Soft Modding in Two Out-of-School Virtual Worlds-Based Programs

Educators and policymakers have shown increased interest in using after school programs to accomplish a wide variety of goals. One tactic used to leverage student interest while encouraging productive learning and engagement with both academic and nonacademic school activities has been to incorporate games and digital media into after school programs. This cross-case analysis examines two after school programs that leverage virtual environments: Global Kid’s “I Dig Science,” which employed the virtual platform Teen Second Life; and Games, Learning, and Society’s Casual Learning Lab, which used the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.

The worked example presented in this paper examines representative key moments from each program that we conceptualize as instances of soft modding (Gee and Hayes 2010a; 2010b); that is, modding that involves literacy practices that center on the design of social structures or the engineering of social interaction around the software of a video game or simulation. Gee (2009) equates such skills with the kinds of emotional intelligence necessary for success in the 21st-century workplace and in everyday life. We adopt the recently conceptualized practice of soft modding as a lens through which to examine its productive elements. In both after school programs, soft modding incorporated design principles along with important 21st-century literacies such as argumentation and civic engagement. In fact, the ways in which the design processes involved with soft modding were enacted in these spaces essentially constituted civic engagement. This placed the design processes associated with soft modding at the center of the learning process because it became an authentic problem-solving process.