Co-opting Video Games in the Classroom: What's the deal?

[Michael Young]

Games are fun. But not always. For example, I bet if I required an entire 5th grade class to complete 3 hours of WoW leveling each night for a week, some would be complaining about the homework load. Some of us would like to co-opt video gaming into the service of the traditional classroom curriculum. But there is something about the nature of goals and intentions, is this a teacher-centered assignment vs is this a personal goal, that relate to gaming being fun or not. What is it? If it's not just properties of the game that make it fun (affordances), then it must be the interaction (the relationship we have with it) that creates a fun situation. Fun is situated. Games aren't fun for all time and all people. It's the interaction, right? So how do we design for this?

[Simon Ferrari]

Are you asking how to design your curricula or how to design (make) edu-games?

What you're getting at is what happens when instrumental use of games (for education in this case) runs into an important part of the definition of play outlined by Bernard Suits: play is voluntary. In an effort to keep things short, I'll tell you what I've seen work before instead of theorizing. If you want to teach a game genre, don't restrict your students to one artifact. This creates a mix of the voluntary and the non-voluntary that still allows them to have fun while learning. The whole idea behind the county curriculum--that in X year the student will read X book--doesn't work for digital artifacts. What I'm getting at is that playing a game for school doesn't have to be fun, but you're robbing an essential quality from the play experience if you make it completely non-voluntary. Of course, this requires you to do a little extra research to give the students 4-5 choices to pick from, but this will only help you grow your repertoire and your understanding of the medium in the long run.

At the risk of sounding like a hippy (every educator should read Bernie de Koven's The Well-Played Game, by the way), one great first step would be to ask yourself after each lesson: am I using games instrumentally to illustrate a point, or am I sharing a play experience? If you're talking about younger children (if you're a primary educator I guess), combining videogame lessons with New Games-style cooperative games outdoors is a really good way to teach the basics of how play and games work.

I should note that the style of videogame teaching I'm suggesting here originates with Professor Celia Pearce at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bernie de Koven is this under-appreciated (and somewhat impoverished) genius of the New Games school that focuses on creating an educational play atmosphere. You can buy his book here http://www.deepfun.com/Store/ in PDF form to ensure that the money you spend goes straight to him. The price is voluntary donation, but I accidentally insulted him once by paying $1 for it (as I'm a relatively poor graduate student). The book is well worth at least a $10 donation.

Ask me again when I'm (hopefully) professing in four years, and I'll have a more experienced modus to share.

[Simon Ferrari]

As I side note, I hope that the description above shows Roger that Georgia Tech isn't all about thinking from the POV of the designer. I'm actually working on a secret project that, if it gets syndicated next month, will both help answer this question and provide a salve for the great Travis v Bogost debate of 2008.

[Roger Travis]

@Simon That's really great to hear. I can't wait to see how it develops in the field, at Georgia Tech, and in your own project!

Mike, my experience this semester with CAMS 3208 indicates that Simon's observation with regard to voluntariness is absolutely crucial. A lot of the highest-quality learning seemed to come from students picking the games they wanted to talk about themselves. I did get some good responses to Club Penguin and Runescape, but it was the discussion and reports that came out of games like Lord of the Rings Online (which a couple of students started playing on their own) and Kingdom Hearts (which was several students' favorite game) that were, from my perspective, quasi-magical teaching moments.

As a parallel example, I'm always blown away by what happens in the extra-credit assignment I give in CAMS 1103 (Classical Mythology), which is pretty much just to find a modern myth to analyze. Reading those assignments, I can almost feel my students "getting it." This is one of the reasons I've become a complete convert to the idea that a really significant part of the future of education is online--in my experience, things can more easily be made playful, and voluntary, online than in a traditional classroom environment.

[Simon Ferrari]

@ Roger: Oh man, your last paragraph just reminded me of a paper I wrote as an undergraduate about Odysseus being a Bodhisattva. I spent my entire freshman year reading Sophocles and Aeschylus (didn't take long, there ain't that much if you avoid getting into the nitty gritty of Euripedes), lyric poetry, and epic on my own time. Then I took this great class with a crazy old Chinese professor named Kam Ming Wong (who is one of the few surviving speakers of a dying south Chinese dialect) that basically focused on finding connections between eastern and western mythical archetypes (kind of an experiment in seeing if we could out-interdiscipline Joseph Campbell without actually reading him as primary source). That was the most fun I ever had writing a paper, and after reading it he gifted me with a Chinese name: Fei Sai Meng--"Meng Tzu's Rival"

[Michael Young]

Well, Joe Renzulli talks about such projects as "type 3" where the project is complete student-centered, student generated. But I was hoping to get beyond best practices, to open up a discussion about the psychological aspect of personal goals and intentions. There's an old lawyer adage about, "never ask a question you don't know the answer to..." well, the answer I thought I knew to my question is that we have to make instructional design efforts to induce in students new personal goals, ones that relate to the curriculum's raison d'etre. The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt's efforts that draw on cognitive psychology introduced the idea of "anchored instruction," the anchor here being a good story, told well, whose plot line is interrupted, and the "problem" passed on to the viewer. A carefully crafted "problem" of this sort could be designed for nearly any curricular content I can imagine. The take-away here being that as instructors who want to incorporate video games, we need to consider the "situated embodied" nature of learning and use pedagogical techniques to induce in students goals they may not have when they come in, goals that will make learning fun.

[Simon Ferrari]

@Michael: Ah, I'm hopelessly ignorant of the cognition of teaching and learning. I'd be really interested in reading some of that though, since I'm pretty sure I've never seen a student who didn't want to learn all of a sudden find learning fun (outside of movies such as The Class and Stand & Deliver).

This reminds me, when the heck do I actually take education classes if I'm on a PhD track?

[David Carlton]

I'm trying to puzzle in what ways it's important that we're talking about games here. I should probably already know the answer, but can you give some examples of when and why you (you specifically, not an abstract you out there) might be tempted to assign a game or games in a classroom? I can think of lots of answers to that; most of those answers, though, would also have parallels when assigning works in other media to students, so I imagine the same sorts of problems would also come into play. E.g. I agree with Simon's and Roger's points below that letting students pick the game to talk about can help in some circumstances; but that seems just as true to me when talking about books as when talking about games.

Hmm, thinking about it a bit more, one of the issues here is of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. The former leads to much much much more powerful learning experiences, yet schooling is steeped in the latter. (At least at all the schools I've been at!) I would be hesitant to lean too much on the fact that (some) students are intrinsically motivated to play (some) video games - coopting video games for that reason seems to me to be unlikely to end up well. So I'd rather try to figure out better ways to connect with students' intrinsic motivations in general and try to shield students from excesses of extrinsic motivators than lean on video games. (Reading Michael's later comment, I'm quite uneasy with the goal of "induce in students goals they may not have when they come in", in particular.)

And another issue is the psychology of learning: it's certainly the case that the sort of schooling I was exposed to wasn't the optimal way for my brain to absorb material, and was much less optimal for most people around me; I'm quite willing to believe that psychologists will (indeed, I'm fairly sure some already have) figure out better ways to organize classrooms, and that games will have something to do with that. If so, I'm all for that.

I'm not really getting a good answer that relates strongly to fun, though. Which is a bit weird, now that I think about it: I think it's good to spend as much of your time having fun as possible, given whatever other constraints there are in your life.

[David Carlton]

Simon Ferrari said:

This reminds me, when the heck do I actually take education classes if I'm on a PhD track?

No idea what it's like where you are, but in my experience: you don't. But, also in my experience, there are books around, there are other people around who are struggling with how to teach well, and there are institutions in the university whose job is to help people teach better. It just depends on how you want to spend your time.

[Michael Young]

Well, as one of those educational psychologists, I'm one of the folks who is supposed to be "figuring out better ways to organize classrooms" and I'm pretty sure we're not going on the assumption that intrinsic motivation (however defined) is "much much much more powerful"... unless my reading of that literature is way off. We are also not going on the assumption that "brains absorb material" either. Instead, cognitive science has put forth some contemporary theories of learning that suggest that information is NOT absorbed, encoded, represented, stored, processed, and retrieved... instead, information is simply acted upon, directly, in an on-the-fly perceiving acting cycle and keeps our entire bodies (not just brains) in touch with the world. Take a look at William Clancey's (of NASA) work on how thinking of thinking as all in the head created robots (autonomous agents) that got completely disoriented with the slightest perturbation to their directional systems... while in contrast "situated cognition" produced autonomous agents that could easily navigate around despite all kinds of conditions and achieve goals dynamically. I say all this to respond to why I (specifically) might want to use games in a classroom... they provide rich authentic problem solving situations, that can be shared and discussed by the members of the class, using social construction of knowledge, often involve important skills (group collaboration/organization, leadership, mentoring, decision-making and problem solving), and provide a rich source of quantitative data for (toon) improvement. In addition they can involve rich historical (Pirates of Carribean, Call of Duty, Civ IV), and textual (e.g., Morrowind) content. But to be authentic and effective from a embedded embodied cognition perspective, they should probably be fun, too. Thus my question.

[David Carlton]

Wow, that's really interesting! Forgive me for harping on the whole motivation thing; I got my info from Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards, which seemed from a layman's point of view of doing a reasonable job of presenting the research on that topic (and which matched my own experience); it sounds like I've been misled, or the research has moved on since the book was written? Do psychologists even consider intrinsic / extrinsic motivation to be useful analytic categories?

I guess when I read your description of games in classrooms, they sound like something that would be inherently pretty fun. If people are solving problems, can talk to others when doing that, and are learning something relevant to the lecture content, I would expect students to find that fun if they basically want to be in the class in the first place? I would think that I would; I recently spent time at the Amplify Your Effectiveness conference (an instructional conference, not a conference for presenting research), where all the classes were centered around hands-on simulations. And I both really enjoyed that and felt that I learned something in a way that I wouldn't have if they'd been presented in a traditional lecture or lecture/discussion format. And in that context, being assigned the simulation to run didn't interfere with my enjoyment (or learning) at all.

[Michael Young]

Simply put, psychology has certainly not gotten is Grand Unification Theory yet of how people think and learn. Many learning theorist do still use the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction for survey research based on students self-report, for example Carol Dwecks work on motivation in math classes. But not only is self-report data not very reliable or replicable, there is (logical) reason not to focus too much on motivation per ce. For example, if I focus all my energy on motivating you to be a great surgeon or nuclear engineer.. no matter successful I am at getting you "all rev'ed up"... there is still quite of bit of work on getting you the content knowledge and expertise to do that work... and schools should probably focus there first. In addition, there is a chicken-egg phenomenon with motivation... Typically you might assume that motivation leads behavior (I get motivated, I act), but again drawing on the self report data we get from motivation research, there is just as much reason to think the causality goes the other way (I act, and I report I was motivated). To test this, there is classic psychology research that manipulates subjects into roll playing to do certain acts, and the survey research shows that the subject's attitudes and reported motivations come into line with the actions they take in those roles (see guards/prisoners research for example). So while reported levels of motivation are correlated with behaviors such as academic achievement, correlation does not imply causality... so success may make us report higher motivation, not the other way around. We've probably gone too far on this topic... especially since we're supposed to be talking Fun, right (LOL)!

[David Carlton]

Thanks for taking the time to explain that, that was really interesting!