Learning from and through Games
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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.
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
- Center for Media Education Report: Growing Up in a Culture of Simulation
- David Cohen and Stephen A. MacKeith, The Development of Imagination: The
Private Worlds of Childhood (New York, Routledge, 1992) - Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in
Work and Play (Jossey-Bass, 2000) - Edward Fiske, Smart Schools, Smart Kids: Why Do Some Schools Work? (Reprint) (Touchstone Books, 1992)
- James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
- Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in The Crib: Minds, Brains and How Children
Learn (William Morrow, 1999) - 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) - Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (3rd Edition) (John Wiley & Sons, 1998)
- David Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1982)
Links
- David Siqueiros, a politically active Mexican muralist, whose mural "Tropical America" inspired the whitewashing theme in the game.
- The Center for Media Literacy has resources to teach the subject to youth and adults.
- The University of Oregon Media Literacy Review for educators.
- Citizens for Media Literacy promotes citizenship through media literacy.
