Play with Learning

Game Mechanics and Learning Theory

To bring together the series on how learning theories overlap with games, I’ve drawn up a table of how game mechanics relate to the ideas about how we learn.

By using and combining various definitions of game mechanics (Wikipedia, SCVNGR & Gamification.org), it is possible to map how dynamics correspond to the various learning theories.  This is not an exact science but does suggest which mechanics can be used to encourage particular ways of learning.

Of course the risk with any sort of exercise like this, is that it becomes formulaic and is wrongly perceived as a rule for creating “learning” games.  I don’t believe that is the case. Every game needs to be looked on a special case: as soon as you try to bottle the essence of play, it tends to evaporate.

Social Learning and Games

farmville sheep

In this final look at how each of the major learning theories relate to games, we explore the ideas behind social learning.  In the social and contextual approach to learning, the outcome is for the learner to become socially accepted and to be an effective member within a community.  This is what is commonly referred to as learning in a community of practice (COP)[1],[2].

In the Social and Contextual approach, learning does not occur solely within the learner, but in the group and community in which they work.  Learning is a shared process which takes place through observing, working together and being part of a larger group, which includes colleagues of varying levels of experience, able to stimulate each other’s development.  In this view, rather like cognitivism, individuals only learn from more competent others but the emphasis is now on being part of a larger system.  Crucially, this system includes the learner, other people around them, the equipment they use, the technologies they work with, the procedures they work with and the overall culture of the workplace.

Whether they are conscious of it or not, groups, and individuals within them, learn mainly through social interaction.  This happens through discussion, observing and sharing.  Again, the role of the practitioner is one of facilitator who needs to help focus discussion to maximise key learning points rather than just letting a group tell irrelevant anecdotes.

Vygotsky in his Social Development Theory[3] coined the term “scaffolding” to describe the various forms of support that educational providers can offer learners.  It might include verbal assistance, questioning, suggestions and directions all aimed at extending a learner’s activities where the learner cannot accomplish this alone.

For Vygotsky, learning from others more competent in culturally appropriate skills and technologies was the capstone to his educational theory.  Vygotsky suggests that children or students can be guided by explanation, demonstration, and work, and can attain to higher levels of thinking if they are guided by someone who is more capable and competent – a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO). This conception is better known as The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).  The Zone of Proximal Development is the gap between what the learner can achieve on his own and what he can achieve with the support of others. The ability to attain higher levels of knowledge and understanding depends upon interaction with other, more advanced, peers.  This unequal interaction facilitates and encourages learning.  Through increased interaction and involvement, students are able to extend themselves to higher levels of cognition. Vygotsky defined the Zone of Proximal Development as,

“the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under the guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”

The ZPD is the difference between what students can accomplish independently and what they can achieve in conjunction or in collaboration with another, more competent person.  The Zone is created in the course of social interaction.

The term “social game” has become very popular of late.  Farmville is perhaps the commonly thought of social game (although many don’t think it is a game at all) because to succeed requires the active participation of other players: collaboration is essential to progress (that or using real-world payments to short-circuit the process).

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORGs) like World of Warcraft are better examples of social and contextual games because they are dependent on multi-layered teamwork.  In these circumstances, players improve their performance through the observation, imitation and modelling of others.

Social learning also occurs outside the game world but in related ‘spaces’ such as forums.  The associated activity of leader tables, message boards, hints, tips and cheats all represent instances of social encouragement, support and scaffolding.

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]

What Games are Good For?

In spite of my criticisms of many educational games, I believe passionately in the potential of games to inspire learning. I don’t think that games are a panacea but they do have many characteristics that can make a profoundly positive impact on our lives.  The real educational value for gaming lies in four key areas:

• Cosmetics – making the unpleasant or mundane more palatable
• Confidence – offering the chance to practise and fail softly
• Catalyst – as a spring board to further investigation
• Collaboration – as a means of pooling our intellectual and social capital

Cosmetics

bbc questionaut

For many years we have adopted game mechanics to make ordinary activities more engaging. Recently that process has gained a higher profile and more glamour through the term “gamification.”

The most common form of educational game is the quiz.  A quiz is simply, a glorified, gamified, test. I’m not being disparaging, on the contrary: there is no doubt that ‘treating’ assessment in this way makes it more engaging without diminishing any of its quantification value.  Quizzes make the process of testing knowledge more enjoyable but you still need to identify the right answer to progress.

Although mainly used to check knowledge, this same approach can help raise awareness and change behaviour.  It’s a technique deployed for loyalty reward points such as Air Miles, travelling (Foursquare and Gowalla)  and environmentally-friendly driving behaviour (Toyota Prius, Nissan Leaf, etc.)

Confidence

flight sim

There are many circumstances where we want to practice before being exposed to a real situation.  Those circumstances might be technical, financial or social but where getting it wrong in reality might cause real problems. Games provide the perfect environment to practice, to experiment, to fail softly.

It goes without saying that we’d prefer our airline pilots to train using simulators before taking the controls of a real jumbo jet.  Games can also provide a proving ground for social interactions, leadership skills, teamwork.  Although the fidelity of the game is unlikely to present an entirely true mapping with reality, the experience of playing within a recognisable environment helps develop important, transferable, understanding.  I suspect the translation to reality will always need some additional contextualisation and the scaffolding but it does at least prepare the ground, and even if the game and reality are radically different it can help the player feel more confident.

Catalyst

myst

Where games have proved to be enormously valuable is when the experience has been scaffolded or supported by an enthusiastic teacher who can use the game play as a stimulus for other activity. Good teachers (formal or informal) can draw out of the game transferable lessons such as urban planning from SimCity, rotational geometry from Tetris, creative writing from Myst or social etiquette from the Sims.

In these circumstances, the accuracy of the game is less important than its ability to engage:

Jonny Ball famously said “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good joke.”

Games are excellent in their ability to bring a subject to life, encourage exploration and provoke further thought.  Even if a game is not strictly true in its representation of objects or events those inaccuracies can form a powerful stimulus for further investigation and discussion. From my own experience, I know that the flaws in games can prove powerful provocations for debate and that that can generate profound learning.

Collaboration

CASP9 Refinement Puzzle 2

The combined problem-solving activity of the gaming world is racking up some astonishing figures – people have played World of Warcraft for an incredible 6 million years of combined effort since its launch in 2004.  The biggest growth area in gaming is multiplayer games with millions of players around the globe regularly engaged.  And the activity is predominantly team-based – these are virtual communities at ‘work’.  That shared experience, that voluntary collaboration – “cognitive surplus”, as Clay Shirky might call it, “blissful productivity” Jane McGonigal might say, can be channelled into very valuable focus such as the example of gamers identifying the structure of a new retroviral enzyme.

There is something deeply satisfying about solving a problem, beating a challenge or experiencing something new when it is done with others.  The social nature of online gaming has great potential to bring people together for a common purpose.

Imagine if we made more use of that combined effort: what other real world problems and challenges might gamers solve?

I have no doubt whatsoever that games can make a unique contribution to education and society.  I think that in the past we have, perhaps, been overconfident in our expectations: wrongly assuming that games on their own could solve many, if not all, of the barriers to learning.  However, if we take the true characteristics of games and embed them in a well thought through set of experiences then we have something that  will be genuinely different and make a genuine difference.

There’s more to play

taxonomy of play

As a teenager I spent lots of time in my garage designing and making boardgames. Highly elaborate fiendishly complex and virtually unplayable boardgames.

The first computer game I designed from scratch was a simple town planning simulation. It was about 15 years ago and I built it to complement a theatre show for schoolchildren. Since then I’ve largely concentrated on computer and console-based gaming.

Attending this year’s Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin, I had a moment of epiphany. Talking to the likes of Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, and Colleen Macklin reminded me that games can take many forms and in most circumstances play doesn’t require technology. I needed reminding that children can play on their own. Adults too.

Corinne Hutt’s model of play (shown above) eloquently describes the range we enjoy.  She argues that in epistemic play we explore the basic properties of materials and in doing so find the basis for developing further knowledge, skills and understanding.

Ludic play, including socio-dramatic play, provides opportunities for language play and creativity and for rehearsal and practice.

Games-play offers increasing levels of difficulty and gratuitous rules.

These helpful definitions provide a useful framework and a timely reminder that the benefits of play are not confined to the electronic world.  At the GLS conference, we derived as much pleasure playing simple card games such as the MetaGame as we did from the Arcade.  Cards, anyone?

Educational games

baf 2011

Yesterday I spoke at BAF Games.  This is a summary of my ‘Play with Learning’ talk.  I have embedded links to supporting information into the post .  Sadly, I couldn’t capture the lively Q&A session afterwards.

I made my first game as a young teenager – a board game so incomprehensibly complex and tedious, it only ever had one player. Me. I programmed my first computer game at the age of 14, using the machine code printed in the back of a Sinclair User magazine. It took a week to input, twenty minutes to load and thirty seconds before it crashed. Despite those experiences, I spent innumerable hours playing games on my ZX Spectrum.

At the same time, although not entirely related to my game-playing, my school-based education collapsed.  I left school with a clutch of poor GSCE’s, a single in A level Government and Politics and a report that read straight ‘E’s.

For me there’s always been a link between games and learning, but it’s taken years of industry and professional experience including my time as a BBC Commissioner and a PhD in the educational psychology of games to fully appreciate the potential benefits.

I am a game player but I’m also a lifelong learner. I am a passionate believer in the potential of education to change lives.  I believe that learning is something that can make the world a better place.  It can transform society, culture and the economy by catapulting people out of often horrendous situations and helping them realise their potential.

Learning is not an onerous activity – we love to learn.  Everyone loves to learn.  The thrill and satisfaction of acquiring some knowledge or skill, or overcoming some challenge by developing a solution is universal.  Just because the experience of school poisons some attitudes towards education it doesn’t mean that learning ever loses it’s ability to delight.

Play and learning are intrinsically linked.  Indeed, we learn in three ways: repetition, play and dialogue.  From the moment we are born, play is a basic human desire.

Who could deny that play is enormously attractive?  Regardless of whether it is computer-based or real-world, sports and games are a universal passion.  You only have to consider the viewing figures for the Olympic Games and the World Cup to recognise that play is universally appealing.  The last World Cup had more than 3 billion viewers making it the single biggest collective event in human history.

But it’s not just passive entertainment.  In terms of activity duration it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that video gameplay is unprecedented in human history: some estimates suggest that we play three billion hours per week, 150 million people play FarmVille each month.  That’s an astonishing amount of time and reach.

Some of the most fervent game players are exactly the same people who disengage or drop out of school and play no further constructive role in society.  With their devotion to gameplay, it is easy to see the attraction of making education more game-like.

In education the appeal of games represents a form of Holy Grail.  The idea that a disaffected disinterested disempowered teenage boy (or girl) might spend hours and hours of their own time tackling a formidable problem, want to talk about it with his friends, and pursue it until he succeeds is something that any school teacher would love to be able to mimic. A gamer will willingly invest more than the 100 hours needed to complete a game like GTA 4; that’s the equivalent to half a GCSE or 10 credits towards a Masters degree.  Gaming seems like the obvious solution to reengage young people.

Sadly, we tend to deliver them ‘games’ like this:

magnet game

We deceive ourselves that these activities are going to make the same impact  as the games we play at home. In fact, if we’re honest, this sort of “educational game” is neither educational or a game because it doesn’t possess the characteristics of either.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to compare educational resources like this with commercial off-the-shelf games.  After all Grand Theft Auto 4 had a $100m budget; that works out at $1m per hour of activity.  Most educational resources have a minuscule fraction of that.   But sadly, even the easy-to-implement feedback and rewards systems don’t come close to what the entertainment-focused competitors provide.

The other problem with educational games is we’re not all gamers so for some the prospect of playing a computer game isn’t that appealing.That said, I’m not suggesting that we can’t all appreciate games and gain something from them.

Many of the perceived benefits of educational games are a consequence of the Hawthorne effect where the extra effort committed to introducing and testing the game are the reason for improved performance, not the game itself. Actually, there is very little evidence to suggest that playing games, without any further contextualisation, delivers any transferable learning at all which is why I’ve said, provocatively, games teach us nothing.

Perhaps when you take these resources apart, closer inspection reveals very few gaming characteristics.  In my post what is a game?  I identify the following core characteristics that turns an activity into a game:

I haven’t included fun in that list.  For me, fun is a bonus in gameplay but it is by no means a defining characteristic.  Indeed most games that I play are not fun.  Most games that I play, if they are worth playing, are characterised by long, grinding effort.  I rarely finish games feeling euphoric – more often I feel exhausted but satisfied.  What makes the effort worthwhile is the quality of the rewards.

Many of those game characteristics are intrinsically associated with learning.   Games meet learning in the following aspects:

• Opportunities for reflection and evaluation
• Access to feedback on performance
• Record progress
• Purposeful interactivity
• Achieving learning objectives
• Opportunities to collaborate, investigate or experience
• Chance to correct and learn from errors

Actually, I think games teach us lot.

So, in spite of my criticisms of “educational games,” I still believe passionately in their potential to inspire learning. And I think their real educational value lies in four areas:

• Cosmetics – making the unpleasant more palatable
• Confidence – offering the chance to practise and fail softly
• Catalyst – as a spring board to further investigation
• Collaboration – as a means of pooling our intellectual and social capital

I think that learning is of the utmost importance to our society and our world .While I don’t believe that games are a panacea, I do believe that they offer a unique way to reach and develop our potential and tackle many of the problems we face.

Playing games often brings out the best in us.  It inspires ingenious solutions, hard work and perseverance and global collaboration.  In games we believe that anything is possible and that we are capable of anything.  Surely those are traits that we should bring to bear on life.

Play & Games articles

There’s a lot of really interesting work going on with play and games – here are some of the articles that have caught my eye in the last couple weeks.

Play

Bring Back Play and Disorganized Sports to Our Children. From The Innovative Educator. http://j.mp/n8tCG3

ChicagoQuest promotes game-playing at school – Chicago Sun-Times http://j.mp/qU8zEk

Parents’ behavior linked to kids’ video game playing. Michigan State University http://j.mp/qLuP63

Helicopter Parents Can Impede Child’s Ability to Play. From NC State http://j.mp/nyPH8v

Gamasutra – Features – Personality And Play Styles: A Unified Model http://j.mp/qV1dvx

Game-based learning

Do Action Video Games Improve Perception and Cognition? Florida Uni research in Frontiers in Cognition journal. http://j.mp/rdxeSI

In the Brain, Winning Is Everywhere. How games affect the brain. From Yale. http://j.mp/oNS856

Five Lessons On Teaching From Angry Birds That Have Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Parabolas. From dy/dan http://j.mp/qpcZ9y

Use

Find Games For Your Players [Marketing] from What Games Are http://j.mp/ob0FIy

Gamers Succeed Where Scientists Fail, Opening Door to New AIDS drug design. http://j.mp/oKX5vk

UK ‘must act to solve games industry brain drain’ Tigra study reported by BBC. http://j.mp/ocsOft

The games people play

Although I’m sceptical with much of the ‘research’ that describes virtually everybody as a ‘gamer,’ there is no doubt that over the last few years there’s been an explosion of activity in casual games. Of course one could argue that we’ve always played casual games such as Solitaire and Minesweeper but recently the genre has become more prominent and acceptable. Casual games are now regarded as an extremely lucrative business proposition and are penetrating markets where ‘play’ has previously been a nasty word.

One More Level has created this great infographic to describe the demographics of casual games.

Casual Gaming Infographic

Source: One More Level Flash Games

Beach games

pipe game

During the summer I went to North Wales with the youth group I help lead. While we were away, we played lots of games. Not high-tech, computer-based games but real-world, physical games. It was a timely reminder to me that play, even for teenagers, does not always depend on bits and bytes but can happily exist with a few bits and bobs. In fact, the simplicity added to the fun.

We played a variety of short games on the beach. Some were physical, collecting as much water as possible with a pipe drilled full of holes for example. Some were creative, such as making pictures with beach-combed artefacts. Some were simply sporty, such as volleyball. Almost all the games were faintly ridiculous.

The variety of games catered for everyone’s preference and skill and avoided the situation where any of the young people could feel excluded. They gave every one a chance to shine.

The young people played in teams. The competition was an important driver for participation and each game had a scoring system that rewarded achievement and more arbitrary factors such as teamwork and flair. Having said that, everyone recognised that the scoring was simply a device to provide structure and was at the whim of each of the game leader’s discretion. The scoring was wildly inconsistent but no-one really minded.

But team play is more than competition, it is dependent on collaboration.  The games were designed to leave no-one behind – every game required everyone to participate. No-one could fail individually, but the team could succeed together.

These lo-tech games worked because they drew on the fundamentals of play:

• the society of shared voluntary activity,
• simple rules,
• clear goals,
• boundaries in time and space, and
• no material consequence

The morning on a breezy Welsh beach illustrated beautifully the simple joy of playing together.

Play and games articles

Some of the articles about play and games that I have seen in the last few weeks.

Theory

Online Games & Interest-Driven Learning are Transformative for Today’s Young Learners by @constances http://htn.to/anmyvV

Three Qualities That Make Video Games Better Teachers Than Teachers from EdReach http://j.mp/lNARUV

Gamification time: What if everything were just a game? From BBC News via @jonkingsbury http://j.mp/jdbxTK

Video Games and Learning « Sam Pabón’s Ed-Tech Zone http://j.mp/juDIHp

Parents are forgetting how to play with their children, study shows – article from The Guardian last year http://j.mp/jdoiSR

Video Games Help Learning Difficulties – PC Advisor http://j.mp/jIJg55

The British secretary for education Michael Gove and video games as a tool for learning> http://ow.ly/5w90f

Examples

Celebrity Calamity! – a game about financial literacy via @mcdanger http://j.mp/qBH8kj

@SixtoStart and BBC team Up for “The Code Challenge” @bbccode from ARGNet http://j.mp/iNEZfx

Video: A Fast-Moving Video Game Played On Scrolls of Printer Paper from Popular Science http://j.mp/joGpik