9 Responses to Virtual Roundtable: Game-based Learning – Why It Works and Where It’s Going

1. Mary Anne says:

   April 22, 2012 at 5:17 pm

   Harnessing the power of well-designed games to foster specific learning outcomes, is a challenge for many educators today.
   • How can we help them unlock the key to this power?
   • Where do you see the trends going?
   • What resources can leaders utilize that show the research on such positive claims?

   These are some of the questions that begin our discussion on this potentially “game-changing” topic
2. Michael Levine says:

   April 23, 2012 at 9:39 am

   Games and Education Reform: New Allies in Engagement and Personalization

   The popularity and increasing innovation of video game play is providing a new and surprisingly fresh framework for policy discussions about education reform. The transition to a digital age that aligns with the 21st century knowledge-based economy defines our children’s future job prospects. But our learning approaches are stuck in a time warp. Video games are emerging as the modern learning tool with significant potential. Many like Game Star Mechanic and Manga High now offer real-time assessments that map to the skills needed for kids such as math sense, systems thinking, critical analysis, collaboration and creativity.

   Foundational literacy skills like reading combined with new digital literacy skills that evolve from interactive play must now drive educational change. Today, according to the Electronic Software Association (ESA), 46 million kids between the ages of 5-17 are gamers. Additionally, 50% of parents play video games with their kids, 84% of parents think video games are “fun for the entire family,” and 66% think video games “provide mental stimulation or education” and “bring families closer together.”

   A growing set of promising exemplars show the potential power of game-based learning. The National STEM Video Game Challenge encourages youth, grad students, and teachers to create their own game-based solutions to teach essential knowledge and skills. Effective new apps and games have emerged as a result. Interactive games such as the transmedia property Prankster Planet created for Sesame Workshop’s The Electric Company are currently teaching kids to read and create. Corporations such as Cisco and Microsoft and trade associations such as the Entertainment Software Association have announced very promising new digital games initiatives focused on teaching new social networking and digital literacy skills and looking towards the “just-in-time” nature of game engines to tap their potential to give personal feedback to diverse learners.

   On the health education side, the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity, challenged game designers, software developers and students to develop games using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) data on nutrition. Some states like West Virginia have even made video games part of their mandated physical education curriculum! The realization that game-based learning might hold promise has also taken hold among an influential, bi-partisan group of Members of Congress, the “E-Tech Caucus”, and recently moved President Obama to declare that video game creation should be part of the administration’s Educate to Innovate and Digital Promise initiatives. Mr. Obama even included young game designers as part of the highly competitive White House Science Fair for student innovators (see the White House blog post about the Science Fair and read more about last year’s National STEM Prize winners.)

   Today’s more tech-savvy educators are recognizing the potential of digital games as a teaching device in their classrooms. Building upon the insights of creative designers paired with child development experts—the original formula for Sesame Street—there are now whole schools based on the concept of game-based learning. Funded largely by grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Quest to Learn in New York City is the nation’s first public school grounded in principles of game design. A second school called Chicago Quest opened last fall and innovative charter schools such as the Rocket Ship network are already pioneering new ways to integrate games in the classroom. The premise behind these schools is simple: allow young people, through game design principles, to construct their own learning environments, which in turn will teach them how to develop the essential skills necessary to compete and thrive in the 21st century economy.

   The learning potential of video games has yet to be fully realized. For example, a recent research review found that video games seem to have more robust possibilities in teaching early literacy and health promotion skills than in promoting deep scientific or computational knowledge. Much work remains to be done to understand and deploy their exciting affordances to personalize and deepen learning while aligning with critical new educational standards. In the years ahead, policymakers and industry leaders should harness the power of video games to help build a modern education system. To benefit the national economy and accelerate educational progress, it just might be time to put down our pencils and play!
3. Andrew Coulson says:

   April 23, 2012 at 10:06 am

   “Why are games so promising for real learning?”
   The other day my home PC got one of those computer viruses that pretend to be virus-checkers. This one was pretty scary – preventing any other action, even web-browsing, before I purchased the fiends’ product. It black-screened my desktop, my applications and my files started disappearing. So I started browsing on my other laptop and long story short found several click by click recipes to follow, one of which I selected as the easiest and which worked. But as usual in my OMG-my-computer’s-about-to-die mode, I just clicked my way through what were “black boxes”, to me. If I got another virus tomorrow, I’d go right back to browsing for the “right” recipe. If this whole scenario were a computer “game” I was “playing”, well I found a recipe to “win”, but I didn’t understand anything. I wasn’t even trying to learn; I just wanted to “win”.

   So why are games necessarily so promising for real learning? Might they not similarly just have students get to “wins” without really learning anything valuable? I’m going to start with five oversimplified, perhaps provocative statements with the objective of getting an interactive conversation going with you.
   1) Effective learning requires an interactive conversation, beyond passive browsing/listening/reading/viewing.
   2) An interactive conversation within a computer based learning environment is called a game. It has an objective, it has rules, it is sustained, it requires posed solutions and gives feedback, and it can (& should) get quite challenging.
   3) Games have a “duty cycle” of time & attention on actual subject matter (experiencing concepts or practice) vs. unrelated background info or entertainment value. It is entirely possible to have students deeply “engaged” in a computer game, but what they are engaged with is gameplay and not learning subject matter.
   4) Computer games can deliver a new learning environment impossible to deliver in the physical world, even by a 1:1 with an expert teacher.
   5) Computer games can successfully address equity, access, and motivation challenges. “There’s no achievement gap in videogames,” Quentin Lawson, NABSE.

   p.s. My comments here come from the perspective of a software exec with a program, using virtual-manipulative games, designed for inschool/supplemental-curriculum (nowadays deemed “blended”) use. If you’re interested in a few more and deeper thoughts you can see my blog at http://www.arcsparks.com
4. Andrew Coulson says:

   April 24, 2012 at 6:57 pm

   Effective learning requires an interactive experience, beyond browsing, passive listening or reading, or viewing. Games are an interactive experience. Let me begin to explain why I believe this distinction is valuable and important.
   The organization I’m in serves the math content area. And math, of all subjects, is the most tightly inter-connected, yes? Most of what you learn in 2nd grade you will use again in 3rd. If you really didn’t get fractions in elementary school, you will suffer (and fail) in algebra. There is a logical and connected sequence of learning concepts and skills: place value should come before the standard multiplication algorithm. In order to understand math and be able to continue to higher math, one needs to be constantly adding on to a conceptual framework of math understanding – a framework ultimately built and maintained by the learner herself, in the learner’s head.
   So, with higher math concepts in mind, imagine trying to learn math from scratch by browsing for web pages through Google. Imagine just browsing for the “answers” to specific math problems. Maybe you could even post the problem and get it answered by an online expert. Maybe you find a little bit of math concept on this website, and a little bit more on that. For me, this math-by-browsing thought experiment has me generalizing that Googling, or browsing, through many un-related bits of information, in search of answers, is an inefficient and likely ineffective way to develop a logical conceptual framework, i.e. to learn anything complex.

   Unlike Google, lecture series and books on the other hand can describe complex subjects; each does have a lot of content designed to fit together. They have to have an underlying conceptual framework, the lecturer’s or author’s, which they intend to walk the learner through. The problem is that, no matter what shiny new technology delivers lectures or pages, from podcasts to YouTube to Kindles to iPads, asynchronous lectures and books are of course essentially passive. And watching an embedded video is still passive. Even live lectures, in my unhappy experience at a large and well regarded research university with 100+ student lecture halls, are fundamentally passive for almost all of the students in attendance. The problem with passive consumption of information is that while one might feel able to follow the thread of thought at the time, it all too easily breaks free from memory later. It takes an additional, often optional step of action to weave it in, whether that be active listening via smart note-taking; homework; or pausing while reading a book to synthesize, take notes, or draw diagrams on one’s own.

   So, rather than requiring extra motivation and effort, how could we get interactivity and action to be the path of least resistance for every learner to take? So that new concepts introduced get the benefit of active learning, and get riveted onto a conceptual framework?

   There are two ingredients: i) A game-based learning environment, or more specifically puzzles within games. Puzzles are by their nature interactive: situation, objective, player action, game response, objective achieved?, new situation. Over and over, in a highly motivating way. Perception/action/perception is how people are designed to learn. ii) immensely challenging instructional design to create puzzles, sequences of puzzles, and games that are effective for learning.
5. Michael Levine says:

   April 25, 2012 at 7:14 am

   Thanks for the provocative post about interactive games and the role that puzzles can play within games to mobilize kids to learn more deeply. Since we are pretty early on in understanding where and how videogames can make a positive influence on different content domains and habits of mind, I thought I would share some of the research findings i just came across from a recent article in the Review of Educational Research from March 2012.

   In a piece by Michael Young and colleagues from the University of Connecticut entitled ‘Our Princess is in another Castle’ the researchers looked at some 300 articles that probed the relationship between video game play and academic achievement. Interestingly they found that the types of activity or domains of knowledge that were being influenced mattered a great deal. To quote the article: “we found some evidence on the effects of video games on language learning, history, and physical education, but little support for the academic value of video games in science and math.” To advance work in promoting STEM learning these authors recommend that designers and educators separate deeper and more meta-cognitively oriented simulations from games. They also suggest that a new emphasis on “situated learning” (as Andrew has suggested above) be baked into the game design, especially focusing new attention on the types of social collaboration that can occur in games that deepen and scaffold knowledge building outside the actual play experience. Would love to hear others’ thoughts on this provocative piece of research. A summary of the Young et. al. article is here: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/82/1/61
6. Andrew Coulson says:

   April 25, 2012 at 8:53 am

   Hi Michael – let’s keep this roundtable rollin’ and thanks for pointing out the article in your post above.
   The taxonomy of games (e.g. as you mention above simulations v. games) and indeed the distinctions between games and puzzles are important distinctions for understanding research. We need to distinguish the mammals from the fish, even animals from plants, by their properties. I’ve tripped across little-to-nothing myself along the lines of a game taxonomy, and if readers can share schema they’ve found useful along with why that’d be much appreciated and interesting.
   I have the luxury of focusing for the last decade on one corner of this map – in-school, supplemental, computer-based math games; blended online/student with bricks/teacher. Even in that corner, there is a wide range of niches for “game software” to fill: diagnostic/assessment. skills practice. personalized practice problems. “real world” problem contexts. with or without teacher role. concept introduction. remediation: adaptive concept/skill re-teaching.
   I suggest that in the STEM arena, where understanding complex relationships of ideas, rather than fact memorization alone, are the learning goals, a focus on the following question is in order:
   What exactly is happening at the moment (in the game) where the student is learning something new? In other words, aggressively strip away all the non-subject-matter gameplay and identify the learning environment that remains.
   Finally I suggest that if the learning environment that remains is an electronic version of conventional instruction, then we are not looking at a game-changer. It can be highly valuable (save time, easier access, more duty cycle, quicker feedback, formative info for teachers) but not transformative. And transformative is possible with games/puzzles. In other words, if our shiny 21st century learning environment, even a highly engaging game, still rests on passive absorption of content (as if watching a lecture) then I say we should not expect transformative results for all students.
7. Andrew Coulson says:

   May 1, 2012 at 8:03 am

   In a post above I wrote about “duty cycle” in games. Something important to note as one considers programs.
   What I mean is: if you were to take a stopwatch and observe how much time students spend doing what in a game, what fraction of the seconds would they be “learning”, whether actively engaged or passively. And I mean learning the intended subject, not the gameplay per se.
   Let’s suppose math. The “learning” could be understanding a problem and finding the math in it. It could be observing example math procedures of problem-solving. It could be practice in those procedures of math problem-solving; even quizzes are practice. It could be getting instructive mathematical feedback or reinforcement on math problem solutions, whether video, audio, or animated. It could be watching a new math concept explained, or the thinking process before posing a solution to a problem.
   In a math game, then, duty cycle seconds would not include: non-mathematical gameplay time, non-mathematical problem setup (i.e. the backstory to a problem), seconds spent navigating, watching a non-mathematical “win” animation, or (gulp) waiting for the computer to respond.
   While I am not saying that 100% duty cycle is an ideal design goal, I do say that duty cycles can vary quite a bit among games, and I believe that one should be conscious of duty cycle and consider what a low duty cycle vs. high duty cycle means for effective learning. High duty cycle games can be as engaging as low.
8. Andrew Coulson says:

   May 3, 2012 at 8:47 am

   If a transformation in student outcomes is desired, a new type of learning environment is in order. Shiny new hardware or even web2.0 portals delivering learning environments that, when you strip away the h/w and s/w conveyance, are the same as what you experienced in school yourself (e.g. watching/listening to a lecture, doing practice problems, hilighting a book or taking notes) is not a new type of learning environment. Games in particular have the potential to deliver new types of learning environments in many ways: minds-on engagement, tangible interaction with the subject matter. I believe a valuable distinction in game-based learning is: could an expert teacher in a 1:1 tutorial deliver this same learning environment, or is it only deliverable via game software?
   Note: the point is not that the software is better than, or can “replace” teaching, but rather is it enabling a new kind of learning environment to add to the mix of instructional tools at the teacher’s disposal?
9. Andrew Coulson says:

   May 16, 2012 at 7:59 am

   I made one last point in my post April 23rd so, to round out my posts here I will elaborate: Computer games can successfully address equity, access, and motivation challenges. “There’s no achievement gap in videogames,” Quentin Lawson, NABSE.

   By equity, I mean that it’s possible for games to overcome incoming weaknesses or gaps in student content, concept and procedural knowledge, and weaknesses in outside-of-school supports. For example, a student initially weak in math, or in English, can still engage, make progress, and learn in a well-designed math game. And they can succeed whether or not their parents are strong in math or English.

   By access, I mean that games, again, can reduce or eliminate barriers that keep some students from fully engaging with conventional content. Consider for example the language barrier, where language proficiency (reading skill and comprehension) is a taken-for-granted pre-requisite to engaging with course content — even in math. But (most) math games are not “reading from a screen” and are de facto reducing the language proficiency prerequisite to engagement. In the case of my organization’s math games, the games initially have zero language at all: no audio, no math vocabulary, no English words, not even any abstract math symbols.

   The motivation aspect of games almost goes without saying. Almost, but not quite. I remember my sons being pretty darn motivated to help SpongeBob flip burgers for Squidward — motivated to solve a hamburger-flipping “puzzle” with no academic content at all. The “trick” is that the same level of motivation from gaming — the “addiction” to beating a level — can be gained from providing puzzles OF the academic content, and raising those puzzles to high challenge levels.

   Games can level the playing field for students. It would be ludicrous to think that any student’s background would prevent him/her from succeeding at entertainment video games, like a Madden 2012 NFL game, would it not? Those entertainment games require a high enough level of learning the game rules, of memorizing content to automaticity, of trial-and-failure-and-conclusion, of creating and developing strategies, and of problem-solving that, frankly, I personally choose not to even start playing them (I got a day job). Because it would take a lot of time and effort and be a challenge, for me.

   If we design great instructional videogames, steeped in content “puzzles” for students to solve, they all have the capacity to impress us adults with persistent problem-solving and surprising strategies.

   “There’s no achievement gap in videogames,” Quentin Lawson, NABSE. Games are a vital, fundamental component of the future of learning.