Play with Learning

News that defined us

Helping young people to critically “read” the news is crucial if we are to develop a society that can make sense of unfolding events.  Increasingly, children are disengaged from “reliable” mainstream news organisation and instead use partisan or unsubstantiated sources for their information about current affairs and the world around them.

The News that Defined Us, a website that I produced for Tyneside Cinema, unlocks the process of making the news and allows young people to interrogate the production behind the stories.  By providing first-hand access to the media ‘machine’, the project helps to re-engage young people in this crucial form of communication.

The strength of News that Defined Us is the personal and intimate experiences associated with news production.  The project brings together broadcast journalists, eyewitnesses and schoolchildren from Whickam School in plenary sessions where the young people can quiz the adults.  Taking recent stories as a starting point, the makers and subjects of the news talk to students about their experiences and implicitly reveal the effects of representation, censorship and bias.

Danny Savage speaking to students at Whickam School

The opportunity to question professionals is enormously valuable but difficult to scale.  The News that Defined Us project captures the experience of the school question-and-answer sessions and disaggregates them to create a rich interactive library.  The shared legacy is a website where guest sessions are organised according to curriculum subject and theme.  The site provides archived copies of related broadcast material and interactive questions to recreate the school events.  By organising the content into themes, it provides a lasting resource that powerfully illustrates the principles and issues in topics such as conflict, culture and human rights.

Renowned BBC broadcasters such as Kate Adie and Alistair Leithead spoke of their experiences in the UK, Washington, China and Afghanistan.  Their experiences were complemented by visitors such as Private Scott Cooper (a teenage soldier who lost his leg by stepping on an IED), PC David Rathband (a police officer blinded by the killer Raoul Moat) and Councillor Stephen Bridget (a local politician).

From twenty sessions, the project run by Tyneside Cinema created over 200 interactive questions to support thirty hours of broadcast news footage.  The site provides a unique resource both for teachers and students.  Its structure helps educators include this rich media into their lessons while the design encourages young people to explore issues more deeply.

Today the project is launched at the Houses of Parliament in the illustrious company of Tom Watson MP, the terrier-like politician who has pursued the immoral journalists and corrupt management of the British Press, his fellow committee member Damian Collins, Blaydon MP Dave Anderson and our Bridget Phillipson MP.  It is an auspicious start to website that I hope helps young people think more critically about the news that defines them.

Experiential learning and Games

Many theorists propose that we learn from our experiences that is, that effective perception and processing of experiences improves performance.

Merrill suggests that the most effective learning environments have problem solving as their basis.  This trial and improvement, problem-solving covers four distinct phases of learning:

1. Activation of prior experience;
2. Demonstration of skills;
3. Application of skills; and
4. Integration of these skills into real-world application.[1]

kolb's learning cycle

One of the key theorists of experiential learning is David A. Kolb.  Kolb developed his experiential model, as opposed to a purer cognitive one, following the influence of Dewey and Piaget[2].  Kolb formally recognised that people learn from experience and described learning as following a cycle of stages:

1. Concrete experience
2. Observation and reflection
3. Abstract conceptualisation
4. Testing concepts in new situations[3]

In crude terms, learners have to do something, think about it, pull out its key points and apply them to work or life.  In the first, perceptual, half of this cycle learners sense and absorb the information coming from concrete experience and reflect on its significance.  During the processing period, learners build cognitive models that can be tested in practice.

Kolb argued that learners can enter this cycle at any point and that learning is a process of repeatedly looping about these four stages.  Feedback from the experience becomes key in the refinement of performance and the learner’s ability to apply knowledge in new circumstances.

The experiential view of learning is considered more sophisticated than pure behaviourism or constructivism because it represents a more holistic view of the learner.

However, like constructivism, experiential learning draws on the learner’s personal experience.  The role of the facilitator is to encourage learners to address the various stages of the learning cycle.

One of the implications of this is that the role for practitioners is not about teaching specific knowledge or training fixed behaviours, but is one of helping the learner discover approaches that work for them.

Facilitation is about creating and providing space for learners to try out something new, reflect on their experiences, arrive at new conclusions and think about how they would apply these conclusions in their work and life.  In this view people learn for themselves with a bit of help and assistance, rather than have it done to or for them.

As with constructivism, the learner is not a passive recipient of learning simply being fed knowledge but is active in its gathering and manipulation.

Typical experiential games include task-based simulations (such as SimCity) or role-play (e.g. The Sims) where players have a given or a chosen goal and must act consistently “in character” to achieve it.  The beauty of these “open-ended sandboxes” is that players can experiment and “fail softly.”

In physical role-play, children have been observed to use real objects to create imaginary situations in which they role-played and formulated rules that surfaced naturally during their play [4](Berk, 1995). In the same way, simulations allow for the simplification of systems: they describe manageable chunks of behaviour that learners can absorb.  The structure and simplification of environments gives users the chance to parse information more effectively.

Herz (1997: 220) suggests that the circumstances within a simulation are less important than the forces that create them [5].  The “four dimensional building blocks” of moving resources in time do not change the system they merely illustrate the way in which it operates and allowing the user to establish the rules and relationships between elements.  The simulation therefore describes environmental processes through graphics, animations and other dynamic media, portraying complex abstract relationships in a more recognisable and intuitive way.

And that is where simulations offer most education value, not product but process: the articulation of rules and relationships – the basis of experiential learning.

Constructivism and Games

building blocks

Continuing my series on the relationship between the various learning theories and games, this post explores the idea of constructivism.

From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon as described by Behaviourism, rather it requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction[1]. In constructivist theory, the learner takes an active role in constructing his own understanding rather than receiving it from someone who knows.  According to constructivists, learners interpret information from the unique personal perspective of their previous experience.  They learn through observation, processing and interpretation: personalising the information into knowledge[2],[3].  As well as the recognising the cognitive aspects of learning, a major emphasis of constructivist theory is situated learning, that is contextual learning where material is placed in a recognised situation and takes account of the learner’s beliefs and conceptions of knowledge (Ernest, 1995).

Boethel and Dimock outline six assumptions of constructivism:

• Learning is an adaptive activity
• Learning is situated in the context where it occurs
• Knowledge is constructed by the learner
• Experience and prior understanding play a role in learning
• There is resistance to change
• Social interaction plays a role in learning[4]

Learning, according to Constructivist theory, takes place through stimulating one’s ideas and helping to reflect on them.  The process encourages learners to consider how new ideas, actions they take and experiences make sense of their own mental models.  The main difference between the behaviourist and constructivist approaches is that in the former, one sees the learner as a relatively passive storer of knowledge and the latter the learner is an active creator of their own knowledge.  In practice, most situations seem to involve a mixture of the two.

Constructivist games provide primary sources of information, simple elements and raw data for players to experiment with and manipulate.  Open-ended God-games (like Black and White or Spore) and simulations (like Age of Empires) typify the theory because every instance of the game is a unique creation by the player.

In an extension to constructivism, Seymour Papert recognised the potential of production as a means of learning in his work on constructionism, that is, “learning by making.”

Papert says “Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word— shares contructivism’s view of learning as “building knowledge structures” through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.[5]

Cognitivism and games

busy brain

In this, the second part of my series on examining how learning theories relate to game play, I’m looking at the theory that suggests learning is dependent on mental capacity – cognitivism.

Cognitivism replaced Behaviourism as the dominant learning paradigm in the 1960s[1]. Cognitive psychology proposes that learning comes from mental activity such as memory, motivation, thinking and reflection.  Cognitivists believe that learning is an internal process that depends on the learner’s capacity, motivation and determination[2],[3].

Although cognitivists such as Jean Piaget[4] and Jerome Bruner[5] have different emphases, both believe that learning is demonstrated through a change in knowledge and understanding.  Cognitivists describe this change as altering a learner’s mental model.  Cognitivists maintain that the mind, thinking and understanding mediate the stimulus and response described by behaviourists.  That is, while learning may result in a change of behaviour, it is primarily a change in understanding.

Cognitivism focuses on the transmission of information from someone who knows (such as an ‘expert’ as opposed to facilitators) to learners who do not know.  The learners receive it, take it on board, store it, relate it to existing ideas and information that they already have, index it (like a filing system) and then retrieve it, so that they can find it in their memories later when they need it.  In cognitivism, learning is the process of connecting pieces of knowledge in meaningful and memorable ways.

However, working with older learners can be more difficult because in the cognitivist view, learning is more about modifying and extending ideas than adding new ones.  Although more mature learners may have ‘collected’ more ideas they may be ‘fixed’ or harder to change.

Cognitivism relies heavily on Piaget’s notion of age-dependent “stages of development” to define the mental capabilities of learners. For teachers in a cognitivist environment getting the balance between the transmission and facilitation is critical for effective learning.  Practitioners have to decide when to offer input (transmitted knowledge) to learners and when to facilitate a learner’s understanding of their own personal model.

In cognitivist thinking, purpose and outcomes are like a general sense of direction for a journey rather than a detailed specification of the shared, identical destination.

Cognitivism is more concerned with process than the product and is therefore demonstrated by games than improve reflexes, promote critical thinking or help people learn different patterns of association.  In 2009, Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes comprehensively demolished claims that brain training games were any better than even the humble paper and pen for increasing brain ‘power’ but puzzles and strategy games that offer a free environment for decision-making such as Tetris, Age of Empires and Professor Layton  are good examples of the cognitivist approach.

Bandura’s later theory of Social Learning[6] attempts to bridge the gap between behaviourist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.

Behaviourism and Games

carrot

Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Learning Theory and Game Design.  Clearly there are game mechanics that exploit particular learning traits and I thought it would be interesting to identify them.

Researchers have long studied the way in which individuals learn.  Over the years, academics have proposed a number of theories to describe and explain this process.  A recent assessment by Burgoyne[1] on schools of thought identified 14 different theories.  However, those fourteen fall into five broad categories that I’ll explore over the next few posts:

• Behaviourist
• Cognitivist
• Constructivist
• Experiential
• Social and contextual

Despite the different concepts, it is worth noting that there is no definitive theory for how we learn, rather we exhibit different characteristics depending on the objective and circumstance.

Behaviourism

Key behaviourist thinkers including Thorndike[2], Pavlov[3] and Skinner[4] have hypothesized that learning is a change in observable behaviour caused by external stimuli in the environment.  In behaviourist theory, change in behaviour demonstrates some learning.

Behaviourists describe “conditioning” as a universal learning process, dividing it into two types:

• classical conditioning occurs when a natural reflex responds to a stimulus
• operant conditioning occurs when a response to a stimulus is reinforced

The key principle of Behaviourism is the reward or punishment of a new behaviour, commonly described as the ‘carrot and stick’ approach to learning.  The theory states that rewarding someone for particular behaviour encourages him to behave in the same way in a similar situation.  The reward reinforces behaviour.  Conversely, if behaviour is punished, the subject is less likely to repeat it.  In Behaviourism, people can learn not to do things as well as to do things.

Behaviourism has had a particularly significant influence on teaching, training and instruction.  Learning objectives are typically described in Behaviourist terms and identify specific behaviour that is desirable (and hence rewarded).  For practical skills, a Behaviourist approach often follows a tell-show-practise-reinforce sequence.  This process describes what is going to be learnt, demonstrates how it is done, gives the learner an opportunity to practise and uses reinforcement to refine behaviour.  Rewards typically take the form of feedback.

A key feature of behaviourism is the fact it is based on observable behaviours: making it easy to collect and quantify research data.  However, there are many criticisms of the theory including its inability to describe learning that occurs in the absence of reinforcement (such as initial language learning), its disregard for changes in reinforced behaviour and its ignoring of any purely cognitive input.

Computer games are sometimes described as a “Skinner box” because of the way they offer reward or punishment for the player’s behaviour.  Like the classic experiment, many games require the performance of a repetitive task to achieve some goal or reward.  In behaviourist theory, a reward or positive reinforcer is anything that increases the frequency of a behaviour.  Conversely, punishment or negative reinforce is something that decreases the frequency of a behaviour.  The strict (narrative) structure and scheduling of rewards is classic behaviourism and characterises many games.

Traditional positive reinforcers in computer games include the following:

• Points
• Power-ups
• Bonuses
• Unlocks

Negative reinforcers include:

• Failure to beat high score
• An increase in obstacles or opponents
• A decline in health

Multiplayer and social games provide a set of social reinforcers including:

• Status
• Leaderboards

Some commentators including the Georgia Institute of Technology professor, Ian Bogost, argue that gamification is a product of a simplistic Behaviourist approach to game design. Game designer, Jon Radoff continues:

“The behaviorist approach to games that channels inquiry away from the harder problems of immersion, cooperation and competition that is so important to creating successful game experiences.”[5]