCleanse, developed by Associate Professor Diane Heatley '82, MD'87, can be found at pharmacies around the country.
SinuCleanse is an adaptation of an ancient yoga custom known as Neti, a nasal irrigation process that is traditionally one of six purification techniques undertaken to prepare the body for yoga practice. Lukewarm water is poured into one nostril and allowed to flow out the other, with the use of a glass Neti pot. SinuCleanse improves on the process with an unbreakable, plastic pot and a prepackaged saline solution that “makes the cilia [microscopic hairs in the nose] beat faster and speed mucus transport,” says Heatley. “Plain water or other additives or preservatives can damage the delicate ciliary lining of the nose and interfere with mucus clearance.”
The process is so effective that Walgreen's has decided to carry the device. After using
SinuCleanse, some of Heatley's patients feel their symptoms have improved so much that they no longer need antibiotics and other medications. “I hear every day from people who tell me they can't believe something so simple works so well,” she says.
— C.G.A.
SinuCleanse is an adaptation of an ancient yoga custom known as Neti, a nasal irrigation process that is traditionally one of six purification techniques undertaken to prepare the body for yoga practice. Lukewarm water is poured into one nostril and allowed to flow out the other, with the use of a glass Neti pot. SinuCleanse improves on the process with an unbreakable, plastic pot and a prepackaged saline solution that “makes the cilia [microscopic hairs in the nose] beat faster and speed mucus transport,” says Heatley. “Plain water or other additives or preservatives can damage the delicate ciliary lining of the nose and interfere with mucus clearance.”
The process is so effective that Walgreen's has decided to carry the device. After using
SinuCleanse, some of Heatley's patients feel their symptoms have improved so much that they no longer need antibiotics and other medications. “I hear every day from people who tell me they can't believe something so simple works so well,” she says.
— C.G.A.
Cool Tool - Bug Out
The little doorway behind Birge Hall seems uninviting, and the room behind it doesn't even have a formal name. But it houses some of the more interesting research tools around. Inside are between four and six large stainless steel containers, each one filled with larvae of the dermestid beetle, which thrive by eating the flesh of dead animals.
The beetles' creepiness is exceeded only by their contributions to science: they help prepare bones for the UW Zoological Museum, one of the foremost research collections of animal remains in the country. When the museum acquires a deceased rhino or giraffe — as it did recently when a Madison zoo giraffe suddenly died — curators drop the bones into one of the containers and let the beetles munch away. After a few days, bones emerge so clean that they need only minor preparation before they can be catalogued into the collection, which now contains seventeen thousand specimens from beasts common and exotic.
Researchers travel from around the world to study the collection, housed in the Noland Zoology Building. (A veterinarian recently wanted to examine a tiger's skull before trying to treat the living thing.) Not many people get to see the beetles, though. Their little underground chamber, which was originally constructed in 1877 as a magnetic observatory, is specially designed to allow tight control of temperature, humidity, and cleanliness. That means no guests at this particular dinner table.
— M.P.
The beetles' creepiness is exceeded only by their contributions to science: they help prepare bones for the UW Zoological Museum, one of the foremost research collections of animal remains in the country. When the museum acquires a deceased rhino or giraffe — as it did recently when a Madison zoo giraffe suddenly died — curators drop the bones into one of the containers and let the beetles munch away. After a few days, bones emerge so clean that they need only minor preparation before they can be catalogued into the collection, which now contains seventeen thousand specimens from beasts common and exotic.
Researchers travel from around the world to study the collection, housed in the Noland Zoology Building. (A veterinarian recently wanted to examine a tiger's skull before trying to treat the living thing.) Not many people get to see the beetles, though. Their little underground chamber, which was originally constructed in 1877 as a magnetic observatory, is specially designed to allow tight control of temperature, humidity, and cleanliness. That means no guests at this particular dinner table.
— M.P.
The Power of Om
On a spring day in 2001, a man in flowing crimson robes and open-toe sandals arrived at the Waisman Center to have his head examined. Matthieu Ricard, a French-born Buddhist monk, was escorted to a computer station, where he was fitted with a net-like cap of electrodes that recorded his brain activity as he looked at various images flashing on the screen. He was then led down the hall, where he reclined on the bed of an MRI scanner and, within minutes, began meditating.
During the past two years, several monks have followed, traveling from India and Tibet to complete batteries of tests at UW-Madison's W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, where they are taking part in an extraordinary venture to understand the potential of the mind. Forged jointly by UW Professor Richard Davidson and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the study is one of the first intensive examinations of the long-term effects of meditation, which some scientists believe can reshape the brain in positive ways.
This fall, Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Keck lab, leaked a few preliminary details about what his team has learned by examining these champion thinkers. One of the monks, the professor says, showed considerably higher levels of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with positive emotions, than anyone else the lab has observed.
During the past two years, several monks have followed, traveling from India and Tibet to complete batteries of tests at UW-Madison's W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, where they are taking part in an extraordinary venture to understand the potential of the mind. Forged jointly by UW Professor Richard Davidson and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the study is one of the first intensive examinations of the long-term effects of meditation, which some scientists believe can reshape the brain in positive ways.
This fall, Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Keck lab, leaked a few preliminary details about what his team has learned by examining these champion thinkers. One of the monks, the professor says, showed considerably higher levels of activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with positive emotions, than anyone else the lab has observed.
That finding hints at the transformative power of meditation, a contemplative practice that has been a tradition of Buddhist religions for more than two millennia. Davidson, a devotee of meditation in his own life for thirty years, has begun to study how the practice may help some people become calmer, happier, and even healthier.
“Emotions, particularly strong emotions, can hijack the mind; they kind of take us over,” says Davidson. “Meditation doesn't diminish those emotions per se, but it loosens the grip emotion has.”
In another small experiment, Davidson brought in Jon Kabat-Zinn, a meditation expert from a stress-reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts, to teach the practice to employees of a Madison biotechnology company. After two months of meditation training, most of the participants reported feeling more energy and less stress, and brain scans confirmed that activity in the good-feeling zones of their brains had increased. Additionally, those who meditated showed increased immune response to a flu shot, suggesting that people may in some cases be able to think their way to better health.
— M. P.
“Emotions, particularly strong emotions, can hijack the mind; they kind of take us over,” says Davidson. “Meditation doesn't diminish those emotions per se, but it loosens the grip emotion has.”
In another small experiment, Davidson brought in Jon Kabat-Zinn, a meditation expert from a stress-reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts, to teach the practice to employees of a Madison biotechnology company. After two months of meditation training, most of the participants reported feeling more energy and less stress, and brain scans confirmed that activity in the good-feeling zones of their brains had increased. Additionally, those who meditated showed increased immune response to a flu shot, suggesting that people may in some cases be able to think their way to better health.
— M. P.
Wisconsin Ideas
Cardiologists at the Medical School have developed ways of determining a person's vascular age, a figure that assesses the risk of heart disease and stroke. Based on ultrasound images of the carotid arteries in the neck, the calculation assesses how much artery walls have thickened over time, one of the telltale risk factors for heart disease and stroke. Combined with traditional assessments like blood pressure and cholesterol readings, the “age” could help illuminate the need for preventive steps and lifestyle changes.
As Hurricane Isabel sauntered toward the Carolina shores in September, UW-Madison's tropical cyclone research team was holed up in a computer lab, helping analyze the storm and predict its course. The team created a series of images based on real-time satellite data, which were used by the National Hurricane Center, the Weather Channel, and other storm trackers.
A lab mouse missing a key gene has so far proven to be impervious to weight gain and Type II diabetes, two of the negative effects of a high-calorie, high-fat diet. The gene produces enzymes associated with the production of fatty acids, and researchers believe that people who don't have it may stay lean and healthy even when eating fatty foods.
A technique developed to fight erosion in Wisconsin is now busting dust in Iraq. With the help of the U.S. Marine Corps, engineering professor Aicardo Roa-Espinosa adapted a method of bonding soil to keep desert sands from kicking up when helicopters land, creating potentially dangerous, blinding clouds. Helicopter landing zones in Iraq and Kuwait have been treated with the technique to increase pilots' visibility.
As Hurricane Isabel sauntered toward the Carolina shores in September, UW-Madison's tropical cyclone research team was holed up in a computer lab, helping analyze the storm and predict its course. The team created a series of images based on real-time satellite data, which were used by the National Hurricane Center, the Weather Channel, and other storm trackers.
A lab mouse missing a key gene has so far proven to be impervious to weight gain and Type II diabetes, two of the negative effects of a high-calorie, high-fat diet. The gene produces enzymes associated with the production of fatty acids, and researchers believe that people who don't have it may stay lean and healthy even when eating fatty foods.
A technique developed to fight erosion in Wisconsin is now busting dust in Iraq. With the help of the U.S. Marine Corps, engineering professor Aicardo Roa-Espinosa adapted a method of bonding soil to keep desert sands from kicking up when helicopters land, creating potentially dangerous, blinding clouds. Helicopter landing zones in Iraq and Kuwait have been treated with the technique to increase pilots' visibility.
