Considerations at CCT–Pedagogy, domain, school, medium, and age
Designs for ordinary schools and teachers and reluctant learners
Working on 7th grade science and literacy games
Focused on educational need–what will help teachers in a classroom? In this case, popular misconceptions–the research will focus on can the game dispel a particular misconception?
Initial game designs for photosynthesis game permitted (accidentally) the player to succeed without ever learning abut photosynthesis
Next game idea focused on metaphors, moved away from reality, instead focused just on chemical change
All this is fodder for PFL, game produces a visualization and experience of a phenomenon that can be unpacked by a teacher
The role of the instructional designer is to take all these different interests and foci, see the affordances of the medium (in this case DS games) and decide how it can support current educational practices.
OK, so I tried doing this yesterday and it didn’t work at all, but I’m going to attempt to liveblog the conference today. Sandy D. just walked on stage looking pretty spry I must say. Now she’s making grandma jokes about her lack to tech literacy, but has become an advocate of games because she’s seen them work with Our Courts.
She’s saying our government only works when people understand how the government works. Citizens need to be educated about civics every generation. Public schools were founded to teach civics (really?), but now only half of the states require civics for high school graduation. This is a crisis. Native born citizens couldn’t pass the immigration test (good point). She’s railing against old boring civics education from the 60s and dumb old big textbooks.
One of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind was that by offering money for reading, math, and science, schools dropped their focus on American History and civics.
Sandy D loves Jimmy G “He’s a genius in this field.”
As someone who grew up on a farm, she’s more interested in things that work than things that are beautiful, but maybe Our Courts is both (uh, maybe).
Our Courts was meant to help teachers liven up their teaching and the results have been shockingly good. Now it’s called iCivics and there are tons more games planned for different branches of government. It’s very challenging to get the games in schools because every state has its own bureaucracy.
OK, so I really don’t have much analysis for Justice O’Connor’s talk. She complained about the lack of civics knowledge in the US (valid) cheered the educational potential of games (good) and said she wants a game that makes kids care about nature (nice). Not a lot of controversial statements here. I’m not in love with the iCivics game suite, but in the grand scheme of games for change it’s fine, and I look forward to seeing what else they come up with. OK, that’s it.
Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to baffle a media studies class full of 19 year-olds by claiming that I was going to talk about video games and then rambling for an hour about magic circles, mancala, Yoko Ono, and the great sport of chess boxing. I had a good time anyway, and I promise that in the next couple days I’ll post a summary of my talk complete with a selection of the beautiful slides from my power point.
Prospect Magazine has a column by Julian Gough that is so ludicrously stupid I found it painful to read and impossible to do more than skim the last third. It’s another screed against public schooling and for education solely through home gaming. This article lacks the merit to warrant a complete, well thought out analysis so instead I’m just going to pull some of the choice quotes and briefly comment on why they are incredibly dumb. Finally, for the record, I realize that Julian meant this piece to be humorous and uses hyperbole in that effort, but it just doesn’t work.
(As a criticism of educating kids together in school buildings) “We no longer force adults to work in Victorian workhouses. So why do we force children to learn in Victorian schools?” That’s right, we don’t work in workhouses. We work in office buildings with lots of other people. Or just a few other people. Regardless, we still work primarily in groups in shared physical space. There is value in having this experience as a young person.
“Monitor the brain activity of a kid in a maths class—nothing going on.” What a grossly ignorant statement.
“If governments can regulate toxic chemicals in food, they can regulate computer games—which don’t have to be toxic.” I find this offensive for political rather than educational reasons.
Naming successful educational mainstream games Julian refers to Spore as “the evolution game.” No, actually, it’s more like the intelligent design game Spore. It may be a fun game, but it’s no biology textbook.
“Trying to turn children into literate, creative, flexible free thinkers by adding things to the national curriculum is like trying to transform witches into Christians by piling ever-heavier rocks on their chests.” This is actually a nice simile I can appreciate. The eduational standards system is totally out of control.
“Every society in history, until ours, trained and taught its youth through totally immersive gameplay and storytelling.” What? Can I get a citation for that little factoid? Have you studied the educational system of feudal Japan? Ancient China? Midieval Europe? Ever heard of apprentices?
I’m sorry folks, there is no magic fix for the education system. Game based learning is great, handheld devices are great, but they can’t heal the gaping ignorance chasm that’s swallowing our country. If we’re going to deal with the glaring, tragic flaws of public education we need to stop fixating on magical gadgets and ask difficult questions about the status of teachers in our society and what the real purposes of education are. Also, directing a couple hundred billion dollars from the DoD to the DoE wouldn’t hurt either.
I tried writing a response to Jeff’s TEDxNYed presentation but it kept sounding really curmudgeonly and bitter. And boring. So, you should probably just go read his blog post yourself and we can kvetch in person.
Instead of giving tests to find out what [students have] learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.
But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions. We drill them and test them and tell them they’ve failed if they don’t regurgitate back our lectures as lessons learned. That is a system built for the industrial age, for the assembly line, stamping out everything the same: students as widgets, all the same.
But we are no longer in the industrial age. We are in the Google age. Hear Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s head of product management, who advised students in a blog post. Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.”
So according to Kotaku, everyone is (or at least was) talking about this presentation by Jesse Schell from the recent DICE convention. Not wanting to be excluded from the “everyone” category, I’d like to offer my response, even if it is a few days late.
For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll summarize briefly. First, Schell asserts that the success of Facebook, the Wii, Guitar Hero, Farmville, Webkinz, etc. blindsided most industry experts and reveals a marked change in the desires of players and the strategies of designers. The world, Jesse says, is awash in artificiality and the masses are weary. We crave the real, and so corporations have responded with real Angus beef burgers and cell phones that let us be our authentic selves.
Game and toy makers, at least this handful of insightful innovators, understand this change and have developed products that discard the old notion that game should be immersive, instead designing games that blend reality and fantasy. Webkinz are physical objects with a related virtual world. The Wii and Guitar Hero create situations where people enjoy both the game and the spectacle of others playing the game. And social networking games take advantage of our desires to compete and collaborate with our real friends.
I think the first part of Jesse’s talk is fairly sound. Yes, people have grown tired of all that is “fake” but the fact that they’re being satisfied by corporate supplied solutions is proof that this isn’t a genuine shift in behavior and desire. An Angus burger from McDonald’s is still about as far away from a slab of grass-fed beef as a plastic plant is from a redwood. Farmville is not farming and it is precisely its differences from real farming that made it successful. People may crave authentic experiences, but they still want those experiences to fit within their generally comfortable, sanitized life. The “adventurous” among us go on eco tourism trips; they don’t bushwhack the Yukon navigating by the stars. Read the rest of this entry »
This is not game related, but generally involves youth, technology, and education so I consider it valid. Also, it’s so completely outrageous I think people blogging about pet care or curling should post it just so word gets out. I’m just horrified that school administrators think this is an accceptable use of technology and an accetable way to treat their students. And what do school administrators have to do with “improper behavior” in the home? I can only hope a significant legal precedent in defense of privacy rights results from this case.
via: Boing Boing
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
I’m going to be turning this into a longer, scholarly article for the I/S Journal, but to keep my thoughts organized until then, I’d like to write this blog post explaining my presentation at the I/S Symposium.
Spoil-Sports play an invaluable role in game design and in society as a whole, and to examine the dynamic between spoil-sports and rule makers, I’d like to begin with an excerpt from the essay The Heresy of Zone Defense by Dave Hickey.
It’s in the third quarter. The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy- Sixers. Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind; and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!
When Erving makes this shot, I rise into the air and hang there for an instant, held aloft by sympathetic magic. When I return to earth, everybody in the room is screaming…. Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem’s remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving’s, since it was Kareem’s perfect defense that made Erving’s instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules.
Consider this for a moment: Julius Erving’s play was at once new and fair! The rules, made by people who couldn’t begin to imagine Erving’s play, made it possible…. [T]he maintenance of such joys requires that we recognize, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow, by suppressing both the pleasure and the disputation. In so doing, it becomes a form of violence itself.
This passage, besides just being a beautiful piece of writing, perfectly illustrates the goal of all game designers, and I’d hope, all rule makers. A game is essentially a set of rules and a goal. The rules constrain the means by which players may attempt to reach the goal. These constraints, if well designed, promote emergence, the process whereby simple actions repeated can create patterns of great complexity. An elegant rule set uses the fewest number of rules to encourage emergence and allow for innovation, while creating a system lacking contradiction and ambiguity. As Hickey writes, Erving’s play was both new and fair within a rule set designed by men who couldn’t possibly have imagined what Erving would do. This is excellent rule design.
A government can also be seen as a rule making body. Our society is a game with a variety of goals (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to name a few) and perhaps an even larger number of rules constraining how we may attempt to reach those goals. Those rules, at their best, create a fair playing field where everyone can attempt their finest moves. All too often, however, the rule makers cease to design elegant rule sets and instead create rule sets that solidify the advantage of some to the detriment of others. The rule sets are cumbersome, bloated, so that players are constantly involuntarily breaking the rules and subject to punishment. As Edmund Burke said, “Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”
To explain how spoil-sports fit here, I turn to Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian who in 1938 published a book entitled Homo Ludens. In this book, Huizinga explained how play has served a fundamental role in the development of human culture. According to Huizinga, many of our most important institutions like art, religion, and writing are essentially play with different media. He also investigates the role of the spoil-sport. To paraphrase:
All games have rules which are absolutely binding. While players follow the rules, a magic circle is created within which the game is reality, but if the rules are transgressed, the spell is shattered. The player who trespasses against these rules or ignores them is the spoil-sport. This is not the same as cheating for the cheater pretends to honor the rules while subverting them and so still acknowledges the magic circle. While cheaters are scorned, it is interesting to note how much more harshly spoil-sports are treated. They are ostracized, cast out because their actions have revealed the fragility of the play world and so destroyed the shared illusion–a word which literally means “in play.” In ordinary life, spoil-sports are treated similarly, and they are known as apostates, heretics, radicals, etc.
I would differ with Huizinga only in pointing out that in ordinary life, society has two options when faced with spoil-sports: they can be cast out or in time they can be understood as harbingers of necessary reform to flawed rules. The motivation of the spoil-sport is key here. There are those who wreck the game purely out of malice, insecurity about their inability to play well, or even simply an urge to be destructive. Another type of spoil-sport, however, disrupts the game because she understands it to be unfair. The rules are flawed, and while other players would prefer to continue along as if all were well (because of personal gain form the inequality, fear of change, or obliviousness) the spoil-sport chooses to disrupt play in order to force recognition and improvement.
Frederick Douglass is an excellent example here. The United States was a slave country justifying the system of slavery because of an established rule set. African-Americans were naturally inferior, naturally savage, naturally lazy, etc. and so it was only right for whites to dominate them. These truths were contradicted every day but most people ignored or were oblivious to the contradictions and the game went on. Douglass chose to become a spoil-sport, and his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass exposed how deeply flawed the logic of slavery was. Here was an obviously highly intelligent former slave describing white savagery and African-American humanity. Douglass deeply unsettled millions of people, and in time America’s rules had to change. Read the rest of this entry »
OK, maybe not counter-revolutionary, but certainly boring and status quo. This fall Parker Brothers is releasing an update to their classic Monoploy game, and the changes are aimed to make the game appeal to a younger generation. Gone is the paper money and banker, replaced instead with debit cards and an ATM. prices are also inflation adjusted so a player gets $2 million for passing Go instead of $200. Gone too are the metal game pieces. Say goodbye to the boot and top hat, replaced by clear tokens or some such nonsense. The game board is round and clips from pop songs play after certain actions.
I see a lot of cosmetic updates here, but nothing revolutionary. Not like the revolutionary roots of the game, “The Landlord Game” which was developed by Elizabeth Magie to promote the flat tax. Not revolutionary like some of the great mods of the game I’ve heard, including one to explore empathy by having players trade money and property periodically based on certain rolls. Of course, it’s a game about bankrupting all your fellow players and monopolizing and entire city’s real estate, so what should I expect?
I just came upon a rather old (last March) blog post about games and education that represents the kind of vague, hand-waving boosterism that we really need to avoid if games are ever to become a widely-adopted educational tool. The title of the post is “Classrooms are obsolete (and so are teachers)” and while the author later moderates this statement by clarifying that in the future young people will need mentors, not teachers, the thrust of the article still runs counter to sound pedagogical theory.
Problems in the post start early, with statements like, “…gaming is perfectly suited to education. Far more so than the current classroom/teacher system. Our one on one, challenge-reward mechanism is the most perfect way yet of imparting knowledge.” The most perfect way yet of imparting knowledge? This is a rather grandiose statement that glosses over the different kinds of learning. Content knowledge, skills knowledge, and concept knowledge are all different. Games are well suited to content and skill, but have not proven to be as useful for concept knowledge.
While serious games can quite effectively teach a soldier room clearing skills or help a teenager learn historical names and dates, complex systems like photosynthesis or poverty are not as easily taught through a game alone. For these issues, games work best when skilled teachers or facilitators combine game play with live action activities, group discussion, and creative expression. This is exactly the structure used in the Playing 4 Keeps programs I’ve designed and it provides an effective balance of scaffolding and freedom.
When the author of this post makes statements like, “Teachers, at best, think that games are chocolate coated broccoli,” he’s being hugely insulting to all the sage teachers who understand games as a tool, not a panacea, and use them where appropriate. A good teacher can also help a young person learn by picking up on subtle cues that exist outside the play space. While a computer game only know what the player is doing in the game, the teacher can read facial expressions, body language, and student interaction. A good teacher intervenes at critical learning moments when the student hovers between determined frustration and hopelessness. Computers are nowhere near sophisticated enough for this.
Another wildly optimistic claim by the author is “With proper game based learning it is very simple to keep a track of every student’s progress. But more than that it is very easy to see their strengths and weaknesses in all their complexity. The aptitudes of every single student will be plain to see. Which would lead to everyone having the optimum further education and making the right career choices for their abilities.” Game-based learning will never eliminate bad decisions or changing interests and so can never ensure everyone makes the right career choices. Life is full of chance, unpredictability, and mistakes and if we make claims like this it makes game based learning either seem like pure fantasy, or the vehicle to a Huxlian dystopia.
Finally, the post ends by declaring that eventually all education will take place through the web delivered in individual, bite sized portions for free. “Anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to consume whatever education they want any time they want, delivered to them in the optimum manner for them to absorb.” This description of education is completely misguided. Education is not consumption and cannot be absorbed. True education is a process of development and change and such processes are neither simple nor painless. Sure, education can be fun, engaging, and deeply meaningful, but it’s also really challenging. Learning a foreign language takes work, interpreting Deleuze is exhasperating, and grappling with complex issues can be exhausting, but these endeavors are satisfying because they are difficult. Finally, education is often best when it is social, and group learning helps participants develop valuable skills that cannot be gained in isolation playing learning games on an iPhone.
Public education in the United States (and I presume around the world) has massive structural flaws. I am completely in favor of reorganizing schools, distributing learning so that it more seamlessly integrates into students’ lives, and using exciting, dynamic technology such as video games to enrich the educational process. But, I also don’t want to ignore the millions of educators who have been working to improve education for hundreds of years, nor deny the real strengths that public education offers.
Any changes that we make need to be grounded in a sound understanding of what reforms have come before and be supported by sound research. The author of this post criticizing public education cites no research to support his claims about games’ potential or the current methodologies’ flaws. It’s easy to make grandiose claims about what games are capable of, but go a few steps too far and you’re just writing science fiction instead of helping drive reform. Game based learning has a lot of exciting evidence to support it, but I urge caution because it also has a lot more questions than answers. We have a lot to learn, it won’t always be easy and that’s exciting.
To close, here’s a great clip of game designer Brenda Laurel at the 2004 Education Arcade. She exaggerates a bit here, but fundamentally she’s just warning, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”
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