Play with Learning

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.

New connections; common ideas

collaboration

One of the joys of being able to publish ideas online is the ability to make entirely new connections with people one would never otherwise meet.

This weekend I’ve had the pleasure of being introduced (virtually) to two really interesting thinkers and practitioners in fields of play and learning – Lois Holzman and Jim Martinez.  Lois is the director of the East Side Institute, a training and research centre for psychotherapy; Jim is a teacher in Manhattan.  They both describe their extensive experiences of using play for learning eloquently and I think I’m going to learn a great deal from them.

Regardless of whether I ever actually meet Lois or Jim face to face (and I hope one day I will) the serendipitous links created through tweets and search engines open up all kinds of new opportunities for collaboration.

It is a self-selecting community, of course – we have to want to be found.  Similarly, we have to want to participate.  Sometimes, that can be hard because of the barriers we erect as we age.  But, if Lois and Jim will forgive the comparison, it is like online dating with its explicit purpose to associate and very deliberate and considered communication.

Collaboration, the crux of Jim’s blog, is a skill more potent today than ever before.  Let’s see what comes from this new relationship.  I’m excited by its potential.

Clever Fools

CASP9 Refinement Puzzle 2

Now, here’s a clever science game.  A game that actually generates valuable scientific outputs.

Foldit is a game from Seth Cooper and his colleagues at the University of Washington where players score points by squeezing as many  proteins as possible into a chemically stable configuration.  Understanding how proteins can fold together is essential to establishing bio-chemical processes and hence the creation of new drugs.  This is significant work.  Performed by gamers.

The team have just published a paper in Nature and their accomplishments have been picked by the Economist and others.

A few things jumped out at me as I read the research:

1. Players have performed better than the best available software algorithms.
2. Few of the highest scores come from experts
3. Many of the best results are reliant on collaboration.

Of course, none of these things are especially surprising but they are exciting nonetheless.  Although players haven’t proved as good as the algorithms at folding proteins from scratch, they have excelled at risk-taking – remodelling using structures that are temporarily unstable – a strategy dismissed by the software.

And enthusiastic amateurs have produced some of the highest scores.  This might just a consequence of the number of participants – there might be relatively few biochemists in the player pool or it might indicate that the ‘fools’ offer real advantages.  It’s not an insult.  The liberating aspect of being an enthusiastic amateur  is not knowing ‘the rules’ or being confined to play by them.  This has resulted in multiple novel strategies as the ‘unschooled’ have experiemented wildly.  It’s a winning approach.

And finally, many of the best scores have been the result of teams of strangers working together.  The effectiveness of collaboration demonstrating that again that (for adults particularly) dialogue is the core of learning.  It’s also an example of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus at work.  Together we’re capable of more.

Foldit epitomises many of the advantages of using games to serious purposes – it’s team-based fun, it’s unconventional and it’s generating real transferable scientific value.  Good game.