Learning from and through Games

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Published on Sunday, 04 November 2012 20:17

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Learning From and Through Games

Posted November 3rd, 2005 by Nick Hunter

Philip Tan and Jessica Irish

Introduction
Over the past decade, interactive digital entertainment ? computer and video games, have made significant strides in developing immersive worlds, interactive story, massively multiplayer online communities, and tackling broader range of themes and human experience. Yet, few if any examples exist of how this medium might be used to support learning. Traditional "edutainment" is based on limited pedagogical models, and does not take advantage of the games' potential to simulate phenomena, engage the player through story, express ideas creatively, or collaborate with other players. The word edutainment was used to describe educational games as well as function as a brand identity but there was a marketing debacle around some of the "edutainment games" some years ago. Because of certain creative decisions regarding those games and the resulting economic fallout, the games industry is wary of reentering the space. An increasing number of developers are recognizing the potential for revenue that exists for educational games. Educational publishers are realizing that games are a competition for students' attention these days. Several non-profit organizations too are using games for community building purposes.

The Education Arcade
The games that are made at the Educational Arcade are based on what its researchers observe of kids in the classrooms and combine this with the lessons game developers and console manufacturers have learnt over the years of how to get their audiences engaged within the medium by making compelling games and control systems. The Education Arcade draws on the wealth of content within the educational sphere and focuses on the obvious need to have students retain the content they learn from the academic fields and their teachers. The aim is also to look at learning in general and generate prototypes that would benefit the game developers as well as teachers and schools.

The Education Arcade is organizing a special conference to be held in conjunction with E3 in May 2004, in collaboration with the Entertainment Software Association. The speakers include leaders invited from the academy, industry and classroom. Topics and panels at this event will include themes like:

• Are Games Educational?
• From Simulation to Interaction
• Fostering Games Literacy
• Building Partnerships Among Universities, Industry, and Public Institutions
• Making Tools for Making Games
• Commercial and Educational Successes
• New Collaborators: Making the Next Move
• Roundtables on Educational, Technical, Creative, and Market Trends

Thoughts on Designing Educational Games
The gameplay should be able to compete with the kind of games that the students are playing at home, in order to catch and retain their attention.

The approach of buying a supposedly educational game for one's kid and sneaking it into his/her video game collection with the hope that it might induce learning is pretty unproductive. The view at the Educational Arcade is that games that are used for teaching purposes should be specifically designed for the classroom. They should be supplied along with other reading, learning and teaching materials, which will help both, the teacher and the students to make the maximum use of the game.

Game designers need to realize that while they may be good at making entertainment games, this same skill may not apply in terms of educational games. They often randomly tweak the content in order to make the game more entertaining and may not realize that in the educational context, this could lead to wrong knowledge being obtained by students.

There is also an opposition from people in academia to the concept of using games in education ? it has taken a lot of effort to make academia realize that the games industry has something to offer the field of education.

The concept of games literacy is also gaining currency ? this means enabling students to learn about all that goes into the actual production of the game. Through this, they develop an expertise in production as well as an understanding to judge in a critical manner, the kinds of games they play, the choices they make among these, and what aspects of the gameplay they enjoy and which ones they don't.

Examples of Games Created by The Education Arcade
Supercharged
In the world of Supercharged, the player races through mazes consisting
of electrostatic forces, magnetic fields, and electric fields by
adopting the properties of charged particles and placing other charges
in the environment. This game was originally conceived as a 3D game,
using the same game engine as Grand Theft Auto. The team soon realized
that the 3D game wasn't really desirable ? it crashed a lot when they
tried to implement it and was very unstable. To salvage the project,
they decided to make a 2D game with the same idea. They found that this
was much easier and conveyed the same concepts that they wanted to
convey quite effectively.
http://educationarcade.org/gtt/EM/Intro.htm

Environmental Detectives
Environmental Detectives is an outdoor game in which players using GPS
guided handheld computers try to uncover the source of a toxic spill by
interviewing virtual characters and conducting large scale simulated
environmental measurements and analyzing data. This game has been run
at three sites, including MIT, a nearby nature center, and a local high
school. Early research has shown that this mode of learning is
successful in engaging university and secondary school students in
large scale environmental engineering studies, and providing an
authentic mode of scientific investigation.

http://education.mit.edu/ar/

Revolution
The current project of The Education Arcade is Revolution, a
multiplayer online role-playing game set during the American War for
Independence. They are using the Neverwinter Nights game engine and
modifying it to suit their needs. They are collaborating with faculty
from the MIT history department to ensure the authenticity of the game
and its various elements ? the economy at that time, the role of the
individuals in the community, etc.

Revolution would be a multiplayer 3D game where
each player navigates the space of the town, interacts with other
players, and is given the opportunity to act in and react to various
events that in one way or another represent the coming of the war.
Players begin by choosing the role they wish to play from a set of
predefined characters. Once this is finished, players immediately find
themselves within the world of the game where they can explore and
improvise their own narrative based on the resources available to them,
as well as their interactions with other players.

Revolution is designed to be educational and
engaging, and can be played as a classroom activity. In a classroom
setting, Revolution would essentially take the place of a live
role-playing exercise, substituting a virtual space for the space of
classroom performance. A typical session (or "lesson") will consist of
students in a networked computer lab setting, all participating in the
shared experience from individual terminals, after which a teacher-led
discussion or some other classroom-oriented event would follow.
Link on this site

Tropical America by OnRamp Arts
Background
Tropical America was a two-year project (2001-2002), funded by the Department of Education as an alternative media literacy program around issues of computer gaming and youth violence. Tropical America inverts the traditional 'first-person shooter' video game model. Its game design features both an exploration and an archive of the interconnections of historical events, creating a model new media 'textbook'. The game was developed by Belmont High School students in Los Angeles, most of who were from recent immigrant families, in collaboration with artists and teachers. OnRamp wanted to create a program that had some continuity in social sciences and history and also helped inform the curriculum of the teachers in the school.

The game was the third of three projects. The first project involved conceptualizing a superhero and its back-story. The students developed a personal history of a fictional character and the turning points in its life. The project involved the production of a series of animations from the 12 best stories generated. The second project dealt with ideas of space. The kids looked at interactive movement as a structure for a narrative. They analyzed their own local areas (apartment, block or street) and wrote a mystery story set amidst their own locale. The students were then assembled into five different groups (5-7 students each). There were different themes provided to them, such as being young and female and walking down the street, or growing up without a father. One boy wrote about turning his father into a tree planted in his front yard, so that he may have roots and also watch his son grow up! The kids then tried to find a spatial way to navigate through the stories. For each story, they chose formats that best fit the metaphor and theme and modeled it appropriately.

Tropical America had more complexity and interactivity. First, the project organizers had to make sure the kids understood why they were working with them. At first, the kids thought the adults were trying to make money of them. As the project went on and the kids were able to build trust, those that were most dubious at first became the most involved.

Game Development
The name Tropical America was inspired by the similarly titled Los Angeles mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, of a Native American being crucified on an American eagle, which was subsequently whitewashed in 1932. Juan Davis, the writer helping OnRamp with the project, broke the discussions down into character development. The students were street smart and savvy, but a lot of them were ignorant about history, not even knowing who Columbus was. So they began by talking about historical moments and thinking about why they spoke Spanish, ate the foods they ate, etc. Many of the kids were immigrants from South American countries, so immigration came up as an important theme. The students also came across a whole lot of data that was symbolic (Grapes brought over to America by Europeans for communion, the importance of quilting, the status of women?) It was eventually decided that the premise of the game would have the player as the sole survivor of a massacre (based on a real historical massacre). His aim is to find out what happened and honor those that were killed. In most violent video games, the aim is to kill everyone; here everyone's already dead at the starting of the game! A strong sense of magic realism was incorporated in the game. The kids chose key moments and symbols and gave them larger meanings. They researched source texts and built upon the game.

As one finishes the game, one honors the name of one of the victims and gives them a proper burial. As one repeatedly plays the game, one build up a graveyard of those that one has helped honor. In this way, the player become a hero and honors the history of Tropical America. The game is linked to a HTML database of interrelated texts, historicized moments and images. The database keeps the game relevant without inundating it with details. It is a good starting point to engage the kids and debate moments that have actually happened, more than just what happened in the game. It encourages reading and reflection as well as fun.

Release and follow up
When the game was released, OnRamp had a reception with the families of all the kids. Culturally, it was very important to involve them in the process; many of the family members didn't speak English and were happy to know that their kids were creating such good work. This reception helped to solidify the game/project in their community and made them feel that they had actual ownership over the game.

Further Readings and References

Books

1. Center for Media Education Report: Growing Up in a Culture of Simulation
2. David Cohen and Stephen A. MacKeith, The Development of Imagination: The
   Private Worlds of Childhood (New York, Routledge, 1992)
3. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in
   Work and Play (Jossey-Bass, 2000)
4. Edward Fiske, Smart Schools, Smart Kids: Why Do Some Schools Work? (Reprint) (Touchstone Books, 1992)
5. James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
6. Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in The Crib: Minds, Brains and How Children
   Learn (William Morrow, 1999)
7. Lt. Colonel Grossman and Gloria Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids
   to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence
   (Crown, 1999)
8. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (3rd Edition) (John Wiley & Sons, 1998)
9. David Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1982)

Links

1. David Siqueiros, a politically active Mexican muralist, whose mural "Tropical America" inspired the whitewashing theme in the game.
2. The Center for Media Literacy has resources to teach the subject to youth and adults.
3. The University of Oregon Media Literacy Review for educators.
4. Citizens for Media Literacy promotes citizenship through media literacy.

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Published on Sunday, 04 November 2012 19:48

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Define Objectives

What do you want the students to learn? It's very important to keep this idea central to planning your lesson and choosing or designing a game, or you may end up using a game in which the material to be learned is bypassed by the players.

Decide what sort of game and storyline (if appropriate)

You may want to use a game that you already know is fun, like a trivia game, your favorite board game, or a relay race, and use that as a base for the rules.

• Will this be a race, a quiz bowl, a simulation, or some other kind of game?
• Should the students play individually or in teams? If they have teams, make sure that they come up with cool names.
• Will they compete against each other or just for a score?

If players are not competing against each other, you will definitely want some kind of storyline for your game.

• Are the students playing prospectors, paleontologists, or explorers?
• Are the students trying to save a simulated town from a geologic hazard?
• Are players reconstructing changes that have taken place through geologic time?

Break Objectives down into Challenges

It is also possible and often desirable, to have multiple levels of challenge.

• For a trivia game, the challenges are individual questions.
• For other types of games, they might be identifications, measurements, or other tasks.

Once a certain number of challenges have been accomplished, it's time to move on to harder tasks or a different kind of task.

Design Rewards

Appropriate prizes for completing or winning a game include:

• Certificates
• Snacks
• Small prizes like interesting rocks (for geologists)
• Grades - handle with care!

However, for a long-running project, early success could be rewarded with immediate admission to the next level.

Build Game

Work out the rules and print or assemble physical apparatus like cards, boards, etc. or write Java applets.

Although this can take a fair bit of time, and even some money, good-quality pieces are reusable, and exciting for students.

Test Game

This is a very important step! Have your playtesters assess issues like:

• Fun (engagement)
• Ease of play
• How long the game takes
• Most importantly, the integration of learning objectives into gameplay

If possible administer a pre- and post-test on the material to be learned before and after the game.

Run Game

If the students will be playing on teams, don't let them sort themselves into teams. Either assign them randomly or make sure that they are balanced in terms of experience with the subject.

• Students should, however, name their own teams. If they balk, threaten to think of names for them. Some potential team names to motivate students to come up with their own: the Terrific Trilobites, the Fighting Feldspars, the Mighty Magmas....

While running a game, the major concerns will be to prevent cheating and, sometimes, especially with a physical game, to enforce safety issues.

Competitive or often even cooperative games are likely to make for a very noisy classroom.

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Published on Sunday, 04 November 2012 20:08

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New York Launches Public School Curriculum Based on Playing ...

Games have long played a role in classrooms, but next month marks the launch of the first U.S. public school curriculum based entirely on game-inspired learning. Select sixth graders can look forward to playing video games such as "Little Big Planet" and "Civilization," as well as non-digital games ranging from role-playing scenarios to board games and card games.

But this goes beyond guiding your virtual settlers in "Oregon Trail" during classroom free time. The Quest to Learn (Q2L) school, based in Manhattan, hopes its guided approach can help students take on the role of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers and evolutionary biologists.

"It is important to note that Quest is not a school where children spend their day playing commercial videogames," says the Q2L website. A look at the school's curriculum confirms a far more ambitious and hands-on approach to education -- after all, the school does abide by New YorkState education standards. The 20 to 25 students in each class, each equipped with a laptop, attend four 90-minute periods each day, rather than study individual subjects.

In one sample curriculum, students create a graphic novel based on the epic Babylonian poem "Gilgamesh," record their understanding of ancient Mesopotamian culture though geographer and anthropologist journals, and play the strategic board game "Settlers of Catan." Google Earth comes into play as a tool to explore the regions of ancient Mesopotamia.

Students may also play the evolution-inspired video game "Spore," but they get equally serious time with digital tools ranging from Maya 3D modeling to Adobe Flash. If anything, Q2L students may emerge as some of the most digitally savvy pupils of their peer group.

New York City education officials certainly hope that the school can represent the tip of a "transformative" revolution, according to Metropolis. Q2L will start with sixth graders and add a grade each year until it reaches the high school senior level.

The school originated from the vision of a nonprofit called Institute of Play, and has support from ParsonsSchool for Design. Financial backing to the tune of $1 million comes from donors such as the Gates Foundation, Intel, and the MacArthur Foundation, but New York City plans to take over funding by 2015.

That public money also means Q2L students must take the same math and reading tests as other New York students -- after all, school isn't purely a lark. But as we know here at PopSci, getting an education need not run counter to enjoyment.

Social Learning through Gaming

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Published on Sunday, 04 November 2012 19:38

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Elaine M. Raybourn

Sandia National Laboratories*

P.O. Box 5800 MS 1188

Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA

+1 505 844 7975

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Annika Waern

Swedish Institute of Computer Science

P.O. Box 1263

SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden

+46-8-633 15 00

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Information

Systems]: User/Machine Systems?Software Psychology

Keywords: Games, learning, social behavior, collaboration, edutainment, design.

Introduction

Throughout human history we have played and gamed. According to Eric Berne (1964), author of Games People Play, human relationships are in fact comprised of game playing behaviors. Huizinga [1] observes that playing games is one of the most common ways to form new groups ? groups formed from playing games tend to become stable. Since playing games is such an important factor in the human socialization process, a natural extension is to believe that we learn social behavior from playing games. But while the general opinion holds this to be true for sports, other types of gaming, in particular computer gaming is rather seen as more anti -social than socializing behavior. This view has recently become challenged from many researchers, both through studies of children gaming behavior and the study of multi ? player online role-playing games including MUDs.

Role-Playing Games Inspired by Theatre

Games inspired by theatre have a long tradition as therapeutic tools, originating in Vienna (and later on in US) with psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno's work in the 1920s. Moreno has inspired three types of role playing genres that are in active use in therapy and education today: the psychodrama, intended as a therapeutic tool, the genre of pedagogical theatre, and finally role play for professional training. During the eighties and the nineties the genre extended into live action role playing, a genre that has taken inspiration both from traditional table ?top role playing, theatre sport, and historical reenactment. This genre, sometimes called Participatory Theatre, is in rapid development, and there exists professional development of role playing games, such as games focusing on ethical training for high -school students. To further explore the pedagogical and training potentials of gaming, it is important to bring in the experiences from this long tradition of pedagogical gaming into the computer game and simulation game genre [2].

Social Learning in Games

Games have long provided a structured environment for quickly learning complex behaviors. Most games used in a professional context fall into the following categories: teaching, training, operations research, therapy, and entertainment [3]. Among the fields that most use games for teaching and training are management science, economics, psychology, sociology, political science, military science, and education. Games are often used for training and teaching interpersonal and intercultural communication principles and skills. Social simulation and computer -based role-playing games can help adults explore skills, methods, and concepts rapidly within an engaging nonthreatening environment ripe with experiential and behavioral learning components [4], [5]. Learning in games can be simultaneous and multilevel. Players may learn from (1) contextual information embedded in the dynamics of the game, (2) the organic process generated by the game, and (3) through the risks, benefits, costs, outcomes, and rewards of alternative strategies that result from decision making [6]. Some games provide players the unique opportunity to operate on these levels simultaneously; demonstrating that decision-making and applying newly learned tools or skills in multicultural and multinational organizational contexts is a complex, multilevel social process.

Social Focus in Game Design

Designing games also provides the design team an opportunity to practice new behaviors and experiment with skills, attitudes, behavioral models, and theoretical perspectives. Shubik [3, p. 189] asserted that "the act of game construction and playing forces us to specify fully scenarios and processes; it challenges imagination and logic. It forces us to pay attention to completeness and consistency, but above all toprocess and playability." It might be said that game design is itself a game for many designers, and hence an opportunity to become engaged in creative, imaginative, highly focused play. According to Swartout and van Lent [7, p. 33 -4], ?For conventional software, design is usually driven by a specification or set of requirements. In game design, the driving force is the user?s experience. Game designers try to imagine what players will experience as they work their way through the game, trying to deliver the most exciting and compelling experience possible. ? But what exactly are players and designers learning through game play, or through the design of compelling experiential activities? If gamers are developing new skills, is this skill development lasting? Are the skills applicable and transferable in diverse contexts? How does compelling game design sustain player discovery and social learning over time?

The Workshop

We seek to bring together researchers, academics, and designers from several disciplines, including game design, development, communication, psychology, computer science, graphics, visual art, etc. who are deeply interested in understanding more about social learning effects from playing games in technology -mediated settings such as computer or video games, augmented reality games, virtual reality, mobile devices, live action role plays, massively multi-player online role playing games (MMORPG), and so on. We are interested in what (if anything) players learn within the game setting that can be successfully transferred to similar or different situations or social settings outside of the game context? and we are also interested in how we, as game designers, create games that provide learning opportunities for lasting skills development that extend out of the game and into real life.

We aim for a single -day workshop, and will design sessions based around themes that emerge from the accepted position papers. The workshop will be highly interactive, allowing time for questions and discussion. Finally, we invite all workshop participants to submit extended versions of their position papers to a special issue of the journal ?Interactive Technology and Smart Education? on learning from gaming technology to be published in the winter of 2005.

ORGANIZERS? BACKGROUNDS

Elaine M. Raybourn has a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication with an emphasis in Human?Computer Interaction. Her research concerns intelligent community-based systems, social-process simulation games, intercultural learning, and collaborative virtual environments. Current efforts include designing a training game and social simulations that stimulate intercultural awareness and strategic thinking. Elaine was an ERCIM (European Consortium for Research in Informatics and Mathematics) fellow from 2001-2003, is a member of Sandia National Laboratories, and National Laboratory Professor at the University of New Mexico?s Department of Communication & Journalism, Institute for Organizational Communication. She has published in various refereed outlets and co-organized several ACM and IEEE workshops including Intercultural Communication as a Framework for Design for GROUP 99; Storytelling in Collaborative Settings for CSCW 02, and CVE 02; Supporting Intercultural Computer- Mediated Discourse for CHI 03, and a 3?day workshop on Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises for IEEE in 02 and 03; and a 3-day workshop on The Impact of Culture on Space, Nature, and the Built Environment for Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in 1998.

Annika Waern holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. She has a long background in technology and design of intelligent interfaces, with a particular focus on user - adaptive information systems. She has published in various refereed outlets and previously organized workshops for the Intelligent User Interfaces conference and ERCIM (User Interfaces for All). During the years of 2000 - 2003, Annika worked as the CTO of the Swedish company Gamefederation, acting as the chief architect for a platform for on -line game services. Annika is now working as a senior researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Her current research focus is user ? and context-aware games and story-telling systems, with a particular focus on computer supp ort for role-playing games in augmented reality. At SICS, she organizes a multidisciplinary research theme on game research, and recently organized a workshop on interactive narratives at the Stockholm University (September 2003).

*Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under Contract DEAC0494AL85000.

REFERENCES

1. Huizinga, Johan. (1950) Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture. Beacon Press, Boston.

2. Nylander, S. and Waern, A. (2002). Interaction Acts for Device Independent Gaming. In Playing with the future, Manchester, April 2002. Also SICS Technical Report 2002:04.

3. Shubik, M. (1989). Gaming: Theory and practice, past and future. Simulation & Games , 20, 2, 194-189.

4. Raybourn, E. M. (2003). Design Cycle Usability and Evaluations of an Intercultural Virtual Simulation Game for Collaborative Virtual Learning . In C. Ghaoui (Ed.), Usability Evaluation of Online Learning Programs, Information Science Publishing, 233 -53.

5. Raybourn, E. M. (2001). Designing an Emergent Culture of Negotiation in Collaborative Virtual Communities: The DomeCityMOO Simulation. In E. Churchill, D. Snowden, & A. Munro (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Places and Spaces for Inteaction , Springer, London UK, 247-64.

6. Sisk, D. A. (1995). Simulation games as training tools. In Sandra M. Fowler and Monica G. Mumford (Eds.) Intercultural sourcebook: Cross -cultural training methods, 1. Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press, 81-92.

7. Swartout, W., van Lent, M. (2003, July). Making a game of system design. Communications of the ACM 46, 7, 32-9.