Over the past two months I think we’ve made one thing very clear: we’re pasionate about what we’re doing. But based on conversations I’ve had with friends and family, I’m not sure everyone understands our work. So I’m taking this opportunity to explain it to you based on an upcoming game I’m designing, Jade’s Ups and Downs; a simple, story-driven game which asks the player to push the up or down arrow about once every ten seconds (in correspondence with the story) in order to advance.

Educational Video Games??…. What?

As the term says, educational video games are simply video games that educate the player. But how does that education take place? Well, in Jade’s Ups and Downs, we’re teaching 2-3 year olds action-reaction using two buttons, the up arrow and the down arrow. If the player presses the incorrect button there is no stimulus. That is, nothing happens. No sound, no animation, nothing. As an early education teacher, I’ve witnessed two-year olds search for an incorrect or unintended stimulus, repeat it until they tire of the response and move onto another activity. In an effort to get them to complete the activity, we only give the player two buttons (so if one option isn’t right, the other is) and we only acknowledge the correct button input as it correlates to the story.

So therein lies how they’re educated. They learn to push the arrow key which correlates to the story and, as a reward, the animated story advances. For example, one line of the script says, “…. she looked down.” at which point the game pauses and awaits (and will eventually tell) the player to press down. After the down arrow key is pushed Jade will look down and the story continues.

Why Teach from a Computer? No One Wants to Stare at a Screen All Day.

Studies have shown that babies and toddlers (under the age of two) should not be viewing screens (particularly when it’s passive media, such as television) as it distracts their minds from the active learning they should be engaging in at such an early stage of life. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that young children (ages two and up) be limited to one to two hours of screen time per day. Jade’s Ups and Downs is designed to be a five-to-ten minute play session. It provides a fun and engaging experience that can provide variety to an early education teacher’s curriculum and can be reinforced at home (as it will be playable online). So, again, this game – like our other games – is like another tool in a teacher toolbox, intended to hammer out useful ways to educate.

The End

Hopefully this whole concept of “educational video games” is starting to make sense. They aren’t replacing a teacher in a classroom. But, as is the case with Jade’s Ups and Downs, are an excellent means for a teacher to provide learners with a fun and educational experience that can introduce or reinforce lessons taught in class.

Just in time for the new school year, here are 10 ideas for how to bring the best of games into the classroom

1. Give students a reason

In games, there’s always a good reason to do something. You go fight the bears because you need pelts. You solve the puzzle because you need to get through the door. In the classroom, however, often the reason is “to get a good grade.” Although this is a motivator for some students who see the connection between good grades and future success, many students can benefit from some additional motivation. Although we can’t always add game-like narratives to lessons, we can give students good reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing.

2. Raise the stakes

In video games, the stakes are often high: save the world from zombies, protect the president’s daughter, escape the evil lab. Everything the player does in the game is to achieve this overarching goal, which adds richness and meaning to tasks that sometimes are no more than button-pushing. By finding ways to raise the stakes in the classroom, you can add the same meaningfulness to school activities that a compelling narrative adds to games. A common way to do this is to add competition, but you can also raise the stakes by connecting what your class is doing to the community, creating something meaningful or useful together, or solving a real problem in your school.

3. Lower the risk

Even though video games raise the stakes, they are actually very low-risk endeavors. If you make a mistake, you’re immediately transported back to your last save point. Many games let you pick the save point, so if you’re worried that your next move won’t be successful, you can save first and risk nothing by trying. However, school environments often do not give students low-risk opportunities to try something new. When everything is graded and counts toward an overall average, students are given an incentive to “play it safe” and not try something creative or expressive. Try giving your students many opportunities to fail and then try again.

4. Give quality feedback

What happens when a player gets sent back to a save point? There’s a bit of loading time, which provides them with an opportunity to reflect and plan out strategy for the next time around. Players quickly learn to adjust their strategy based on what went wrong (or right!) the last time around. One of the weaknesses of the traditional grading system is that a simple letter or number doesn’t provide enough feedback for students to meaningfully adjust their behavior. By providing good feedback and time to reflect and try again, students can learn from the testing experience.

5. Help students “level up”

Many role-playing games give each player a numeric score that is their overall level, and then individual scores for in-game skills. Levels are increased by using those skills to complete quests, and very rarely is a level decreased for any reason. This is very different from a traditional school environment, where everyone “levels up” together at the beginning of the school year, and they are all provided the same challenges regardless of actual skill proficiency. In addition, grade averages can fluctuate throughout the year, and even throughout four years of high school, meaning that fantastic chemistry skill can be quickly overshadowed by a failing grade in creative writing. Providing assessment in the form of “leveling up” means that the highest levels are attainable for everyone, no matter how many times they’ve failed getting there.

6. Form guilds

Some of the most popular video games are Massively Multiplayer Online games, where players connect online and attempt quests as a “guild.” Within these guilds, players practice negotiation, collaboration, and leadership skills. In addition, since every player has different in-game abilities, every guild member brings something unique and valuable to the group. However, many group activities in the classroom end up being a solo project for the student in the group who cares most about getting a good grade. This means that the student who needs the practice least is doing all the work, and those who could most use the experience are getting nothing out of it. For your next group project, try taking some inspiration from guilds, and give students different tools, information, or resources so that they all come to the group with a unique offering.

7. Let students cheat

Well, maybe not all the time! But there is something powerful about being able to help out a fellow player. Take a look at all the tutorials and walkthroughs on YouTube, and you’ll see gamers showing off what they know in order to help others succeed. By giving students appropriate ways of helping each other out, the weaker students will get practice taking ownership of their work, and the stronger students will get practice articulating what they know.

8. Give three stars

In casual games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, there often is a metric at the end of a level indicating how many stars you’ve earned. One star allows you to move on to the next level, but two stars gives you bragging rights, and three stars shows that you’ve achieved the maximum number of points. These star ratings and associated rewards give players an incentive to come back and replay levels that they’ve already completed, in hopes of getting more stars. You can do this in a classroom by giving students incentives to try again at just-passable work, or to give the superstar students something challenging to strive for. However, the power of this system is in the choices – students must decide they want to try for more “stars” themselves!

9. Don’t memorize

Quiz and trivia games have their place, but for the vast majority of games, memorization is not a requirement. Often players will need to know something in order to be successful, but their success depends on their ability to find and apply that information, not memorize and recite it. Classroom activities can mimic games by simply providing students with a problem to solve, and letting them determine the necessary information, find it, and apply their newfound knowledge to the solution.

10. Play games! 

There many quality educational games available to teachers right now (check out GameUp for a start) and more continue to be released all the time. In addition, there are many resources to help teachers bring games like Portal and Minecraft into their classrooms.

And don’t just leave the playtime to your students. Pick up a controller and jump in!

How Far We’ve Come, How Far We’ve Yet to Go

For the majority of my life I’ve wanted to see the marriage of two of my greatest loves: Video Games and Knowledge.  Within the last ten years we’ve had the benefit of watching the interactive medium mature into a widely recognized and respected mainstream art form, and even more recently, the acknowledgement of its value in places of learning.  The latter mostly due to the gamers of yesteryear, themselves maturing into adult contributors to society, and beginning to implement what they have understood all along: that games are an extremely powerful, interactive tool for more than just entertainment.

Despite these leaps in understanding and adoption of the “game” as an educational aid, we still have yet to bring it to its true potential, and certain, lingering preconceptions about what video games are and can do continue to hold it back.  Those of us who grew up with the entertainment software era know the stigma it has fought to shed for 30 years, namely its synonymy with “kid stuff”, being a “waste of time”, and containing “nothing of value”.  Unfortunately those perceptions have yet to fade away entirely today, with most educational software companies doing away with as much of the “fun” and “childlike” aspects as possible, in order to make their product less “game-like”.  This is something that, as developers and designers, we must change not just in our work, but about our fundamental cultural understanding of learning.  Contrary to the typical belief that has dominated the formal educational field for centuries, not only are Play and Learning not mutually exclusive, they are intimately and inherently linked.

The Nature of Play

Play is the catalyst that encourages our learning process.  When human beings have fun, it opens the mind to imagination and the realm of possibility.  We come into the world with the urge to play being as second-nature to us as eating, sleeping and breathing, and that natural tendency is what prods us to reach out and experiment with ourselves, others and the environment.  In the 2006 book “Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning: Insights from a Neurologist and Classroom Teacher”, the author Dr. Judy Willis writes:

“The highest-level executive thinking, making of connections, and “aha” moments are more likely to occur in an atmosphere of “exuberant discovery,” where students of all ages retain that kindergarten enthusiasm of embracing each day with the joy of learning.
…when spontaneity is replaced with conformity, students’ brains are distanced from effective information processing and long-term memory storage.”

Dr. Judy Willis. Whatchu talkin’ about?!

She goes on to state that “fun” results in a greater flow of oxygen to the brain, as well as released endorphins and dopamine, which in turns stimulates long-term memory and critical thinking.  The combination of these lead to a sense of pleasure and joy, as well as the desire to engage further and pay closer attention to whatever the source of the stimulation might be.

In Dr. Stuart Brown’s 2009 TED talk “Play is More Than Fun”, he addresses how every species of animal on earth partakes in play for play’s sake, but this playful interaction facilitates cognitive function, problem solving and information retention.  Focusing his career on the study of play, he cites many examples from his own research on the positive aspects of play at all stages of life, but also negative side effects resulting from not enough play.  Ultimately his research shows that there is thorough, real-world evidence that play is not only positive for mind, body and spirit, but is a form of self-education and knowledge gathering.

The Obvious Question

I first became interested in the link between video games and education when I was too young to realize it.  In the age predating the internet many games were too difficult to complete without outside help.  As most of my leisure time as a child was spent immersed in computer and video games, my household found itself the frequent recipient of phone calls asking for hints and tips for various games I’d completed.  After overhearing one such phonecall from a neighbor down the street, my Mother remarked “If you could remember the lessons you’re taught in school half as well as you remember every ridiculous detail of these games, you’d be a genius.”

Probably the crowning achievement of my life.

That one comment has stuck with me throughout my life.  Why couldn’t I remember the lessons from school, but to this day I can still play through the entire first level of Actraiser (1991, Quintet, SNES) without looking at the television, solely using the audio cues as a guide?  Almost every childhood gamer who is an adult today can tell you how to find the ‘warp zones’ in Super Mario Brothers (1985, Nintendo, NES), just as most who were children in the late 90’s can recite all 151 Pokemon (1996, Nintendo, Gameboy) from the original games.

So what’s the difference between the typical Game-as-Entertainment, and educational software?  The answer should be “nothing”, but unfortunately it’s more complicated that this.  The typical educational game has historically been thought of as “boring”, not engaging for the player, and often, not very educational at all, though the latter primarily because it fails to capture interest to begin with.  As another author has covered previously on this site: All games are educational.  So why do we end up learning more from entertainment-centric software than we do from the educationally focused ones?

Simpler Than You’d Expect

Blue Doors open with gunshots, Red Doors open with missiles? How about: Blue Doors accept 3-digit key-codes where the sum of each number must equal ‘X’, Red Doors accept prime numbers where two of 3 digits are even?

So when it comes to education, video games as they are, even the typical, entertainment-focused, bargain-bin ‘Call of Honor 4: Super Wars’, teach problem solving on a level superior to any other practice aside from real-world experience.  Not only do Games-as-Entertainment present an experience almost solely comprised of compelling obstacles to overcome, they also have the added challenge of teaching the audience the fundamental tools to interact within their world, analyze problems, and apply what they’ve learned using a limited spectrum of available resources to overcome them.  At their very core games have always focused on educating.  Instructing the player how to interact with the world, gradually introducing them to increasingly difficult puzzles and challenges, and rewarding them through various stimuli when they succeed.  The formula is the very definition of educational practice and positive reinforcement.

But our first instinct when it comes to educational gaming is to do away with these aspects, because we as a society have grown into a 20^th-century industrialized mindset of assembly-line education.  Today many games for education are placed under the label of “Serious Games”, where “whimsy” and “fantasy” are removed along with most things that make the game intrinsically fun to play.  Granted this is justified in the context of training programs or high-level technical simulation, but when this practice is broadly applied to the entire medium in the educational realm, we immediately stagnate the experience in the same way educational software has been designed since the 1980s.

So if anything, we should be valuing the “fun” elements within these games even more than the educational aspects, as that is the feature that gets attention, holds focus, and as the evidence above suggests, facilitates the learning process directly.  It should not matter that your Advanced Placement Science Game looks like Pikmin, and features a narrative typically found in a Japanese animation.  If it is visually appealing, aesthetically pleasing, and draws more attention for it, you are not doing a disservice to the educational aspect, you are winning over an entire audience to volunteer their time to willingly learn.

Oh Mathman, how I recoiled at the thought of someone actually making me play you.

Educational games need to be games, first and foremost, to the point of tricking the audience into learning when all they thought they were doing was having fun.  They don’t even have to be considered a different genre altogether.  Role-playing games can teach chemical interactions in place of elemental weaknesses.  Survival Horror can feature dramatic medical emergencies while instructing the player about antibiotics, medications, anesthetics and the failure of privatized health care.  My personal dream is to develop an open-world, time-travelling Final-Fantasy-styled adventure epic that encompasses human history around the world, where the audience can relive historical moments, see key decisions that change the course of civilization, hear reenactments of famous speeches, and observe historical figures as accurately as what history has written about their lives and times.

Probably the only conceivable way to one-up this masterpiece.

So with hope and help, we can educate the entire world while bringing them laughter, drama and happiness at the same time.

Sources:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/learning/why-fun-matters-in-education.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/CANCER/pedresource/pedres_docs/ChildrenLearnThruPlay.pdf

About the Author:
Creath Carter is an independent video game developer who lives in the Boston Massachusetts area.  With over a decade of professional development experience and formal education in both art and design, Creath is currently pursuing his dream of merging educational software and video games in unprecedented ways.  He loves cats.