Thesis statement and relevant design context: Good video games allow for the player to take on a new identity. This new identity encourages and motivates them to participate in social spaces for that game. By bringing this sense of new identity and contextualized social spaces to classrooms, students will feel greater motivation and interest towards the subject at hand or tangential ones.
Problem Statement: Classrooms are doing a poor job helping students take on a new identity and explore subjects. Video games can provide this benefit. By using built in social tools created around the classroom we can take this new identity and create fruitful conversations and learning outcomes in class.
Proposed solution: I plan on making a prototype game in Unity for a college level game design course. The focus of the game would be level creation and it would include in game tools to give feedback on classmate’s levels. This feedback can be seen on their profile in class which will help create motivation and participation.
Project introduction (overview): Video games offer two major advantages when it comes to learning. They can provide a good simulation of the subject matter along with timely feedback and extrinsic motivations (points, achievements). This gives the player a space to practice while they learn and helps towards mastery of the “mechanics”.
The other major advantage, and possibly the more important one is that good video games help the player take on a new identity and interact with experiences from that new lens. Good games form good communities that can self-structure, organize and have large productive discussions. In a classroom setting this new identity and community can provide learners a safe space to fail, test out new ideas and play with new identities. This can help improve both their motivation and help them find their comfortable space in the semiotic domain.
Right now different commercial video games aid education in various ways. Games provide a deeper feedback loop as educators can see more clearly where points of struggle are. Professional industries use video games for training. The two biggest simulation markets currently are Military and aviation. Games like “LockHeedmartin’s P3D” (https://www.prepar3d.com/) and “Command modern Ops” are used by pilots and the military respectively to teach and train as they provide above mentioned benefits of learning. If you read the manuals to them, they come across as software more than games but they have affordances to “play” for fun. (such as missions , scores , levels , ect..).
As a casual consumer you can still have a lot of fun playing these simulations and participate in a wider community that lets you learn content and actually practice it within the game. For example mature flying enthusiasts play P3D as part of a virtual airliner. This is a meta-game where you flight for a virtual airline, following procedures and schedules. Players are organized into different roles such as air control traffic, different tiers of pilots, planners and company owners (http://qvirtual.com.au/).For schools, students and teachers have a few options. MinecraftEdu (https://education.minecraft.net/) offers lesson plans with custom made levels and is best supplemented with other learning material. Teacher gaming (https://store.teachergaming.com/) offers a more broad scope. It uses many different games and has different lessons associated with each. It has lessons in biology, math, languages, astronomy etc… Each lesson, similar to MinecraftEdu offers supplementary reading material to help you get up to speed on the concept. Both Minecraft and teacher gaming, according to the websites are best played with instructors there to help and actually teach the concepts while the games just re-enforce it. The games help practice concepts but are useless without the structure of the lesson and productive reflection.
Using James Paul Jee theory of the situated learning matrix which proposes that we learn better if we first learn to take on an “Identity” whatever that may be (Pilot, physicist, ect..), we learn the goals/norms of that identity (Jargon,tools used, ect..) and how they do what they do, through that lens learners can learn the content of the subject. Video games as a simulation are a good base for learning as they provide among many things 1)Psychosocial Moratorium (A simulated world in which to fail) 2)Active control. 3)Amplification of input. 4)Principle of discovery. 5)Immediate and appropriate feedback.
Using these benefits and creating a game that also provides in-build feedback/community tools that are tailored to the classroom we can take advantage of both the simulation power and community power that playing with these identities afford. This paper will test a prototype game made for a college level game design course and will focus on level design. Testing will be on qualitative interviews from learners and teachers about the subject before and after play to gauge their current interest and future interests. This will be compared with simple analytics such as time played, levels complete to gather insight into the success of this proposal.
Need for this project: Studies find that students more and more do not like school. While there are many factors for these. One very commonly cited one is boredom or not finding any relevance in what they are studying. A study from live science finds73 percent said, "I didn't like the school."61 percent said, "I didn't like the teachers."60 percent said, "I didn't see the value in the work I was being asked to do. "About 25 percent said, "No adults in the school cared about me." (https://www.livescience.com/1308-students-bored-school.html) Another study from the 74million non profit organization, surveyed students and found only about half the students found real world use for what they were learning and were engaged in their classroom learning. They also find that students say they are "bored" and "stressed". This is where active learning comes in. The university of Minnesota describes active learning as, "any approach to instruction in which all students are asked to engage in the learning process. Active learning stands in contrast to "traditional" modes of instruction in which students are passive recipients of knowledge from an expert." All active learning is participatory and social. Video games can play a key role in supporting and encouraging this.
Another study by the Speak Up foundation finds that students believe that they can use edutainment games to help them learn their 2008 study found 51% say "Games make it easier to understand difficult concepts" 50% say "I would be more engaged in the subject" 46% say "I would learn more about the subject" 44% say "It would be more interesting to practice problems" All this while there is a growing access to computers. Most students have access to some form of modern computing device whether a laptop or a cellphone.
Right now there are many implementations of games in schools and many different studies trying it from different perspectives . A paper from the university of Connecticut that studied over 300+ papers that tested educational games on students. Their findings were separated out into different school subjects and finally they offer a cohesive conclusion that ties all their findings in together. Each subject was taken as its own area of discussion and were very different from each other. For example the math section deals with content learning based math games that were developed for the purpose of scientific testing to learning languages where the studies looked at already existing games. Their conclusions on each subject were also vastly different. On math they concluded: “Results indicated that students who played the video games showed significant improvement with regard to mathematics achievement as compared to their non-gaming peers, but there were no significant improvements found in relation to students' motivation. Prior mathematics knowledge, computer skills, and English skills did not appear to be significant contributors to the students' end motivation or mathematics achievement.”
While in science there was not enough research to concretely conclude anything. On language and physical education they noted a net positive outcome. Both being because the two subjects had outwardly social traits. Language learners such as Europeans learning English were cited as learning from playing in active shared social spaces such as world of Warcraft or second life. Physical games succeed with extrinsic rewards like scores and combos which one can “Show Off” to their peers. And finally on history they mentioned that most games use historical environments / settings but offer gameplay that is vastly different (I.E call of duty, assassins creed), players have the tendency to bypass the historical context and actual information just in the nature of playing the game, worse yet mechanics in the game could also cause misinterpretation of history. The study concludes with the notion that games are not Inherently useful in the classroom and must be built around the idea of being included in a larger learning context. Games are usually played for long stretches of time, over multiple sessions and cannot easily be converted to suite shorter class needs. This is why learning English in WOW is successful. It provides all the engagement based benefits of video games that are played over long periods of time, games also create affinity groups where players can socialize with each other easily while taking on an identity. Learning to speak English not only makes you better at the subject but also lets you participate in this world more fruitfully.
Theoretical Reference(s)
My theoretical framework is a mix of James Paul Jee's concept of the situated learning matrix, and various theories and studies from Katie Salen's book The Ecology of Games. The two main chapters of Salen's book that I heavily refer to for my theoretical frame work are, "Kurt Squire - Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age" and "Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, Laurie Mcarthy - In-game , In-world: Reconnecting Video game play to the rest of kids Lives. The core of the theoretical framework has 3 main parts with each part building on the last.
Identity Theory Identity here means "Being recognized as a certain ‘kind of person,’ in a given context". Its a very fluid and flexible word. In the Identity theory Gee says that we all hold multiple identities they come and go as the context changes. For example when a person is fifteen they are recognized as holding the identity of a teenager, it comes with a lot of presuppositions as we can all imagine a "teenager" in our head. Eventually as the person grow out of their teens they are not recognized as one and don't get those presuppositions anymore. When a lot of similar identities are grouped together we get a "Semiotic Domain".
Semiotic Domain Most James Paul Jee writings start with a similar point, that is—redefining literacy from just reading and writing to what it calls “Semiotic” Domains. These are much more fluid areas of literacy that involve a multi sensory approach and are based on the social rather than the individual. Gee uses games to describe how players learn better by playing games and how that equivalent is failing in the classroom.
When we learn a new semiotic domain in a more active way, not as passive content, three things are at stake:
1. We learn to experience (see, feel, and operate on) the world in new ways. 2. Since semiotic domains usually are shared by groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gain the potential to join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people (even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face to face). 3. We gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in the domain and, perhaps, more important, in related domains.
Three things, then, are involved in active learning: experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning. He does note that while playing the game itself is a form of good learning. The point of real learning occurs when players can reflect on what they have played in context of the real world. This helps bring the game identity out into the real world. This is why most studies conducted on video games and education are primarily based on interviews. These interviews tend to be the point of reflection for the player.
Situated Learning Matrix In schools traditionally we focus on teaching "content". Jee theorizes this way of learning does not create any motivation nor does it give the learner a whole sense of the subject and the potentials within it. Instead he presents the concept of the Situated learning matrix. In idea learners take on the Identity of an expert (like a scientist in a physics class). Through this they learn the Goals and Norms of the group (i.e. what physicists mean when they say 'work' vs normal people), from this they learn how these Goals and Norms shape how their tools are used. They use this incomplete knowledge to solve problems and finally that leads to learning the content. This he argues is what video games do better than any other medium.
We can learn each step he theorizes by building increasingly more intricate "models". Models are depictions of real things for example a toy airplane is modelling a real one but only may depict realistic proportions but not show the material or mechanical function of each part. A spreadsheet of airplane parts in relation to their temperature change based on elevation is still a model of an airplane albeit a much more narrow and specific one. Both models have uses and value and can be transferred when going from one field to another.
“Because while people learn from their interpreted experiences -- as we have argued above -- models and modeling allow specific aspects of experience to be interrogated and used for problem solving in ways that lead from concreteness to abstraction.” -James Paul Jee, What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy
This is another thing that video games do very well. They can help provide us with a model of a subject/topic that leads to discussion and critical thinking about that subject. Models are important as they are what each learner brings to the table during a discussion. It is only through social interactions, we can build on the model. However, video games are powerful tools of initial model building.
author Kurt Squire mentions that sandbox video games are a great learning tool. It bounces off of James Paul Gee’s situated learning theory and plays with the idea that what game the player plays is shaped by what the player brings to the game (who they are). They conclude that players who they interviewed who played “enter these designed worlds with divergent knowledge, interests and skills. As they become “players”, they develop new and divergent knowledge, interests and skills, moving along a continuum toward becoming experts, wherein they develop a design-type understanding of the game space”. That players would start playing and gain interest in these games from a wide range of perspectives and what they get out of it which is shaped by the game also ends in a wide range of perspectives. The author also argues that you cannot necessarily control what is learned through this kind of play and that every child's learning trajectory will be vastly different. This power of the sandbox can be structured and used to incite the kind of learning wanted.
“Players may begin at a relatively common starting place (similar tutorials / missions), but then diverge further in their interests. Unlike schools, within the type of learning system discussed here, players are encouraged to develop specific areas of expertise , separate from one another and perhaps even from the adults” - Kurt Squire, The Ecology of Games.
The image above shows how 3 children in Squire's example got interested in Age of Empire 2. They all found different points of interests that made them like the game and through the game, they brought their real life identities and through the use of game systems they discovered new identities that could be translated back to real life. In one example a child started playing because he loved "Winning Good''. The player would focus on trying to win as fast as possible. They had talked to the other students about their strategies , used internet forums and finally modded the game files and learned the reasoning for different designs. The one important thing to note is that while students naturally engaged in these games in their own way. It was only through the interactions that the children had their revelations about how they play the game might affect their real world interests. Again Making the social interaction a powerful and necessary tool.
Historical Reference(s)
Classical Teaching pedagogy and what is currently being used in classrooms: TBD
Wargaming: the oldest edutainment: One of the oldest formats of games as edutainment are Wargames. Wargames are any game that tries to simulate real life war. The most classic and a large part of the birth of this is the game of chess. While chess was spreading across the western world it was also being re-imagined and adapted. Chess was primarily played for fun but did make you think strategically. In the mid 1600s “Christopher Weikmann ” took the game of chess and made a more complex version called The King’s Game that took chess and added terrain, many units and movement restrictions to it. This game focused on strategic level warfare and while still played for fun it was the birth of war games.
War games were used by the French army during the Napoleonic wars, used by the Prussian army during the Second Schleswig War and many more militaries have played these war games to train decision makers to make high stress decisions in a real time of crisis. This effect of creating a safe environment where you can play willingly is also why wargames are noted to be a useful tool for high stakes business persons such as CEO’s. (Hershkovitz, 2019)
Over the years that followed various militaries have taken these games and added to it, with the birth of cartography map scales were added and grids were removed, with gunpowder came dice rolls and as our understanding of psychology grew there came mechanics for morale and stress. Playing any modern war game of the highest complexity could take hours if not a whole day of thinking just to take a turn. All the while requiring knowledge of actual military operational procedures.
Wargaming is an incredibly powerful tool as it has been something that is honed over centuries. Peter P. Perla and ED McGrady from the Naval War College note that wargames are an incredibly powerful and influential form of media. They provide entertainment, a high level of engagement as well as what they note as a “Synthetic narrative” one that is real but interpreted through play and the mechanics. They note that “We believe that wargaming’s power and success (aswellasitsdanger) derive from its ability to enable individual participants to transform themselves by making them more open to internalizing their experiences in a game—for good or ill.” At the end of their paper they note that “Of course, wise practitioners must be as cautious when using high-engagement Games must be any wise user of power tools. Games can use the power of narrative persuasion to manipulate players into false beliefs and assumptions in any number of ways. For that reason, game designers have a responsibility to avoid many of the common mistakes that organizations make when they consider future challenges. These errors include both presenting mistaken information or under-or overstating the dangers involved in these events(i.e.,just getting it wrong) and also what we call “the sanitary fantasy”—assuming that nothing can Ever possibly go wrong and no one will ever misbehave.( “Perla, ED, 2011)
I think wargames have a lot to teach us about education and games. While I do not think that everyone needs to be this educated on the subject or content of warfare and I believe our efforts could be better spent teaching various different subjects, wargaming highlights the best parts of education in games. They follow “James Paul Jee’s” situated learning matrix by first allowing you to take on a new identity and learning through that. Wargames are also social games which lets you reflect on the learning in game and turn it into real life lessons.
Minecraft TBD
Kerbal Space Program A more modern example comes to us from the Kerbal space program. Kerbal Space Program is a game about running a fictional space program in a realistically simulated world. The game lets players build their own vehicles and space crafts, take to the stars, conduct science experiments and discover the solar system around them.
From a personal standpoint I think that this game provides everything that an Ideal education game would have. While not being built for classroom play. KSP offers a wonderful world to situate in. Instead of humans you have small little green people called Kerbins . They look cute and make situations that involve crashing a lot more humorous than horrifying. The game offers a lot of tools to help you play and offers extensive mod support and a large community that has created all kinds of in game tools. All of this is wrapped in realistic world simulations. Students or professionals in astrophysics can fly a rocket to the mun by only using the digital readouts for various information.
Stephen Mallory in his paper about Kerbal space program takes the game and directly compares it with James Paul Gee's framework , PLEX framework and Csikenzntmihalyai’s theory flow. Their paper concludes that KSP conforms to many of the concepts from these frameworks and brings them closer together.
The paper concludes with advocating for the use of these frameworks in game creation and teaching. “By providing for a set of criteria that elaborates on the value of the game as means of engagement in an educational context, it becomes easier to not only explain its learning goals and purposes. This data will allow designers and educators to better leverage these games in the classroom and meet students in familiar territory. By being inclusive of educational digital games like KSP, educators allow students to exceed and excel, rising over those “who never confront challenge and frustration, who never acquire new styles of learning, and who never face failure squarely” (Mallory S, 2019)
While the Kerbal space program is a single-player only game it has created a large online community that follows their own norms and goals. Even these simple online interactions are enough to bring a player in and take and reshape their identities letting them play around with who they are and want to be. In one example a study done by Drexel university archived and analyzed posts by KSP players over a number of years they had concluded one player’s growth as such. “ In sum, Cromwell took a more summative approach to his reflections on his detailed knowledge and his monitoring of game and forum achievements (self-organization and self-control). While valuing peer interaction and validation remained, he described waning interest in gameplay as he played other games. At this point, his self-perceptions and self-definitions, though not explicitly described, were perhaps akin to a curator of the corpus of digital art and design story arcs he had contributed to the online forum community.” (Barnay, A)
There exist many modern games like this. Games like World of warcraft, Age of empires still have massive online communities that talk about the game and subjects that revolve around it. Most game forums have places to talk about things that are not directly related to the game and this is where the veterans of the community go to “Hang out” and talk about things that could involve other games to politics to personal questions. This social interaction however can lead towards another big issue with video games and that is game addiction… ADD HERE
Scratch While there are many many tools similar and more modern ones, Scratch by MIT labs is a simple visual drag and drop interface for the squeak programming language. It was created to help teach and inspire children to code without needing to get bogged down in syntax and just focus on logic and outcomes. It is very simple in scratch to put an image on the screen and have it be affected by keyboard or mouse input. This simplicity is what makes it easy for kids to learn but also the simplicity makes debugging, understanding mistakes and testing a lot easier as well. The official scratch website (https://scratch.mit.edu/) has a robust community sharing feature that lets people share their work this helps inspire users to not only learn the “logic” involved in programming but it opens them up to tangential learning opportunities such as game design, sound design, art ect.. While scratch is a very powerful tool I believe it is good at what it does and this approach of an all online only tool could not be translated as easy to a lot of other subjects that aren’t directly related to computers.
TeacherGaming They are a European company that offers a subscription to access a variety of different games along with lesson plans for each one that includes teacher notes of what to teach, learning outcomes and how to play the game. This service is unique and straightforward. It allows students to play AAA and indie games that were made for profit so have a high engagement value but also gives it alongside instructions on contextualization and reflection on the game. While this method of learning is not as powerful as it could be through the lens of “James Paul Jee’s” situated learning matrix as the learning would need to all be contained within the game and none of these games were built with the learning tools in mind and it comes upon the instructor to do this. I think they are a good service that takes what we currently have and tries to create educational value out of it.
Project Description (details)
Project Goals: The main goal of my project prototype is to improve class participation and motivation towards the subject. My thesis consists of 4 parts, 3 of which will be in the prototype. The platformer gameplay, the level editor, the feedback system will be in the prototype. A player profile will be designed and proposed but incorporated in the prototype. Currently the platforming gameplay is finished, the editor is still in progress and the feedback systems will be put in last. I have to also do more research to decide what feedback systems I want. currently I plan to have -Stars (a player can collect these through play. It is a symbol of how many levels one has completed)- -Map annotations (A player can scribble and mark up a map) -Text feedback (leave unformatted written text) -Trophy system (award trophies for level goals)
Solution plan and prototypes: TBD
Testing methodology: The Evaluation Framework is appropriated from Lisa Linnenbrink’s “Measuring Situational interest”. There are 2 measures of situational interest. One is spur of the moment and the other is a longer lasting interest which can eventually transition to an individual interest (a strong personal interest). Triggered SI – How engaging/enjoyable was the lecture/class itself Maintained SI Feeling – How enjoyable was the material Maintained SI Value – How Meaningful/Useful was the material Qualitative Questionnaire: Participants will be made to answer on how much they agree with a statement from 1-5. 1 = disagree ,5 = completely agree. Example Questions: Triggered interest questions (interest in event/activity itself) I don’t like the interviews very much The game was boring Maintained interest question (Interest in thesubject) I think level design is an interesting field level design is interesting
Interviews: I will record interviews. I will pull out statements of triggered and maintained interest.
Quantitative •Time spoken during interviews. (Participation time) •Questionnaire numbers will be added and averaged to give one triggered interest and one maintained interest number.
Relevant processes (extra information such as survey questions and polls might be more appropriate as an added addendum): TBD
Validation of solution: TBD
Limitations and Constraints
I.e this section will explain the limitations of my solution and testing as well as propose how it could have ideally been conducted and what my thoughts on the effects on these limitations are.
Reception
Feedback:
Areas of improvement:
Conclusion
Reflection on process and analysis:
Reiteration of whether thesis goals have been satisfied: