Play with Learning

The Gamification of Education

We often think that gamification is a new idea but we forget, we’ve been turning exams and tests into games for a long long time. Here’s a really good infographic on the subject from Knewton and Column Five Media

The neurology of gaming

There is ongoing debate about how our brains respond to gaming.  I found this infographic from the Online Universities blog interesting. I particularly like the information about which parts of the brain are stimulated by playing video games but I think the jury is still out regarding the effects.  What do you think?

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.

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]

Merry Christmas!

christmas tree

This will be my last post of the year: I’m looking forward to spending a few work-free days with my family over Christmas.  I hope that you will be having a break too.

Play with Learning is one year old and I am delighted with how things have turned out over the last twelve months. I’ve enjoyed some really interesting and varied work – it’s precisely the mix that I’d hoped for when I set the company up –  a combination of theory and practice, research and production.

This year I’ve been happily working with:

• the BBC (helping them define a strategy for their learning games)
• the United Nations (developing a blended learning leadership program for head teachers in Palestinian schools)
• DESQ and Glasshead (for BBC Webwise)
• Numiko (for the forthcoming BBC Primary Art and Primary Geography websites)
• Tyneside Cinema (on the soon-to-be launched  News That Defined Us website for news media literacy)
• the University of Bradford (writing a Masters course on digital media production and delivering a final year module on Creative Media Enterprise)
• Channel 4, the National Film and Television School and Skillset (providing professional multiplatform production and Transmedia storytelling training)

It’s been a blissfully busy time! I’ve made lots of new friends and contacts.  I’ve played a lot and I’ve learnt a great deal.

I’m excited about the opportunities in 2012.  I know that some of the production pieces will launch in the next couple of months and there are lots of exciting projects in the pipeline.  Having said that, I’m always interested in new opportunities so maybe, just maybe there’s something that you and I could collaborate on?

maybe there’s something that you and I could collaborate on?

In the meantime, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

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.

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.