Educational Games Blog – David Patent

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‘Shall We Play a Game?’ A Reflection on Blogging about Educational Games

In the movie WarGames (1983), Joshua – a computer operating system – asks the main character, a teenager named David Lightman, an oft-quoted question: “Shall we play a game?” David replies, “Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?” To which Joshua responds, “Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?” How great would it be if gaming systems were more sensible than us? What seems clear, and not unsurprising, is that David prefers a contemporary high-stakes strategy game to an old-school abstract one.

*Global Thermonuclear War*
“DEFCON 1” *by bovinity is licensed under* CC BY-SA 2.0

Today’s digital games have the power to excite and consume the attention of young people like no other form of entertainment, a fact which concerns many parents and fascinates many researchers. Harnessing the power of games – particularly digital games – for learning has emerged as an established area of study with a significant body of research. In this blog, I have attempted to survey a range of topics related to games and education or training. In the process I have learned a bit about how educational game developers are attempting to engage different types of learners in a range of contexts.

In WarGames, David’s desire to play a cutting-edge game over a traditional one should remind educators interested in using games for teaching that competing with the commercial gaming industry is an uphill battle. Today’s console games, with their high-end graphics and ever-evolving interactive and online features, provide hours of entertainment to users, both young and old. The solution, perhaps, is not to give up on or give in to digital games, but rather to find ways to bring game elements – play, challenge, competition, collaboration, story-telling, instant feedback, freedom to fail, and goal-orientation among others – increasingly into the instructor’s toolkit: to gamify the curriculum.

At the same time, gaming needs to be critically examined. Learners need to be made aware of potential mental and physical health risks related to gaming such as gaming disorder, defined by the World Health Organization (2018) as a pattern of gaming activities that have negative consequences on the user over a period of at least 12 months. While many educational game developers are quick to seize on the purported positive effects of games on learners, the potential disadvantages of games for users need to receive equal attention from researchers and developers. This, too, is a lesson of WarGames. It is only at the end of the movie that Joshua and David understand the futility of certain games, particularly Geothermal Nuclear War and Tic-Tac-Toe. It is from these games that Joshua and David learn that some games are not worth playing.

Tic-Tac-Toe
**“Noughts and Crosses”** by **AdaMacey** is licensed under **CC BY 2.0**

Blogging on educational games has provided an opportunity to explore the current state of game use in education, ponder synergies between gaming and learning, and consider how games and gaming elements may augment the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of learners.

Finally, keeping this blog has greatly enhanced my understanding of a complex and contested construct: educational games. This has led me to several questions, some more general, and some more specific. Below are a few:

What are educational games?
How can commercial games be used or modified for educational purposes?
How can serious games be used or modified for educational purposes?
What features or elements of games can be inserted into or serve as a structure for instruction?
How can VR games be used effectively in learning and training interventions?
In what ways can digital games be a form of assistive technology?
Can games be both intentionally instructive and entertaining?
What are the barriers to successful use of games in teaching and learning contexts?
If games are not a choice, will instructors and learners accept their use?
What is the relationship between gaming and socialization?
How does gaming influence human behavior?
When does gaming influence human behavior negatively?
Can games heal?

The heroes of WarGames pose two last (and more philosophical) questions in this pithy exchange:

David: Is this a game or is it real?
Joshua: What’s the difference?
WarGames (1983)

References

Goldberg, L. (Producer), & Badham, J. (Director). (1983). WarGames [motion picture]. United States: MGM.

World Health Organization. (2018, September). Gaming disorder. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/

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Minecraft and Education: A Totally Unscientific Exploratory Study

Minecraft in Schools – Image by Kevin Jarrett [CC BY 2.0]

Introduction

James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2007), is about as close to a rock star as a college professor of literacy studies can get. In a 2016 interview, he said, “I don’t tend to play educational games. The only time I play them is because loads of people send them to me, and the vast majority of them are terrible” (Wan, 2016). Along these lines, some educators are asking themselves, what if instead of trying to create games to meet educational objectives, we figured out how popular commercial games could be used to transform education?

Minecraft – described alternately as a world-building game (Crafti, 2016), multiplayer sandbox building game (Nebel, Schneider, & Rey, 2016), or digital virtual environment (Egbert & Borysenko, 2019) – is one of the best-selling off-the-shelf video games of all time (Nebl, Schneider, & Rey, 2016). Despite its relative lack of story and objectives and simple graphics, children and teens may spend hundreds of hours engrossed in the Minecraft universe (Crafti, 2016), using blocks to create structures, environments, and machines. According to Nebel, Schneider, and Rey (2016), Minecraft has been employed in many educational contexts to teach a range of subjects and skills including:

spatial geometry
sustainable planning
language and literacy
digital storytelling
social skills
Informatics
computer art application
project management

In Egbert and Borysenko’s (2019) compelling study, Minecraft was used as the medium of instruction in a 12-week graduate level course on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) for pre-service language teachers. Each week, students in the class were assigned a different language-learning related task to complete using MinecraftEDU, an edition of the game tailored to teaching and learning contexts. Here’s one task students particularly enjoyed.

Create something in Minecraft. Print a picture of it in color…. Complete an information gap activity where one partner is looking at the picture created in Minecraft and the other has to build it [in Minecraft] with just an oral description. Swap roles.
(Egbert & Borysenko, 2019, p. 120)

All 15 participants in the study felt their experience using the Minecraft environment was beneficial to their learning. Eleven of the students stated that they would definitely use the game in their language teaching after completing their graduate program.

The Study

Methodology

The present (totally unscientific) study seeks to discover what is so great about Minecraft and what, to borrow Gee’s phrasing, it has to teach us about teaching and learning.

The method of convenience sampling was employed through which two participants were recruited. Both participants happen to live in the same house as the father-researcher (me). The first participant – let’s call him Kid 1 – just turned eleven and is in 6^th grade. The second participant – we’ll refer to him as Kid 2 – is turning nine next week and is in 4^th grade.

In this interpretive exploratory study, an open-ended interview was conducted with each participant separately (mainly so Kid 1 wouldn’t constantly interrupt Kid 2). They were asked to describe Minecraft, and the conversation went from there.

The researcher audio-recorded the interviews and listened to them a couple of times to form a very general impression of the game and its meaning to the participants.

Findings

There were three significant findings. The first finding was that interviewing my own kids was pretty fun, and it was interesting to formally step outside the parent role and just listen to their trains of thought. (However, this finding is kind of irrelevant and beyond the scope of this study.)

The second finding was that these two participants were able to describe aspects of the game world in detail using specialized vocabulary. For example, when describing the game, Kid 2 described it as “a pixelated game.” I was impressed with both children’s ability to articulate differences between modes of the game: creator, survivor, and adventure. By the end of each interview, I realized I was listening to specialists describing their field as I struggled to keep up. They had developed expertise about something that really interested them.

The second finding was that they like the game because it’s fun. This is a fairly obvious finding, but a deeper dig into their reasons for enjoying the game provided some valuable data. While Kid 2 had difficulty explaining why the game was fun, Kid 1 was able to explain the reasons with some degree of cogency.

It’s entertaining since… it’s sort of… I don’t know, it’s just fun to play and they’re always things to do in Minecraft… It’s a sandbox game, which is like, you get to move around – you don’t have to follow a certain set of rules – you can do whatever you want. Modded [Modified] Minecraft, there are, like, quests you have to complete, but, you know, you can do them whenever you want, in which order you please…. It just looks good…. The creators did a good job of designing the block pattern…. With each update, I think Minecraft is just evolving and getting better.
Kid 1

Kid 1 specifically discussed how one update had made it possible to design more realistic elevators. He specifically described how changes to the blocks had made this possible. While most of this went over the researcher’s non-expert head, it was clear that Kid 1 knew exactly what he was talking about, and that he was appreciative of the designers’ efforts.

Parsing Kid 1’s points, I would say there are four important aspects of Minecraft that account for its success, at least for this participant.

Activity – You are always doing something.
Freedom – You do not need to follow a prescribed route in the game, even in modified play.
Design – The game is visually appealing.
Continuous improvement – The game is not a finished product, but one that is evolving and improving with each iteration.

Discussion

Obviously, the results of this study cannot be generalized in any way, shape, or form. But there may be some lessons that resonate with those looking to improve their teaching and learning environment.

Students want to do stuff. Sit and receive is not going to cut it. (Did it ever?)
Students like choice, if not about what to study, at least in what order and at what level of challenge.
Students enjoy things that look cool. Putting time into making materials look good is worth the effort.
Students recognize improvement. When teachers update ‘glitches’ in their materials, activities, and methods, students may take notice and are likely to appreciate the effort.

Minecraft has a lot to offer educators. Affordances of the game seem to lend themselves to “transformational play” promoting “active knowledge construction within constructivist approaches” (Nebel, Schneider, & Rey, 2016, p. 359). Perhaps the important lesson of Minecraft, however, is not so much that it can be used as an educational tool, but that the principles of gameplay and development in Minecraft are precisely the principles whose application could serve to invigorate teaching and learning. Minecraft does indeed have something to teach us about educating children.

References

Crafti, J. (2016). Unearthing learning potential: Using Minecraft in the classroom. Screen Education, 82, 80-85.

Egbert, J., & Borysenko, N. (2019). Standards, engagement, and Minecraft: Optimizing experiences in language teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 85, 115-124.

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about teaching and learning (2^nd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s.

Nebel, S., Schneider, S., & Rey, G. D. (2016). Mining learning and crafting scientific experiments: A literature review on the use of Minecraft in education and research. Educational Technology & Society, 19(2), 355-366.

Wan, T. (2016, September 6). What video games like Doom teach us about learning, according to GBL guru James Paul Gee. EdSurge. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-09-06-what-video-games-like-doom-teach-us-about-learning-according-to-gbl-guru-james-paul-gee

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Virtual Reality (VR) Games in Education

The Promise of VR

About a month ago I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) on the way to work and heard this piece on how VR is being used in training. The gist of the report was that virtual reality – the kind where you put on goggles and grope around awkwardly – has not taken off as a consumer product, but it is being used by employers and institutions like Walmart, Verizon, and Stanford University, as a training tool (Noguchi, 2019). Over a million Walmart employees are using VR to learn how to be more empathetic with customers, Verizon is employing the technology to prepare retail workers for armed robbery situations, and offensive players on the Stanford football team are exploiting VR to prepare for specific defensive alignments.

I first experienced VR this summer when Ken Harper, a professor at Syracuse University’s (SU) Newhouse School of Public Communications, introduced a photogrammetry project involving VR to my English for Architects class at the English Language Institute at SU. Harper and his team had travelled to South Africa in part to recreate a site there in a virtual environment in order to create representations of South Africa for people in the US. (See this story for more on the project.) I found the experience of visiting the virtual site fascinating though I did feel disoriented while wearing the headgear and backpack necessary to become immersed in the virtual environment. There is clearly great potential in creating rich environments for developing deep understanding of other cultures, their histories, and their relationship to our own communities via immersive VR experiences.

Can VR games teach?

All this got me thinking about how VR games might be used for educational purposes. For this blog entry, I searched for recent research on the use of VR games in educational contexts. I found three studies conducted in very different contexts that demonstrate some of the potential benefits of using VR for teaching and learning.

1. Learning about water shortage

In one study, Hsu, Tseng, and Kang (2018) designed a game to encourage water conservation in Taiwan, a place that suffers from frequent water shortages. They felt that the immersion, interactivity, and flexibility of a VR environment might stimulate cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral changes in players regarding the use of water in their homes. The two-person game involves one player in a bathroom exhausting the water supply required for flushing a toilet and taking a shower, and the other pumping water from a water storage tank. Vivid feedback and exaggerated feedback are used to demonstrate reduction of the water supply and its effects. After they play, vivid feedback is shown in the form of the number of 600-milliliter bottles of water used during gameplay. Exaggerated feedback includes the shrinking of an oasis due to water use and a noticeable decrease in the level of a reservoir. Participants in the mixed-methods study were 165 high school students. The results of the study showed statistically significant changes to participants’ cognition and intended behavior following gameplay.

2. Learning fractions

The second study examined the use of a VR game to teach fractions to fourth graders in Turkey (Akman & Çakır, 2019). As fractions are generally one of the most difficult mathematical concepts for young learners to acquire, Akman and Çakır felt VR’s capacity to help learners visualize concepts, together with the potential for an optimal flow experience in playing the games, would help learners acquire knowledge of fractions. Here flow refers to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological theory of flow, in which a series of elements – including a suitable level of challenge and clear goal-orientation – interact to create deep engagement in an activity. (To learn more about flow watch this TED Talk). The game, Keşfet Kurtul, immerses learners in the experience of getting off an island following a shipwreck. Learners must solve various fraction equations to complete mini games within the narrative to successfully leave the island. Interviews with five fourth graders, who used the game at a Turkish private school in the classroom, indicated high levels of motivation and engagement. More extensive research would be needed to develop a greater understanding of potential benefits and challenges of the game.

3. Learning about the first vaccine

Lastly, Ferguson, van den Broek, and Oostendorp (2020) investigated knowledge retention and engagement of learners using the educational environmental narrative (EEN) VR game, The Chantry. In EEN games, players “move through the game environment, often without a clear goal, explore the world offered by the game and while doing so learn gradually more and more about it” (para. 3). The Chantry is designed to teach players about Dr. Edward Jenner, who invented the world’s first vaccine. The researchers sought to understand how participants – 42 adolescents – used the game, retained knowledge, and experienced feelings of engagement under four different conditions: 1) interactive navigation and explicit story structure, 2) interactive navigation and implicit story structure, 3) passive simulation and explicit story structure, and 4) passive simulation and explicit story structure. While passive simulation – a guided tour – led to greater knowledge retention, those participants in the interactive navigation groups had a more positive attitude towards the game. There was little difference found between the experiences and outcomes due to an explicit or implicit story structure. The authors suggest that EEN games may have an important role to play in education.

These three studies offer a glimpse of types of VR games and potential areas of research related to teaching and learning using VR games. In these cases, games were designed or employed to meet specific outcomes in the target population. It is likely that a significant body of research on the use or development of specific games in contexts of use will provide a clearer picture of if, how, and when VR can be exploited in the educational field in the long run.

References

Akman, E, & Çakır, R. (2019). Pupils’ opinions of an educational virtual reality game in terms of flow experience. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 14(15), 121-137.

Ferguson, C., van den Broeck, E. L., & van Oostendorp, H. (2020). On the role of interaction mode and story structure in virtual reality serious games. Computers & Education, 143. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103671

Hsu, W.-C., Tseng, C.-M., & Kang, S.-C. (2018). Using exaggerated feedback in a virtual reality environment to enhance behavior intention of water-conservation. Educational Technology & Society, 21(4), 187-203.

Noguchi, Y. (2019, October 8) Virtual reality goes to work, helping train employees. National Public Radio. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/767116408/virtual-reality-goes-to-work-helping-train-employees

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Educational Games for the Blind and Visually Impaired

The case of Blindfold Racer

What makes videos games so attractive? Some might reply that it’s all about awesome graphics and hand-eye coordination. Given the powerful allure of the visual elements of games, it might be difficult to imagine that games can be leveraged to enhance the learning of the blind and visually impaired (BVI).

Marty Schultz thinks otherwise. For this blog, I watched a recorded webinar given by the entrepreneur in which he discusses how he got into designing games for the BVI, and how his most recent venture – ObjectiveEd – is finding ways to gamify education for the BVI (Perkins School for the Blind, 2019).

It all started when Schultz started working with the middle school his daughter was attending. He already believed that we live in a gamified world, where games have become a normal part of education, thanks to their ability to motivate learning. As he puts it, games make failure okay, and kids “love to learn because it helps them do better in the game” (Perkins School, 2019).

The school wanted him to work with students at the middle school to teach them how to build apps. Wanting to create something new, Shultz worked with the students to develop a racing game for the BVI, which a student later dubbed ‘Blindfold Racer.’ Together they created a 60-level game where players drive with their ears following aural instead of visual cues. After testing the game with BVI students, the game was released commercially and was a big hit on Apple’s App Store. Shultz established Blindfold Games in 2013 and has gone on to develop about 80 games for the BVI on the platform since then. Shultz states downloads of Blindfold Games products have reached approximately 500,000 (Millward, 2019).

ObjectiveEd

Recognizing rising investment activity for assistive technology at the global level (Millward, 2019), Shultz recently started a new initiative, ObjectiveEd. ObjectiveEd is a gaming platform designed to help the BVI to master the following competencies:

Sensory efficiency
Orientation and mobility
Social interaction (cooperation and leadership)
Braille literacy
Assistive technology
Expanded core curriculum standards (ECC)

(Perkins School, 2019)

ECC refers to the special forms of knowledge and skills that BVI students need to be successful in mastering state and national standards. In addition to the competencies mentioned above, they include compensatory skills, communication modes, independent living, career education, and self-determination (Willings, 2019).

The ObjectiveEd platform process works in the following way. First, learners are assigned learning games based on an individualized learning plan (IEP). The game adjusts for the initial skill level of the learner. As students play the game, the game evaluates their progress and readjusts the level of challenge in the game accordingly. Finally, teachers and parents can monitor student progress on the ObjectiveEd platform.

One example of a game is “Barnyard,” a game designed to teach the BVI orientation (e.g., right/left, east/west). The game has been shown to increase the speed at which learners recognize orientation. Another gamified application, “Braille Sheets,” include sheets that cover the screen of an iPad. When users runs their fingers over the sheet, the app speaks the words on the sheet. Students can then play an audio version of the classic Hangman game. They can also create their own stories in Braille and share them with other users by uploading them to the ObjectiveEd site. As of April, eight games were ready for use and dozens of other games are in development with pilot test groups (Perkins School, 2019).

For Shultz, it’s not just the intrinsic motivation and teaching of skills games provide that are valuable to the BVI. As audio games, the BVI are leaders in using games designed by Blindfold Games and ObjectiveEd compared to their sighted peers, giving these learners a sense of empowerment.

References

Millward, W. T. (2019, July 29). How tablet games can teach skills to students with visual impairments. EdSurge. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-29-how-tablet-games-can-teach-skills-to-students-with-visual-impairments

Perkins School for the Blind. (Producer). (2019, April 10). Using gamification to maximize ECC outcomes [Webinar]. Retrieved from https://www.perkinselearning.org/videos/webinar/using-gamification-maximize-ecc-outcomes

Willings, C. (2019, August 4). The expanded core curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.teachingvisuallyimpaired.com/ecc.html

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Collectible Card Games: The Case of ‘Phylomon’

The Appeal of Collectible Card Games (CCGs)

In elementary school, I was an avid baseball card collector. There were few greater joys than opening a fresh pack of Topps baseball cards: the crinkling of the package as I carefully opened it to avoid any damage to the cards, the stick of third-rate bubble gum that I felt obligated to chew on for a minute or five, the expectation of a sought-after rookie card, the hope of picking up a duplicate of a valuable card to trade. My friends and I would pour over the statistics listed on the back of the cards. We’d negotiate and execute trades, curate our collections, compete over who had the most valuable collection, and speculate on which might be more valuable in ten years. I may have been slow with my times tables, but I could tell you Dwight Gooden’s ERA (Earned Run Average) and Alan Trammell’s BA (Batting Average) without hesitation… and I knew what it meant. I was deeply invested. I even got my parents—both completely uninterested in sports—to sign me up for baseball camp one summer. (I was a decent pitcher.)

So, my younger son’s emerging obsession with the Pokémon card game last year came as no surprise. Collectible card games (CCGs)—also known as trading card games—combine two highly appealing activities: curation and play (Turkay, Adinolf, & Tirthali, 2012). In 2002, researchers at the University of Cambridge concerned with children’s waning interest in the natural world and the “potentially grave consequences for biodiversity conservation,” conducted a study of 109 primary schoolchildren’s knowledge of British wildlife compared to Pokémon characters (Balmford, Clegg, Coulson, & Taylor, 2002, p. 2367). The findings of the study carried two significant messages: First, children have an incredible capacity for learning about creatures that are presented to them in an intriguing and entertaining way (i.e., on Pokémon cards); second, teachers and conservationists are doing a terrible job of making learning about the natural world engaging. The children much more readily identified Pokémon species than species in their native natural environment.

“Pokemon Cards” by Photos By Dlee is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

The Phylo Card Game

Instead of getting depressed about the deplorable state of children’s knowledge of the natural world, David Ng, an educator and molecular biologist at the University of British Columbia, was inspired to develop a Pokémon-style card game called Phylo: The Trading Card Game, which got underway in 2010 (Burgess, 2019). Ng decided against the original name of Phylomon for legal reasons. Using a crowdsourcing strategy, scientists, designers, and gaming experts worked together to develop a game based on the Pokémon model for teaching about biodiversity issues and other science-related topics.

“Phylo card game” by UBC News is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Rules of the game and a starter deck are available at the Phylo Game website. Check out this video for the rules.

Does the Phylo Card Game work?

Does playing the Phylo Card Game impact people’s knowledge about and attitudes toward species, ecosystems, and conservation? In a mixed-methods quasi-experimental study, Callahan, Echeverri, Ng, Zhao, & Satterfield (2019) examined university students’ behaviors and attitudes toward playing Phylo. Upon comparing the attitudes and behaviors of students who had played Phylo compared to those who had learned about the same species in a slideshow, the researchers found that playing the game promoted greater positive affect and engagement. While there was no significant difference in species recall under experimental conditions, participants expressed their enjoyment in playing the game and desire to play more rounds of the game. Participants in the slideshow group did not express the same level of engagement. Motivation to engage further with the game suggests that greater long-term retention and deeper learning might be possible through playing the game than viewing the slideshow. Most importantly, the study verifies the notion that Phylo has potential use as a tool to effectively promote ecoliteracy and conservation goals.

If, as McGonigal (2010) indicates, the problem with many popular games is their lack of connection to the real world, then creative adaptations of the CCG model may be a way forward. Besides, as Turkay and colleagues (2012) point out, “From a design point of view, [CCGs] are simpler and cheaper to produce than digital games, as they cut out one third of the digital production trifecta: designer, artist, coder” (p. 3705).

The question is whether games like Phylo can ever come close to competing for kids’ attention given the massive financial success of Pokémon and other market-oriented products and all their spin-offs (video games, movies, toys, etc.). Given the severity of environment-related criIt’s probably worth a try.

References

Balmford, A., Clegg, L., Coulson, T., & Taylor, J. (2002). Why conservationists should heed Pokémon. Science, 295(5564), 2367. Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/295/5564/2367.2

Burgess, S. (2019, September 18). To teach kids that know more of Pokemon than phytoplankton, David Ng, made a game of it. The Tyee. Retrieved from https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/09/18/David-Ng-Pokemon-Phytoplankton/

Callahan, M. M., Echeverri, A., Ng, D., Zhao, J., & Satterfield, T. (2019). Using the Phylo Card Game to advance biodiversity conservation in an era of Pokémon. Palgrave Communications, 5(79), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0287-9

McGonigal, J. (2010, February). Gaming can make a better world [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world

Turkay, S., Adinolf, S., & Tirthali, D. (2012). Collectible card games and learning tools. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 46, 3701-3705.

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My Experience Using Games for Teaching English

From Hangman to Kahoot!

In my previous post, I discussed some qualities of games that have many in the educational and training field excited about their potential use in educational settings. In this post, I’ll be talking about how I’ve tried to integrate games – and elements of gaming – into my teaching practice.

Since my first days of teaching English in the village of Kiskunmajsa, Hungary, where I had no teaching tools except a blackboard and chalk (no textbook, no computer), I’ve been using games as teaching tools. When I was starting out, Hangman was a weekly favorite for reviewing vocabulary.

Source: Lyvia Hurst & Shiqi Zhang, The Ohio State University, https://u.osu.edu/fe1181au18sectrainingmonday/

I was always surprised at how engaged students would get in a few rounds of Hangman at the end of the week. What made such a rudimentary game so enjoyable? Perhaps it was because our weekly Hangman-based review was one of many “playful activities” that appeal to learners of any age because of their basic game elements: competition, goals, rules, challenge, and fantasy (Charsky, 2010, p. 178). Yes, fantasy … No one actually gets hanged!

When I found myself in a teaching situation several years later in which students had regular Internet access inside and outside the classroom, I started using digital games like those still found on the ManyThings website for English language learners. These were “playful activities” that helped reinforce basic spelling, pronunciation, and grammar concepts. And far more recently, I have been using Kahoot! to design simple review games. Kahoot! allows teachers to design quizzes and surveys online that students can play on their smartphones. Students get into it once they get the hang of it.

From analog to digital, the games mentioned above have one thing in common: “Any content can be superimposed on top” of the fantasy world created by the game’s rules and goals (Rieber, 1996, p. 50). Rieber refers to these games as exogenous fantasies. In other words, exogenous games are purely formal, so any content for the game must be provided by the user. These games are widespread in educational contexts because they are easy to make and somewhat more engaging than giving learners worksheets. However, educators interested in taking advantage of more powerful aspects of gameplay often decry these types of games (Ochsner, Ramirez, & Steinkuehler, 2015).

‘Serious’ Online Games

Rieber (1996) labels games that “weave the content into the game” endogenous (p. 50). As the word suggests, as opposed to exogenous games, which lack their own content, endogenous games supply the content within the games themselves. If learners are intrigued by the content, then an endogenous game can be far more absorbing and motivating than an exogenous game.

About ten years ago, I started experimenting in classroom settings with so-called serious online games, endogenous games that I felt had the potential to engage students by virtue of their content – as well as their playful elements. Serious games emerged in the early 2000s as a term for games that were being designed primarily for non-entertainment purposes (de Freitas, 2018). This is not to say that serious games are not supposed to be fun. In fact, as de Freitas points out, one of the main challenges in designing serious games is trying to figure out “how to balance entertainment principles of fun with instructional design” (p. 76).

A few of the serious online games I tried using in classes were:

I created vocabulary worksheets, reading comprehension exercises, and extension activities to accompany these games and others and tried them out in classes. What I found is that while these games generally interested learners due to their play elements, and may even have taught them something, it was very difficult to integrate the games into courses. My frustrations with using games in the classroom are consistent with de Freitas’ (2018) review of educational games research, in which she discerned that “finding the balance between game playability and fun and solid learning design that aligns outcomes with assessments (in-game or as part of the blended experience) is a key challenge for effective educational game design” (p. 80).

Another problem is that all these game are Flash-based and will stop working in 2020! (But that, perhaps, is a topic for another post….)

References

de Freitas, S. (2018). Are games effective learning tools? A review of educational games. Educational Technology & Society 21(2), 74-84.

Charsky, D. (2010). From edutainment to serious games: A change in the use of game characteristics. Games and Culture 5(2), 177-198.

Ochsner, A., Ramirez, D., & Steinkuehler, C. (2015). Educational games and outcomes. In R. Mansell, & P. H. Ang (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of digital communication and society. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Rieber, L. P. (1996). Seriously considering play: Designing interactive learning environments based on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games. Educational Technology Research and Development 44(2), 43-58.

An Introduction to Educational Games

Jane McGonigal on Gaming

In her 2010 TED Talk, Gaming Can Make a Better World , Jane McGonigal, pinpointed four skills that gaming engenders:

Urgent optimism
- Gamers believe they can succeed because in well-designed games, it is always possible to win.
Social fabric
- Gamers build trust with the people they play with, and even against.
Blissful productivity
- Gamers work hard (and long hours) if the game feels challenging and meaningful.
Epic meaning
- Powerful games have great and important missions at their core, so gamers feel that they are doing something important.

The problem, according to McGonigal, is that gamers are making a difference in virtual worlds… not the real one. When games are about virtual worlds, they can easily become a form of escape from the problems we face, both locally and globally.

Jane McGonigal (2010)

Here’s where educational games come in.

As an educational game designer, McGonigal believes in harnessing the power of games to create optimistic, collaborative, and productive gamers who want to do meaningful work to tackle real world problems. With games like World Without Oil and Superstruct, she has sought to develop gamers interested in solving real problems like oil dependency and food scarcity.

So, What Are Educational Games?

It is a commonplace that education is about preparing youth for work, while games are about work’s nemesis – play. Just think of the proverb immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining (1980): “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Seen in this light, education and games might seem like case of strange bedfellows. And in their application, they often are. During my career as an itinerant English language teacher, I have seen many teachers reach for a game as a reward on a Friday afternoon for all the toil students endured Monday through Thursday: a break from the routine of work. There is nothing inherently wrong with this practice, but educational games can be something more.

Considering the global popularity of video games (check out data compiled by WePC), particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Western Europe, and especially among children and young adults, educators would do well to consider ways to integrate education and games – particularly digital ones – into their course plans. Games can be more than mere Friday afternoon reprieves.

Over the past few decades, some educators have been pushing for the use of digital games in education. Some twenty years ago, Marc Prensky (2001) argued that young people today have significantly different cognitive preferences than their predecessors, preferring twitch speed to a slower pace, seeing technology as an asset instead of an inconvenience, valuing payoff over patience, and prizing play over work. Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, and Weigel (2006) see play as an essential 21^st century literacy skill, “one that encourages experimentation and risk-taking … [and] views the process of solving a problem as important as finding the answer” (p. 24). As mentioned above, McGonigal (2010) identifies four desirable skills – or attributes – that games engender.

A Working Definition

An educational game, then, might be defined as a tool – usually digital – that educators can employ to harness the inclinations and skills of many of today’s learners in order to achieve educational goals and objectives.

Whether or not an educational game is effective in a particular context depends on a wide range of variables, including content, the type of game, attitude (of both teacher and learner), and access.

References

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21^st century [PDF file]. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Kubrick, S. (Producer), & Kubrick, S. (Director). (1980). The shining [motion picture]. United States: Warner Brothers.

McGonigal, J. (2010, February). Gaming can make a better world [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital game-based learning. St. Paul, MN: Paragon.