what’s so important about
autocatalytic learning?
The Theory
of Games
Steven
Johnson, Instructor
Fall 2003:
ITP @ NYU.EDU
If there’s
an everyday challenge for teachers I have spoken to recently, it is meeting a
kid’s daily needs, hopes and excitement while meeting the broader expectations.
Expectations of other teachers, parents, bureaucrats and policymakers dominate
out-of-class conversation in a sector increasingly judged by economic measures
and ability to adapt to technology that changes quickly in student homes but
remains Jurassic in most schools. A 7th grade teacher, Joyce,
recalls vividly the feedback she gets from students on her capabilities: “They
tell me I am too slow!” The role technology plays in her lesson plans is
especially criticized. Exposure to
technology in her school is limited to once-a-week trips to the school’s “lab”,
guarded jealously by the “computer guy” who intimidates the kids. The lessons
he guides them through include such basics as connecting to a search engine
(during which excited cries of “I just won a new jeep!” punctuate the noise)
and typing in a word. That alone can
take up to 35 minutes. Outside the class, she uses a home computer to access
email and search for lesson plans. Any lesson plan. Any free lesson plan.
With a class representing at least 10 ethnicities of a mostly middle and lower middle class background, Joyce is aware of the need for these kids to master technology in a tech-heavy work environment, and aware of her own deficiencies to meet that need. Set this in a situation where the kids are well aware of this deficiency you’ll get an empowered set of student voices, though not necessarily empowered in a constructive way. Students often have access to faster computers at home than the one being used as a doorstop in the library, and everyone has TV where kids can see they’re getting shortchanged while men in suits whiz around talking wi-fi and collaborative logistic systems. Even their game consoles are faster, way faster. If the classroom has stakeholders, the needs of neither stakeholder, the student nor the teacher, is being met by this solution.
Contrast
this to the situation of life-long learners who can earn higher degrees over
the Internet in largely self-regulated environments or to Army Special
Operations soldiers who train using advanced simulation environments. In
between the kids and the professionals is a vast wasteland of years spent
playing unguided online and offline games with uneven moral or skill relevancy
and simulations of fantasy that fail to connect to structured learning and fail
to tap into natural intrinsically motivated behavior towards critical thought.
However, it may be that it is because play is so marginalized within schools that
out-of-school gaming has become so objectionable. Roping in this behavior to
stimulate curriculum may provide the best tool for 21st century
education yet.
In a
growing movement of game designers and educational researchers, this
educational technology gap is identified as an opportunity for teaching and for
profit, most notably in the Games-To-Teach project, a joint partnership between
MIT and Microsoft. Their research is very sound, as we will see. The promises
of deep digital design are great, tapping into evolutionarily developed human
behavior; survival responses such as competitive engagement, response to reward
systems, decision making, and heuristic knowledge through guided intrinsic
motivation. If there is one great promise that games and simulations offer
education it is tapping into playful behaviors to activate heuristic processes,
thereby cultivating critical thought. It’s a happy process every 4-year-old
knows about when they see something exciting, learning by just trying
everything, learning by toying and playing.
However,
the caution here is that this 4-year-old is sent into a public school system
steeped in conservatism of curriculum and pressured by the drive to produce top
test-takers only. An exclusive focus on empirical knowledge in these studies
may exclude a rigorous investigation of inequalities in the social contexts in
which the curriculum is set, either through design or ignorance, and thereby
perpetuate that inequality. This trend has a long history in elite education,
as we shall also see. With millions of kids excelling at games in widely
varying demographic environments, the opportunity to serve all students
regardless of access to specific platforms and levels in tracking systems is
great. The chance for deepening the digital divide is great as well. The
challenge then is to create solutions that draw upon design principles to serve
varying needs, creating greater opportunities to develop critical thought and
encourage active engagement in societal processes.
The most
responsive of teachers, like Joyce, are aware of the agency of students – their
ability to dominate the class – and use this to shape the lesson, meeting their
challenge to engage students in what Paolo Freire calls the “dialogic process.” The dialogic process involves an active
engagement towards the goal of liberation, by employing “curiosity about the
object of knowledge and the willingness and openness to engage.” Here, dialogue
refers to an “ongoing process of learning and knowing” that has its basis in “epistemological
curiosity.” (Freire 18) For those who
struggle for connection, their perception of a “closed world from which there
is no exit” must be transformed to a “limiting situation which they can
transform” through active engagement in the construction of meaning in the
classroom, the process transforming both the student and the teacher. (Freire
49) This process mirrors that described by scientists such as Richard Feynman,
discussing the scientific method, the vigorous “trial and error system” that
depends on leaving “the door to the unknown ajar” (Feynman 148). It also has
parallels to the conception of knowledge as “distributed”, emerging “jointly
from one’s own perspective, the perspective from other individuals and the
information derived from available human and technical resources.” (Gardner,
98)
Freire was
a revolutionary and spoke to a problem solving educational method between
oppressed people and their guardians, but the principle is often called upon in
current educational theory because it increasingly mirrors the power relations
in many schools. The everyday challenge Joyce faces has a unique placement
right now, since it seems the old beast of public education is being rudely
awakened by Executive Branch doctrine mandated by the Leave No Child Behind
Act. More than ever before, the burden of success is being placed squarely on
teachers and students who are often mismatched in areas of greatest opportunity
– changing social mores and technology. The outcome has often been a greater
emphasis on high but perhaps unattainable rewards for communities in need,
stricter discipline and exhausting emphasis on rote learning. One price paid is
deep engagement in understanding and application of that rote learning,
sacrificed again in the interests of governmental efficiency.
But there
are many ways to meet the needs of both stakeholders in the classroom with an
active engagement in self-learning processes, where both stakeholders can even
switch the role of teacher and student.
Autocatalytic processes, a process which contains methods that sustain,
re-stimulate or replicate itself, may provide this avenue. Games and
simulations can play a key role, as shapers of alternative experiences in which
agency is highlighted within educational frameworks and critical thought can be
formed. By employing play behavior, well-designed video games may stimulate
kids to play for the sake of playing, learn for the sake of learning, and go
back for the second round. If the best students are those that motivate themselves,
then investigating how others can use this behavior as a model is worthwhile.
Auto-catalytic learning then may be the process of self-teaching when the
critical thought is stimulated enough to motivate the learner to re-engage at
will and without extrinsic reward. To investigate the role of play and games in
a curriculum of this type requires reviewing the behavioral fundamentals on
which it may stand, while keeping in mind that the outcome should be active
engagement with knowledge in the dialogic/analytical process, in order to
prepare students to use tools with mastery in the wider society. Activating
primal play in the pursuit of cognitio per causus, knowing the cause,
and applying solutions until there’s a match are the basics of human learning processes
in this case.
Play is a
widespread phenomenon directly related to the learning process of all mammals.
It is described by physical anthropologists as an adaptive process whereby
solutions to survival problems are tested in safe social environments with
peers. The activity lights up the limbic tissue of the brain which governs
memory and emotion, in a mental and/or physical trial-and-error process not
unlike the basis of the scientific method. The limbic tissue of the brain is
the site of “play, maternal behavior and a host of other emotions” which
bonded our primate ancestors together in “nurturing gangs.” (Druyan & Sagan
6) The limbic system is part of what is
referred to as the “protomammalian” brain, activated in social situations like
play which then stimulates the developing cerebral cortex (largely unformed at
birth) that governs willed behavior conscious experience and rational
abilities. (MacLean)
Play often
involves “mock-fighting” (Druyan & Sagan 285) and bluffing all kinds of
mature behaviors from mock-grooming and nurturing to throwing trash in
mock-territorial stances, along with mock-enactments of adult behavior in
“script-play” (Gardner). Within the social group this behavior is non-violent
but is realized in tracking prey, establishing social connections and, with
chimps, ejecting territorial transgressors, both male and female. (These
behaviors are well known to video game players, whose current use of ‘trash
talk’ in Super Smash Brothers, Quake III, or Medal of Honor
is a rite of passage.) Play then, allows for the mammal brain to mature in an
engaging social environment, responding to and memorizing events that spell
survival, and allowing the cerebral cortex to develop and maturely organize and
govern learned behavior. Play allows us to run through sets of behavior
combinations safely, winnowing out the useful behavior to be later activated by
cerebral functions to solve more complex survival problems. This process is
most intensive in childhood, but continues throughout life.
What does
specifically human play look like and how does it relate to learning? According
to current play research, it is fluid, but certain characteristics are
identifiable: its voluntary nature, intrinsic motivation (independent of reward
systems), involving engagement – often physical, and involving an aspect of
belief suspension or bluff. (Rieber 44)
Behaviors such as “exploration, manipulation and curiosity,” widespread
but apparently not directly related to survival, are “dependent upon
“reciprocal interaction and feedback between the organism and its environment –
a dynamic process governed by the ‘match’ between the organisms competencies
and the demands or responsiveness of its environment.” Play is enacted for its own sake, an
activity that is not tied directly to basic physical or responsive needs.
“Exploration, curiosity and related response patterns we postulated to be
inherently or intrinsically motivated” that is, the motivation for play is
contained within itself. (Lepper & Greene 219) It may be a happy accident
that our adaptive abilities include the natural human drive to experiment by
fooling around and use the results to solve problems. When you understand play,
learning looks a lot like purposeful play, or play looking to solve a problem.
Learning, in strictly psychological terms, occurs only in a “state of disequilibrium”, when a kid resolves conflict and thereby constructs new knowledge. (Rieber 47) For example, if a child sees something hidden and is able to reveal it, the experience is logged as new knowledge that can be drawn upon to build more complex knowledge. When presented with choices, mental structures are aligned/reconciled with the problem or new mental structures are created in a synthesis of older ones to solve it. (Piaget) So in situations when there is natural imbalance or conflict, learning occurs when a person is able to restore balance or resolve conflict. This process can happen within the mind or in the on the playground. Probably the biggest social learning happens on shared playground spaces, “microworlds” like sandboxes and treehouses that help to frame children’s experiences. (Rieber 49) In the adult world, our sandboxes are simulated environments or perhaps closed semiotic domains. (Gee 38) A microcosm of the larger processes, simulations are often designed to have enough players or independent factors to replicate the “disequilibrium” experienced in the real world and to engage the learning process in the simulation.
This fact
should be no surprise of SimCity players. I recently realized (after
losing several days to it) that SimCity is fundamentally a game of
management of disequilibrium, the goal to create growth parameters to
facilitate maximum citizen health and happiness. The measure of success is not to grow something, since growth
will happen whether you like it or not. The real goal is to create rules that
manage the process well, experimenting with the interplay of parameters until
you can reconcile yourself with your growth (and what a Frankenstein it can
be!). The patterns themselves simply simulate organic processes, with
individual units having a degree of free agency within parameters controlled by
larger factors, which may themselves be embedded within larger factors. Sims
may be the cyber-drama Janet Murray describes, albeit with largely shallow
players or SimCity with largely anonymous players. If stories and
narratives are the collective memory of problems successfully (or
unsuccessfully) solved, the collected learning of an unbalanced species in a
crazy complex engaging environment, then simulations take a first step at
really disengaging us from the process, giving us perspective on the place of
the individual in the immersive environment.
What tales would a tiny unnamed Sim in a SimCity I bankrupted to
hell tell? Maybe the ones I programmed! But it would be different than the one
a block over, or in a different city. The type of learning play here is almost
ecological; in the way a group of kids setting traps or building a dam is
ecological play.
If the
promise of the “kaleidoscopic powers” of digitally-mediated narrative can be
realized not by passive viewing but by “manipulating the materials”, then SimCity
seems to fill that promise, offering you the opportunity to create variations
of a narrative (Murray 277, 282). If it is the “forms that get passed down” via
human storytelling (as opposed to the details), then what may evolve over time
are new or age-old narratives told via simulated environments that are
increasingly complex and immersive. However, in a mediated simulation
environment, agency is the key factor that must be accounted for to anticipate
cyclical processes. By planning for revolution, for degradation, death, or
transgression, we can understand the roles they play in the cycle, deepening
our systems knowledge. This seems to be the lesson of the late-citizen of SimsOnline,
Dr. Peter Ludlow, who was kicked out of the simulated world for publicizing
behavior of degraded characters in the community. He was giving the place a bad
rep! The game designers hadn’t anticipated serious transgression or whistle
blowing or the conflict those social behaviors might have with the corporate
mission. (salon.com)
The
understanding of how play turns into learning in dynamic exchanges in
disequilibrium may also explain why there is explosive growth of computer
simulations in therapeutic techniques. From training tools for EMTs to specific
simulations designed to re-enact agoraphobic situations, (see virtually every
issue of CyberPsychology & Behavior), these tools employ simulations for
patients to powerfully re-connect with their own powers to make choices.
Patients positively perceive these tools as game-like, creating an environment
with “less resistance
and more openness to change.” (Smokowski & Hartung) The patient may even
become self-regulating, as suggested by users of The Journey to Wild Divine with participants being able to use the game simply as ‘training
wheels,” a tool to train you towards certain behaviors that can then be called
upon outside of game space (Johnson). By building in a degree of freedom in
choice-making mechanism, patients or students can visualize multiple outcomes
of complex scenarios safely, but with the heightened emotional energy
associated with an activated limbic system.
However,
this is all a long way from the current aggregate state of public schools.
While some of these more advanced techniques of building agency into advanced
simulations is seeping into higher education, K-12 seems to be a no-man’s land
of bad edutainment, or to quote the Game-To-Teach research “Bad Lecture + Bad
Game = Edutainment” (Squire, et. all). However, edutainment is largely the
product of a different generation of designers trained in developmental
psychology and curriculum design, rather than in advanced interactive or
immersive 3-D design, and operating in an educational environment highly
resistant to change.
To
understand why the public schools are the incredible polyglot of richly endowed
institutions, inner-city failures and vast number of mediocre holding pens they
are today, it only takes a quick review of the modernist approach to
education. This approach is typified by
the educational policy written into law in 1895 during the presidency of Grover
Cleveland, with William Torrey Harris serving as U.S. Commissioner of
Education. The approach viewed the citizenry as parts to be assembled into the
giant machinery of society. During and after the World Wars, this approach was
further stratified by the introduction of two further elements. Standardized
testing was largely the creation of James Bryant Conant the president of
Harvard from 1933–53 and his protégée Henry Chauncey, the first head of the
Educational Testing Service. The SAT introduced a broad meritocratic measure
for acceptance into elite academia, though it was not initially designed to
prepare a thoughtful and democratically educated citizenry. Rather, it was
engineered to specifically identify the diamonds in the rough that might be
trained as a meritocratic elite for public service (Conant, Lemann). Lewis Terman created the tracking system in
a more overt attempt to divide public school children by race, segregating
mixed-race schools from within (Lemann). Conant is also largely responsible for
the large scale of secondary high schools in public districts, an argument won
on the basis of efficiently processing the mass of the populace. The design
approach of these educational engineers was drawn directly from modernist
approaches to state and economy, with the dominant organizing principles of
strong centralized control and economies of scale, suited to segment and sort
children quickly, isolating them from the potentially divisive forces of family
and ethnically disparate community, in order to identify potential leaders as
quickly as possible and train the rest for lower orders.
The
outcome of this viewpoint has been highly stratified learning processes that
marginalized critical thought. The long traditions of apprenticeship and home
schooling that reinforced “learning by doing” (Dewey) were rejected. Students
were not trained to doubt or question, but constantly fed data, tested, and
monitored for verbal and mathematical-logical talent. Students are segregated
into separate tracks to be trained for their appropriate functions in society,
with top test-takers trained for leadership. In all students, obedience and
silence in a state-controlled classroom environment is required from an early
age, separating the child from the alternate educational unit of family or
community. As Richard Feynman says in a criticism of the educational system
“You can communicate truth and you can communicate lies.” (Feynman 113)
The subtlety that can be lost here is that you can communicate hierarchies of
learning and methodology innate to the system itself.
John Paul
Gee makes an insightful but slightly extended foray into explaining semiotic
domains and the linguistic behaviors that form permeable but defining barriers
between affinity groups. Or in short, how jargons are coming to dominate common
language. And what that means for e pluribus unum. The parallel
development is the specialization required for an increasingly complex consumer
culture that extends globally, the overlapping semiotic domains pulsating
throughout the web of interconnected specializations. With an increased importance placed on quantifiable skills,
skills that can be quickly evaluated, sound-bited, summed up in a one-line
resume-topper to replace the next semi-permanent worker, this system is being
currently geared more and more towards highly empirical methods of testing;
standardized testing that emphasizes breadth and rote learning of key topics
deemed critical to the formation of differing levels of intelligence. Creative
learning and experiential or case-based learning, the natural outgrowth of
complex problem solving and play, has been sidelined in the pursuit of
efficiency.
Games can
play a role alongside the current curriculum, though. Digital games not only
have a huge player base to draw upon, generating more revenues than the motion
picture industry, but the digital properties can be used to weave the goals of
those who need quantifiable results of progress with those who desire creative
case-based or situational problem solving methods together. While the excessive
focus on standardized testing is unhealthy in the long term, digital games can
supplement or counterweigh curriculum of all types, providing a powerful
platform for critical thought.
There are a series of factors alive today that have
brought the educational sector to a point of critical mass – change or die. One
is the extreme measures being pushed on public school systems that punishes
those who perform badly and rewards those who do well. While its widely
accepted that rewards for good behavior can lead to continued achievement, in
the economic and racial reality that exists, it has the effect of withdrawing
monies from districts with children most in need. Additionally it forces those
poor performers to view their continued survival though the lens of an even
greater focus on rote learning and test performance. This serves the actual
demographic populations of largely lower class minority communities very badly,
virtually eliminating the opportunity to engage in progressive learning
techniques such as self-regulated learning, simulation play and technology
skills. If innovations exist in lively, engaging forms that can prepare
students to form a critical and dialogic relationship with the knowledge, and
in a form most suited to a high-tech environment, it may rarely reach those who
could be helped the most. All of the
innovations in interactive educational game design must be brought to bear to
not only reward those who merit it in testing, but in life. So beyond employing
a newer, more exciting medium in curriculum are there benefits that merit such
a call to action? I believe there are, both intuitively and after questioning
educators. Several highlighted issues have come up, along with key design
needs.
Lesson
Design – Traditional lesson planning is still developed from the
top down, with little learner-centered design. In contrast, game designs are
heavily tested at every stage by gamers during development, high respect given
to the user feedback. The resultant product serves the desires of the user as
well as the designer. Typically the programmers are also users of the game,
whereas while every teacher has been a student, in the case of K-12, the
teachers are fairly removed from being students (they dont look forward to
attending a 2nd grade class as a participant in the same way that a programmer
might look forward to playing a game). This has created a more user-responsive
relationship to design and it may inform educational design as well. While it
may not be practical to test entire curriculum during development, educational
games themselves can be easily tested on children with no worse effect that
that already inflicted by Grand Theft Auto.
Empirical
Testing – Traditional curriculum is developed stressing knowledge
that can be empirically verified. Objective testing may be the most reliable
and measurable way to determine if knowledge has even penetrated, but games and
simulations can potentially offer deeper tests and opportunities to display how
knowledge has been understood and internalized. Digital games, whether online or off, have the added advantage of
memory which can track the play or series of parameter manipulation that any
given student makes. Revolution, an MIT prototype, places students in a
multiplayer environment with character types drawn directly from the American
Revolution. The goal of the game is to organize enough resistance to the
British to stage a revolution and found a new country. If a student actually
organizes enough Royalists to suppress revolution or to appoint George
Washington King of America, the exact play up to that point can be known
precisely, including all moves a student made in search for any alternatives.
The resultant data would directly display Von Neumann’s hypothesized dictates
on game sequencing.
Benefits
of a game integrated curriculum
1)
Games engage students in self-education process. Even if the student is separated from the
teacher, they may take initiative using available tools to activate problem
solving strategies for self-improvement. Games have the ability to scale to the
level of student, perhaps even bypassing the teacher or engaging the teacher in
the education process. Game simulations activate the integration of knowledge -
the application of knowledge that is memorized or read elsewhere. In the same
way that word-problems or problem-sets are laid out, knowledge and strategy has
to be applied in real time to solve the challenge. If a simulated environment
“plays an organizing role in cognition not unlike a story schema” then investigations
within that story can reveal how especially history could have been played out
differently. (Rieber 52) Re-enacting the story of the American Revolution in
the game Revolution can animate the events and give students a unique
opportunity to see themselves as stakeholders in historical processes in which
their choices have consequences. Empowered students are engaged students who
seek reinforcement voluntarily.
2)
Ability to see these consequences of a simulated
solution in a more complex way. If a student is given a problem,
instead of a right/wrong mark, there is a visualization of how the answer plays
out, how the consequences of the answer affects the outcome negatively or
positively for a whole range of related factors. For example, in the game Replicate,
another MIT prototype, the player plays the role of the virus in a 3D immersive
visualization of the human immune system. The goal of the game is to find
weaknesses in the immune system and manipulate blood and body elements in order
to replicate as much as possible. Too much and the body host will die, too
little and the immune system will kill you off. The physiological information is as accurate as possible,
providing direct and reliable feedback in a situation that can be repeated in
real-life. By giving student complex systems in the body to play with, the
games can show the multi-linear effects of one person’s path of action.
3)
Other benefits could include: social
integration of knowledge, increased ability for lifelong learning, access to
real-life scenarios, not wasting thousands of dollars on med school only to
barf when you see real blood. (Like my friend Frank)
1)
Elevation of human interpretation over machine
processing. By placing the teacher at the helm of a simulated environment,
the game can process the many changing factors of the environment, while the
teacher can play the role of interpreter or sage. This highlights the human
ability to translate the environment, providing socially meaningful
interpretations in a more powerful way than can be accomplished by the teacher
playing the role of data disseminator and tester. This low-level repetitive
function can be played a machine, while humans have the unique capability of
guiding complex analysis and judgment towards larger societal goals.
2)
Increased information of exact level of student
capabilities. With the large memory and processing capabilities of
standard PCs and gaming consoles, games can potentially track the behavior of
players to a fine degree, revealing the process a student used to choose their
answer or solution. The process of decision making, in fact, is the bulk of the
data that may be saved. In multiplayer environments, the interaction of all
players can be seen for patterns in a medium that can easily access any point
in game play at a later date, allowing for greater understanding of any point
in the process.
3)
Increased information on cross-discipline strategies
being used by students. Along with greater access, teachers may see how
students utilized knowledge from other disciplines or used knowledge from other
lessons to arrive at their “win” or “solution.”
4)
Ability to engage students in an activity that
surprises and engages them in a dialogic process. Many of
the challenges educators face in the classroom involve just getting and
retaining attention. In a lecture, this may be unfeasible. As a current MIT
student quoted when discussing the use of games in MIT classrooms, “It forced
me to get more involved (whereas in a large lecture hall I could just fall
asleep or stop paying attention), and thus made me understand the material
better.” This helps the teacher enormously in the management of time (recall
the early description of Joyce’s simple search) and helps keep the energy
focused on the topic of the lesson when the dialogue is guided correctly.
5)
Ability to reward students more accurately. Rewards
systems are shown to actually decrease the chance the lesson will be
internalized if rewards are overly stressed (like giving out candy), and
conversely, cautions are less often internalized if the punishment is
overemphasized (like saying if you don’t do this, you’re going to DIE!” since
this is recognized as bluffing). What seems to work is the principle of
“minimal sufficiency” the balancing of “minimal but sufficient external
inducements” towards natural or intrinsic behavior that is desirable, without
resort to heavy coercion (Lepper 27). This process could be refined in a game
environment very precisely through response testing, since the game would be a constant,
instead of having two variables in the classroom – the teacher and the student.
Given the complex variable of human nature, these two may not “connect” on any
given day. By having the students interact with one constant, the machine,
students’ behavior can be seen in isolation, allowing for more accurate
rewarding and cautioning. This may also allow teachers to avoid situations of
bias or overly subjective judgment.
Benefits for students:
1)
Ability for students to “see for themselves” and
avoid easy solutions. In the presence of easily obtainable rewards,
children often “sacrifice challenge...for the certainty of reward attainment”,
choosing the easy way out for instant gratification. (Lepper 16) This is
resolved by introducing a “graduated reward system” where small rewards are
given for easy problems and large rewards are given for difficult ones.
Additionally, the negative effects of giving out external rewards like good
grades or public praise are kept to a minimum if the activity provides the student
with “evidence of his or her superior competence at the experimental activity.
(Lepper 18)” Designs which emphasize the free agency or mastery of the student
in the game help to keep the playful spirit, or intrinsic motivation, alive.
Students can feel free to engage in a more direct relationship with simulated
environments, and if the environment is designed with real-life data, the
mastery will be not only in the game environment, but in the real-life
environment.
2)
Increased understanding of how knowledge can be
applied. Historical facts, mathematical tables, interaction of
physical forces and other knowledge can be visualized quickly and accurately
within an environment that simulates real life, with its unstable nature. This
forces students to make choices to affect the outcome, applying what they can
to solve the problem. In any given topic, stored or memorized knowledge can be
recalled and synthesized to solve complex problems that do not resemble
previous problems. Real-life data heightens this effect, calling upon critical
thought to affect the best outcome.
3)
Engage in the dialogic process. In
multiplayer and mediated simulations, students have the increased ability to
ask questions during the process of solving the problem, as the focus is on the
process itself, rather than the specific outcome. The ability to play with
parameters, in Civilization, SimCity or Age of Empires,
for example, brings out the need for players to gain success strategies from
more knowledgeable people. In the case of games based on real-life data,
teachers would be the people they turn to for game tips and strategies.
4)
Self-awareness. In multiplayer
environments especially, the players’ abilities are more sharply compared and
differences in approach are potentially highlighted. This may lead to
self-awareness of exact skills that can solve a problem, even if they are not
those called upon in the lesson plan. Clear feedback on game play provides a
framework for asking further questions or for developing a sense of mastery and
understanding of the topic.
Of course, like any other
curricular element, digital games have the ability to be abused by bad teachers
or misused by students who are set on disruption. When entering the classroom,
any elementary school teacher will acknowledge the continual struggle for
contact, the struggle for engagement. Even the best of teachers work with
lesson plans unevenly. Joyce resorts to and falls back on even the worst lesson
designs on bad days: total focus on rote learning, failing to tie the lesson
with larger life, failing to give feedback to students performing well, failing
to find creative solutions for students who struggle for meaning. At the end of
the semester in the advent of the PSATs, she overloads her students in a sea of
cheesy tactics to increased memorization powers. Her students still kick the computer doorstop on the way out of
the computer lab.
Reach these students, though,
giving them the most relevant tools to reach full dialogue with their learning
processes increases their chances of engagement with the larger forces in
society. Technological integration with superior teaching techniques like those
used in the Games-To-Teach prototypes and others are well grounded and provide
a clear way to innovate curriculum. However, most of these games focus too much
on the types of students that might naturally migrate towards the sponsoring
institutions. It is a worthy goal to reevaluate how the elements described by
and benefits gained by student and teachers can be integrated into a larger
body of games and simulations. This larger group of games might serve varying
needs and be responsive to students who do not perform well on standardized
testing that serves even now the modified goals of that early partnership
between elite education and industry. By engaging students in a meaningful
simulated environment embedded in curriculum, we can offer students a chance to
develop skills to critique the process itself, perhaps enabling them to
critique their government and educational system more actively in later life.
If the goal of education is to “to ensure equal access to education
and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation” then, in
digital games or what ever medium serves that purpose best, the development of
skills to ensure that is indeed happening is the best gift we can give to these
students.
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Games-To-Teach prototypes:
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Interviews with Educators:
Rana Boone, MA, High School Math Teacher, Austin, TX
Francine Corley, MSW,
In-school Social Worker, Raleigh, NC
Nicholas Goodness, BA candidate, Education @ Swarthmore,
Swarthmore, PA
Patricia Han, Ed.M, 3rd Grade Teacher, PS 25, NYC, NY
Vicki Hoener, Ed.M, Special Needs Teacher, Rhinebeck, NY
Fern Markgraf, MA, Principal, Kahului School, Hawaii State
Teacher of the Year
Karlen Petersen, 5th Grade Teacher, Maui, Hawaii
Virgil Pierce, High School History Teacher, Maui, HI
(retired)
Deborah Politziner, MLS, Elementary School Librarian,
Springfield, NJ
Caroline Pozycki, MPA, After-school Programmer & Ed.M
candidate @ Harvard, Cambridge, MA
Joyce Schaunamann, Ed.M, 7th Grade art, English and Special
Needs Teacher, Maui, Hawaii
Shalini Sharma, MSW, Heartshare, Brooklyn, NY
Karen Underwood, Principal, PS
152, Bronx. NY