PILOTed

Gaming the Brain

Yesterday, in an ASUGSV preconference webinar, Michael Moe, Lauri Järvilehto, Marja Konttinen, and Tom Kalinske discussed how education around the world is at an inflection point, and what we can expect.

Games have always been engaging and instructional. A game is nothing more than complex problems waiting to be solved. For example, Lauri’s young daughter knows 140 Pokémon by heart, but it’s questionable that that will be a skill that will prove useful later in life. The issue has been that fun games are typically low efficacy for targeted knowledge and skills acquisition, and games that were designed primarily for learning have been boring. And gamification, trying to lay game-like elements over traditional learning activities, has shown some but limited utility.

While the technology for engaging video games has been around for a while, we are just starting to learn how to harness play scalably, in order to create learning opportunities that are both engaging and that teach to learning objectives.

A great game puts you into flow. It’s challenging enough to remain interesting, but not too challenging to become frustrating. When you are accomplishing, growing, and develop a sense of competence you are hooked. When you first feel a task is impossible, and then realize you can and then have solved it, you experience fiero. The human mind is conditioned to play, and play becomes a game when people start seeing how well they are doing; great games involve others as a team and/or as competitors. In games, we become conditioned toward action -> fail –> learn -> succeed -> reward, a pattern inherent in the growth mindset, persistence, and grit.

Both schools and learning content are changing to adapt to game-based learning.

Games for learning have to be able to stand on their own as fun, challenging games, AND they have to have learning goals. Game developers are finding that they need to interact closely with subject matter experts during game design in ways that previous instructional designers never did. It’s not enough to find the formulas and algorithms that underlie the field; the game has to incorporate what makes the field fun and challenging. When you are playing a game, and your adrenaline and heartbeat go up, when the game makes you cry and laugh, the experience and learning are deep and personal. A great learning game ignites the same emotional attachments in the game play that practitioners experience when they practice.

On the other hand, learning through a game is not like learning from a book. Games aren’t linear. Players have a degree of agency not normally experienced in school. Games generally have multiple outcomes and multiple paths. Early adopter teachers have been using video games like Minecraft and World of Warcraft to teach for years, and we are starting to see their best practices filter through to other classrooms.

Examples of how the game-based learning is evolving include

• Big Bang Legends from Lauri’s and Marja’s company, Lightneer, which is a problem solving game around particle physics.
• Minecraft and MinecraftEDU, now from Microsoft, which engage kids to build, program, and problem solve
• And TeacherGaming which is surrounding engaging commercial games with educational activities so that they can be utilized by teachers.

It’s great when kids (all of us really) are so absorbed in what we are doing that we don’t even realize we are learning. This happens in great games, and also in problem-based learning.

And if you’re interested in problem-based learning, maybe join us on Edchat Interactive Thursday March 9 as Kevin Brookhouser discusses how to implement 20Time learning.

Real Cool for School

On August 24 (my birthday, by the way)  First Lady Michelle Obama announced ThinkZone Games as the grand prize winner in the Reach Higher Career App Challenge! ThinkZone Games will receive $100,000 and additional sponsor prizes valued at $300,000 for our career exploration mobile app Hats & Ladders.

If you're going to be at the EdNet Conference Sept 25-27, and want to talk about the place of games in our education system, or about Edchat Interactive, or about the education market, contact us.

 

Games in Education Symposium Wrapup

On August 6-7, 1^st Playable hosted the annual Games in Education Symposium in Albany, NY.

This is a free event for educators to get hands on advice in game based learning, and I was able to attend (and present) on the first day.

Keynote with Peggy Sheehy

The symposium started with Peggy Sheehy keynoting. “There’s a word for most games used in the classroom,” she began, “boring.”

But even bad games can have educational value, and the best game based curricula involves the kids in the design process. Begin with two questions for the kids:

1. How can I best teach this?
2. How do you want to learn it?

Kids today are the future, and the future isn’t sitting in rows taking tests. Schools need to be more like a game; when you get it wrong, you just do it again until you know how to do it right. In school in particular, and in society in general, we pit the seriousness of work against the frivolity of play, when we should be maximizing the outputs of work through deploying fun and engagement of play.

There were tons of breakout sessions, from fun ways to flip your classroom, digital games of Middle School Science Learning, Teaching Computer Science with App Inventor,  and the NY STEAM Girl’s Collaborative.

ARGs with Paul Darvasi and John Fallon

Using the real world as the field of play. Paul Darvasi and John Fallon (the real one, not the guy at
Pearson) have created Alternative Reality Games to teach a variety of subjects. One of the most recent was to teach digital literacy and privacy. Students became immersed in a mystery, trying to figure out who was trying to amass information on US and Canadian citizens in order to control them, and in the process found out just how much information was available about them, how that information could be used against them, and how to protect their identities. Another recent game was the Ward Game, re-enacting the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the classroom. Their tips:

1. Develop a compelling narrative and story
2. Create emotional connections
3. Repurpose space in the classroom and school and place them into the game (diplomas, newspaper articles, announcements, posters, etc.)
4. Create false documents that look like real ones
5. Use social media, like fictional characters on FB or videos on YouTube
6. Get collaborators who can play characters or face email or social media accounts
7. Use a variety of game mechanics, like quests and missions, timers, puzzles, cyphers, codes
8. The correct solution to a puzzle or quest must be obviously correct to the participants

Game Jam with Games4Ed

After lunch, Kimberly Heftje, Marianne Malmstrom, Steve Isaacs, and I (all of Games4Ed) ran a 45 minute session where participants broke into small groups to create their own game based learning curriculum. Four groups successfully created activities that used existing games to teach science, ELA, and math along with 21^st century skills such as problem solving, planning, and collaboration. All participants will be able to re-enact those processes back in their own schools to expand on that curriculum or to create their own with their fellow educators.

Closing with Marianne Malmstrom

In a closing session for the day, Marianne Malmstrom gave a talk on creating space for student-driven learning.

Are the things we teach and assess in education the most important things for students to learn? If we fill up schools and class time with all the stuff in the standards and assessments, there is no place left for learning, we will be too busy teaching.

As the adults in the room, we are the experts in life; we don’t have to be the experts in content. And bookending Peggy’s comment, Marianne’s conclusion was that if we would just listen to the kids, they’ll tell us how to teach them.

My only regret is that I was not able to stay around for the second day. I heard Steve Isaacs’s keynote was epic!

Coming Up

I am in three speaking proposals for SxSW Edu. Please vote:

• ARG! Let’s Create Games for Learning: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/54757
• Power Up STEM Professional Development with Games: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/56393
• Edu-gaming: money, morals, and games in classrooms: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/53244

We have a great lineup for Edchat Interactive over the next week:

• August 20: Hacking Education with Mark Barnes: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/august-20-hacking-education
• August 25: Games Jams with Matt Farber: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/mattfarberaug2015

Looking to see as many of you as possible at the BMO Back to School Conference in NY September 10 and at Ednet 2015 in Atlanta October 4-6.

Serious Play Conference

The Serious Play Conference deals with the big issues of society, and in a fun way.

Did you know that there is research that shows the value of diversity? Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon
abstracted the data that indicates:

• Expertise diversity leads to innovation, the more diverse, the more innovative
• More diversity leads to more conflict, but the conflict sparks useful desirable innovation
• A key characteristic of a leader, one that leads to highly functioning teams, is trust; if the team members believe the leader has their back, they will be considerable more effective.
• Gender and age diversity lead to consistently better results, and, in fact, are more highly associated with success than ethnic diversity

We all know that intellectual knowledge is just a fraction of what we need in order to live, and that historically the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) were taught through societal institutions such as family, apprenticeship, and religion.

Today, these KSAs can be taught via games. Here are three examples.

Dojo, by GameDesk, helps people learn to regulate their emotions and behaviors. Have you ever wanted
to calm yourself down, or to focus on one thing instead of … squirrel? Instead of trying to learn through reading or listening, you could attach biofeedback devices and learn and practice through Dojo. Imagine if students could learn these skills in schools? You can see how Dojo works in this video.

What if you could learn history through art? How was Picasso’s art influenced by society and historical events, and how did his art reflect on and impact the world around him? Andre Thomas of Texas A&M founded Live Lab to leverage the university’s Game Design students, Professional game designers, and Electronic Arts’ publishing might to create games that excite and motivate students. While Universities often produce games that show results in research trials, that’s where most university projects stop. The goal of Live Lab is to take these prototypes, finish them, and produce and distribute games that are backed up by research.

Or, what if we all had the skills to detect situations that lead to rape and the skills to defuse the situation? Decisions that Matter has been tested with hundreds of college students yielding substantial, if not yet published, results. The game was produced at a cost in excess of $1M through grants from NSF.

 With all these games, impact has been proven, what remains unknown is how to get these games into the hands of thousands or millions of students who can benefit, and how do you make these operations sustainable. Those questions are yet to be answered, although we are hoping that Games4Ed can lower the barriers.

Games for Learning: What makes games good?

The Games for Learning Summit in NYC, organized by the US Department of Education, dove into the Why and the How of games in education with a passion. Richard Culatta from the Dept. of Ed. spoke on what makes the best games, saying they give feedback quickly – every 10 seconds – and they give students the freedom to make choices. There is a zone, Culatta said, between “what I can’t do” and “what I can do” called the zone of proximal development. This is “what I can do with some support,” and this is where learning happens. Good games adapt to learner needs to find that zone, and keep students engaged so they stay there. The value of play is that it allows for safe failure. When students don’t fear failure they will try again and again; games allow the opportunity to keep playing until the student succeeds.

Games are optimal for education for another reason, as well. It’s important to test students’ knowledge, or educators won’t know who “gets” the material and who doesn’t. And with games, assessment can happen in the background. Assessments can be fun and engaging. With games, curricula are transformed into challenging design elements.

One of the fantastic speakers was Refranz Davis, who by her own admission is a gamer, so she can’t keep calm. Her nephew gets bored with school and homework, but he can spend hours perfecting his Minecraft skills. He goes to YouTube and does research, he learns from it, and then he tries to buildin Minecraft. Her son prepares for a history test by copying 45 minutes of notes beforehand. He’s completely disengaged with history in school. But then he turns around and plays Assassin’s Creed, which is like a living history. He does research on the characters he finds, like Paul Revere, and it has kindled in him a love of history. But he still doesn’t like history the way it’s taught in the classroom.

Good game developers ask: “what do our users want and how can we make what they think they want, better?” This doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the way school is taught. But look at the results: engaged players who voluntarily spend extra hours acquiring skills and knowledge. We have to remember that our goal isn’t for every student to know the dates of the Civil War. We are trying to build better people, better students, better scholars.  

Michael Gallagher, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, made a compelling point that there are 400 universities with video game curricula, a major that didn’t even exist five years ago. There is a growing shortage of coders. We will need 1.4 million coders over the next 10 years, while there will only be 400,000 Computer Science graduates. Educators repeatedly ask him, “how can I implement game based learning in my schools.” His reply, “Let your students be the advocate for games in education”. I have to agree with him.

Paul Cross, from Ubisoft, got into the details of game design by reiterating what journalists already know: you need to start out with a hook. The intro is critical to getting people engaged in a game--it creates a story and a reason for staying in the game.

He explained that Guitar Hero is both a commercial and teaching success because it wasn’t built from the standpoint of “let’s make music lessons better.” The process of innovation doesn't mean making something better; innovation is transformative. People wanted to play the music they liked and they didn’t like to practice. Guitar Hero let’s them do that and have fun while learning. You have to start with the problems you need to solve, and take the opportunity they give you to innovate.

Jeff Hemenway is from Unity, where they help people build games. He was surprised at how hard it is to convince parents of the value to letting their kids code, play games, or develop games. He quickly outlined a plan for using games for assessment. First, he says, list the Competencies you will develop in the game. Determine what evidence you need for each competency. Then create Actions in the game around the evidence.

Adding a multiple choice question in the middle of a game is good pedagogy.Good learning systems, whether they are mediated by teachers or games

• Provide goals and learning expectations to students

• Allow students to take ownership of their own learning

• Facilitate students as instructional resources for each other

• Provide feedback to move learning forward, and create a structure for students to act on feedback

Games can especially help teachers who may not have been trained in pedagogy around a learning goal.

The Department of Education did an incredible job putting together people from the gaming and entertainment industries, educators, edugame developers, and researchers. You could see the conversations and connections grow.

 

I am proud that the Games4Ed collaborative is helping lead the way so that students can learn by solving engaging and challenging problems.

Education Executives Day at Computers for Youth

I had a great day on Monday, October 13, 2009. I attended the Computers for Youth Education Executives day.

The purpose of the day is for Title I Middle School students from New York City and education executives from around the country to evaluate learning software for the home. At the end of the day, three titles become finalists based on the following criteria:

• improves students' academic competencies
• promotes family involvement in education
• develops students' life-long learning skills (such as planning and reflection)
• motivates students to learn
• increases students' social interaction around learning

This summer, the students attended a two week boot camp, where they learned and worked with twenty different titles. From those titles, they chose twelve nominees.

On Education Executives day, the students presented each title to the education leaders, explained what they learned, what they liked, how they used the software, and what they recommended. The educators were

• Craig Lynch, Officer for Information Technology Services, Chicago Public Schools
• Kate Kemker, Director of Instructional Technology, Florida Department of Education
• Anne McMullan, Insturctional Technology Officer, Klein Independent School District, TX
• Hydra Mendoza, Mayor's Education Advisor, San Francisco
• Themy Sparangis, Chief Technology Director, Education Technology, Los Angeles Unified School District
• Andrea Waters-Winston, Acting Director, Instructional Technology, Atlanta Public Schools.

The kids did a great job. For many, it was their first ever presentation, yet they fully engaged the adult audience as they instructed, demonstrated, and explained. You could see their self-confidence increase as the day progressed, and they found out that what they said mattered.

Following is a list of the programs and my reaction and summary of the educator's thoughts

Wolfquest: Amethyst Mountain

This is a free downloadable program designed to teach wolf ecology at Yellowstone National Park. We all had objections to this program. Wolves gain strength by drinking blood. Wolves can only mate with other wolves of the same color. Students didn't seem to learn about how wolves aid the ecology. Many of the students loved the blood and gore of the program.

Splitter

This is a free game that can be played at a number of sites, including the linked one. It teachers problem solving and some physics principals. You play by cutting wooden objects and joints in order to guide your character to its goal. This was one of three games that is very similar to The Incredible Machine, a game I used to play 20 years ago. The kids loved the game, but not quite as much as World of Goo (below).

Venture Arctic

This game costs $19.99 to download, and there is a free demo available. This game teaches more about ecology than the Wolfquest game, as you balance the needs of carnivores, plant-eaters, and plants over the four seasons. The students never did understand how to balance the needs of the different species in order to have a sustainable environment.

Resilient Planet

This is available as free download or for purchase, and comes from the Jason Project. It also comes with classroom curriculum.

Students explore different biomes, both on land and under the sea, and learn to identify plants and animals while they also do activities. The kids really enjoyed the realism and the graphics, and saw a direct connection between this game and what they needed to learn in school.

World of Goo

You can play free for one hour, or download (this site charges $6.99).

Of the three problem solving games, this is the one the kids liked the best, probably because of the graphics and the immediate feedback. In the other games, the students set up their contraption and then pressed a button to view the results. Players create large structures using balls of goo, and must follow the rules of gravity and physics. The kids found that the game occupied them for at least twenty hours. But, when the kids ran into trouble, they also found they could do searches for solutions.

Fantastic Contraptions

This is a free ad-supported site. It can take up to 15 minutes to load on a slow connection (three minutes on my cable connection).

The kids liked this program, which is similar to World of Goo and Splitter. You build machines that move one piece around obstacles to a goal. Most of the kids, though, could only progress through the first four or five levels, before becoming frustrated. The educators objected to the ads, some of which they thought were inappropriate.

Lure of the Labyrinth

This is a free online game, and it has education guides and lesson plans for teachers or parents.

Your goal is to rescue your dog, which has gone to a smelly world protected by monsters, which must be tricked. The game teaches math concepts, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, ratios, and fractions. While playing the game, students have to solve puzzles using logic and math.

Some of the kids never understood the game and never got into it. The kids who did spend the time and effort to learn the game really enjoyed it. Personally, I thought this was the most engaging game.

Games of Math 4: Division & Fractions

The home edition of this game is $19.95, and the teacher edition is $32.95.

In this game, students practice math problems to accumulate points or money. They use the money to purchase a car. Then they race the car.

Students saw a direct connection between the exercises and what they needed to know at school, but did not like the separation between the drill and practice exercises and the fun parts of the game. They also found most of the problems too easy for Middle School.

Skate Kids Online

This is a game that must be purchased by contacting the company, pricing is not listed on the website, but they provided free subscriptions to Computers for Youth.

Skate Kids is a collection of games that are designed in improve the skills needed for reading like concentration, memory, and attention. The kids generally liked the games, but they could not see the connection between these skills and reading, and thus could not explain to the educators how the program was educational. Some of the students said that their parents enjoyed playing the game because it improved their memory and concentration.

Karma Tycoon

This is a free online game, where you create a not for profit for some social good and then try and grow it. Students liked the game, but could not seem to grasp how to create and run a growing non-profit over a period of years. The game has free teachers curricula, and would probably work better with a trained adult supervising the students.

Ayiti: the Cost of Life

This is a free online game from UNICEF. Students create a family in Haiti, and set their goals of happiness, education, money, or health. They learn that family member die, that people in poor countries often face obstacles that cannot be overcome, and appalling choices. Students commented that, while playing the game with their parents, they had discussions on how thankful they are that they don't live in this type of environment.

Emerald Island

Currently this is a free game as the owners are trying to sell the company.

The goal of the game is to buy seeds, plant and care for a garden, and overcome characters who try to destroy plants.

Students found that their younger brothers and sisters (ages 5 to 7) enjoyed the game, but it was not at their level.

Summary

The three programs that the students and educators felt best met the criteria to become finalists were World of Goo, Resilient Planet, and Ayiti.

Next step is for the students to each bring in three other students to learn and play with the games, and then to discuss and select the overall Family Learning Software Award by the early Spring of 2010.

If you haven't heard of it, Computers for Youth is a great organization. They work with Title I middle schools to provide needy families with computers, training, support, and software to foster home learning.

Below are the kids and educators at the end of the day.