Katie Salen's Take on How Games Can Change Education

Don't shoot the player while they're learning.  It's one of the keys to good game design as spoken by a veteran of the field, and adopted by Katie Salen in the context of education.  She spoke about that pearl of wisdom among many others during her recent talk at SXSW.

Drift Deck Joker Katie Salen / JulianBleecker

In video games, you don't want a player who is just learning the controls for the first time to have to also survive a barrage of attacks.  Learners need a safe environment to get the hang of things before they can be challenged.  The same should be true in a classroom.  A student shouldn't be in constant fear of being wrong while they are trying to first grasp something.

At the same time, failure is a good thing.  In games, trying and failing not only makes victory that much sweeter, but it ensures that the player has mastered a necessary skill before moving on.  Why in school do students have only one chance to pass a test? Why do they have to move on to the next topic even when they haven't mastered the previous one? I see this often when tutoring math: because a student doesn't have a solid base to work from, they get progressively more lost for each new topic.

The social aspect (and community) as well as the concept of sharing are important to learning.  There's no problem consulting fellow players of a particular game to get tips and tricks, or building a team of players who specialize in a particular skill but understand the big picture — yet the classroom parallel is often seen as cheating.  Even the typical spatial arrangement of a classroom, where students sit in rows facing the teacher, reinforces the focus on the individual.

These were the main takeaways from Katie's talk, as she summarized them:

• Design for friendliness
• Enable good practice (with failure)
• Support human-to-human exchange (qualitative feedback from peers)
• Keep challenge constant
• Make sharing seem like a gift
• Mind the gap (leave holes for students to fill)
• And, of course, don’t shoot the player when they’re learning

When you look at how games can change the face of education from this perspective, it starts looking a lot less crazy, and a lot more feasible.

Experiment: Teaching Computer Science With Stories

I've wondered in the past how important interactive storytelling might be in educational games.  The  potential to use story for more than just engagement seems high.  In just over a week, a colleague and I are going to run an experiment that will test how useful (not necessarily interactive) story is in teaching computer science concepts to complete beginners.

Stories You Like / Mountainbread

Our experiment is going to be done in the context of my mini-course, Computer Science and Games: Just for Girls! This year's class has 22 students, mostly in grade 8, so even if not everyone consents to participate (in which case we simply don't record their data), we should have a decent sample size.

I have always done many interactive activities in my mini-course, including several CS Unplugged activities.  I like to do the Image Representation activity when teaching computer graphics, and the Finite State Automata in the context of artificial intelligence.  For the experiment, I've been working on writing some stories we can embed the activities into.

The idea is this: We are going to split our class into two groups for both activities.  One group will do the activity as per usual, while the other group will do the story-based version.  The groups will swap for the other activity so everyone gets to see both styles of teaching.  During the activity we will record observations of the students (looking mostly for engagement), and after we will have the students do an evaluative worksheet to see how well they understand the topic.

I'm really curious to see what difference the story will make in the students' ability to understand.  I am guessing it will help, but I'm not sure how much.

Perplexing Problems in Educational Games

When it comes to presenting math problems in an engaging way, Dan Meyer knows his stuff.  From putting pseudocontext in its place to telling a math story with his 3 Acts curriculum, he knows what hooks kids and what turns them off.  His techniques are meant to work in K-12 classrooms, but why couldn't we use his ideas in the context of educational games, too?

Curious minds... / young_einstein

Dan recently wrote out his ten design principles for engaging math tasks.  Many of these could give insight into how to present problems in educational games such that players are drawn to a particular question without being told what that question is.  We want them to have an automatic desire to solve the problem, and figure out what tools they need to solve it, again without being handed the exact tools they will need.

This is the key behind the first principle:

Perplexity is the goal of engagement. We can go ten rounds debating eggs, broccoli, or candy bars. [references a debate, long since settled — dm] What matters most is the question, “Is the student perplexed?” Our goal is to induce in the student a perplexed, curious state, a question in her head that math can help answer.

Embedding problems into a game with this principle in mind could also lead to games that pull what Randy Pausch of Last Lecture fame called the head fake: they don't look like educational games on the surface, but they have real learning content.

There are a few principles that suggest games really are a compelling way to present these perplexing problems:

• "Set a low floor for entry, a high ceiling for exit. Write problems that require a simple first step but which stretch for miles." In a carefully constructed virtual world, these problems can literally stretch for miles.
   
• "Use progressive disclosure to lower the extraneous load of your tasks. This is one of the greatest affordances of our digital platform: you don’t have to write everything at once on the same page."  The presentation would be different (especially in a spatial sense), but of course you don't have to reveal everything at once in a game, either.
   
• "Make math social. More engaging than having a student guess whether or not the ball goes in is showing her how all of her classmates guessed also."  The magic of in-game networking could allow students to see other guesses not just within the classroom but all around the world.
   
• "Highlight the limits of a student’s existing skills and knowledge. ... That moment of cognitive conflict can engage students in a discussion of new tools and counter the perception that math is a disjointed set of rules and procedures, each bearing no relationship to the one preceding it." A player's abilities can be carefully tracked in a game while challenges are presented based on this assessment.

At the same time, it's not entirely clear how to apply some of the advice in a game because of either creative or technical limitations:

• "Concise questions are more engaging than lengthy ones, all other things being equal. Engaging movies perplex and interest you in their first ten minutes." While a game can engage the player quickly, what would it mean to have multiple problems presented throughout a game? How does having a large and complex story affect things, given that problems might end up being more spaced out?
   
• "Use stock photography and stock illustrations sparingly. ... It is hard to feel engaged in or perplexed by a world that looks like a distortion of your own." Will this be true of fantasy virtual worlds as well?
   
• "Ask for guesses. People like to guess, speculate, and hypothesize." How can guessing be effectively incorporated into a game without making it blatantly obvious?

I believe the idea of presenting problems in educational games in this way has a lot of potential, especially when considered in the context of constructing a good story for that game.  Of course, this goes not just for math, but any subject that requires problem solving (including computer science).

Winner of SCS TA Excellence Award

I found out this week that I was one of two winners for our department's TA award.  I was nominated for my term in the fall when I TA'ed the third year graphics course for our game dev students.

It's really nice to be recognized for the effort I put into the term, from running a course blog to offering informal tutorials before midterms.  It's also kind of cool to win because I helped set up the award in the first place while I was the TA Mentor.

As an added bonus, the undergraduate TA who won actually TA'ed for me the first time I taught as a contract instructor. How cool is that?

I'm heading to campus today for our end of year reception, where we'll both be recognized as winners.

The Craft of Research

"I still don't know what the f**k I'm doing." I was so relieved when recently I heard a superstar researcher, a full professor in computer science, say this about research.  I have so much to learn about how to be a good researcher.  That's why I was really pleased with this book I just finished reading: The Craft of Research.

I learned about this book through Steph.  It was assigned for a class on how to do research that she's taking for her Masters in Computer Science.  I always wished I had such a class, so I figured reading this book might be a good substitute.

There are three main topics that make up the core of this book: figuring out what you want to research, putting together an argument as a solution to your research problem, and finally writing an effective report on your solution.

In the first stage, you have to get from a general topic to a specific question you and your readers want answered.  From that question you find your research problem, something that readers think is worth solving.  Whether theoretical or practical, your problem consists of a situation or condition, and undesirable consequences caused by that condition.

Once you know your problem, you can begin to argue the solution.  Each argument consists of a claim, backed by a reason based on evidence.  You acknowledge and respond to issues you anticipate readers will have with your argument as best you can.  You can also use warrants when needed to illustrate how your reasons connect with your claims.  Each reason or piece of evidence might require a sub-argument of its own.

Finally, once you have the structure of your overall argument, you figure out how to structure the written report.  The advice on how to approach drafting the paper in this section seems really good, and I look forward to using it for my next paper.  There are a lot of specifics on how to revise sentences to be more understandable for readers, including what kinds of subjects your sentences should have and how to use the appropriate level of abstraction.

With lots of concrete examples and really clear writing, I highly recommend this book to everyone.  It is a great way to mechanize the process of research for beginners, yet helps seasoned researchers by bringing exactly what they are doing back into their consciousness.  I imagine that many of the tips within would be useful for any level of experience.  This will be a source I will return to often.