With some significant exceptions, serious play has not yet made a serious dent in higher education curricula. It’s worth thinking about why, and also about some interesting implications this holds in the near future for college-level teaching.
I returned recently from the Serious Play Conference held in Pittsburgh, July 21-23, hosted on the Carnegie-Mellon campus. The conference itself has been held annually since 2011, but this was the first time I’ve attended. The conference is small in terms of total number of attendees, perhaps 200-300, but the agenda included much relevant, provocative, and helpful content for developers in the “serious game” space.
Broadly defined, this would include games for education and training, in schools, the military, medical or corporate contexts. In terms of the sessions, some personal highlights include presentations by Victoria Van Voorhis of Second Avenue Learning (on their STEM offering Martha Madison) and Jesse Schell on Happy Atoms. Although both directly addressed applications for K-12 education, in quite different ways each also pointed to some key current issues for game based learning in higher ed.
Martha Madison is intended to teach basic physics and math principles to middle school students, and judging from Voorhis’ presentation (and a subsequent look at the Second Avenue’s website) it is a thoughtfully made game, with significant research and play-testing behind it.
In this regard, it might seem like a digression to focus on Voorhis’ discussion of the analytics and standards correlation features of Martha Madison, but I actually found this really interesting, and important. The analytics closely track student progress through the game: how it long it takes to complete objectives, how many repeat tries, which of several possible solutions were discovered by which players, and the reasoning steps involved in arriving at the solution. These player analytics are then cross-referenced to Common Core standards, so that teachers can see, easily and quickly, how student performance in the game plugs into their broader academic progress. From a teacher’s perspective, that’s a very big deal, and teacher buy-in is critical...because that is one major barrier to getting educational games into K-12 curricula.
Thus emerged one critical theme in the Conference: despite more than a decade of attention on using games to improve STEM education outcomes, K-12 remains a difficult market. While the students are obviously the key target audience as game players, they are not the decision makers about access to the games in the first place. School boards, administrators, teachers, and, to a certain extent, parents are, and it is perhaps not surprising that the features that might convince this latter group to adopt a particular game are not always likely to produce engaging game-play for students. However, well implemented player analytics seem like a win for both sides. They need not hinder good game play, while providing really useful insights immediately to teachers about how the students are doing, and then large and fruitful datasets on game-based learning to subsequent researchers. While everyone agrees on the importance of the player GUI, a well thought-out, accessible analytics interface is kind of like a second GUI for the teacher, and it seems that this feature of Martha Madison is something many K-12 educational games will need to have to compete in this market. Indeed, this seems like a key feature in helping drive the adoption of game-based curricula.
However, when you turn from the K-12 market of Martha Madison to higher education, it is rare for institutions to collect this kind of detailed, nuanced data about the learning process in a given class. The end-of-class optional online evaluation found in many universities is thin indeed in comparison to the richness and immediacy of data a 6th grade teacher will have about how her or his students are learning as they play Martha Madison. The equivalent of game play analytics does not really exist for lecture-based courses, and as a result the if, what, how, and why regarding student learning in this setting remain processually opaque. Grades on tests and papers are hopefully a reasonably accurate guide to if students learned and how much, but they can only be a really crude dataset for addressing the how--what worked in a lecture course, and what didn’t.
But player analytics are likely become increasingly common in K-12 teaching, as a more-or-less standard feature of educational games, and part of the reason for using them. As this graphic shows from the Takeuchi and Vaala report, in-game assessment and analytics are the second-highest factor in driving teacher adoptions (Takeuchi, L. M., & Vaala, S. (2014). Level up learning: A national survey on teaching with digital games. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.)
This would reflect the emphasis on embedded, real-time assessment of student progress found (e.g.) in the Gates Foundation Grant announcement for Teaching and Learning Tools in 2011. A turn towards game based learning in higher education would yield a much richer pool of data for assessing how students learn, a pool of data that could be compared with data collected in K-12 education. This could open the prospect of figuring out holistically what works in educational game design, for what subjects, at what grade levels, from the earliest grades through a college degree.
Meanwhile, Jesse Schell’s presentation on Happy Atoms pointed to another major emergent theme of the conference: the possibility and potential of teaching critical systems thinking skills through games or game-like applications. Essentially, Happy Atoms is a two-part application, which consists on the one side of a durable, flexible, haptically satisfying kit for building models of molecules, and then on the other side a tablet program that can identify on the spot what the students have built, and provide further information about the structure of the molecule and its uses.
While not in itself a game, Happy Atoms lends itself to a variety of game-like adaptations (How many molecules can be built how fast? How complex?), and most importantly it allows students to grasp molecular structures through rapid, iterative, hands-on exploration. The emphasis on teaching systems and structures through game(like) applications is also found in Schell Games new release of Water Bears, whose announced educational area is “Systems Thinking,” and which was the overall 2015 winner in the International Serious Play Awards.
In a fairly hilarious account of his difficulty in finding agreement among research scientists about how molecular structures might (best...most accurately...) be modeled, Schell noted that it would not be possible to holdHappy Atoms to any standard of absolute scientific validity. He stressed instead that we should not ask our models to be accurate, but that they be insightful, which echoes the oft-quoted phrase of the statistician George Box that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” While Happy Atoms is STEM oriented, this observation resonates deeply with modeling past cultures for game-based history curricula. Such models are bound to be inaccurate, but through the very process of making our interpretive assumptions explicit and tangible through game play, they can prove tremendously insightful and useful for teaching. To date, the power of models presented through game play, especially for the humanities and social sciences, remains largely untapped in higher education.
To close with the most simple of statistics, 12 of the winners in the 2015 Serious Play Awards were in the K-12 space, with 8 focused on STEM topics and 4 on Literacy or History. Only 3 were in the Higher Education space (list of winners). This is a rough but essentially accurate reflection of the imbalance of attention to game-based learning in higher education in comparison with K-12. If this imbalance is not addressed, incoming college students will become increasingly frustrated with teaching methods that do not leverage the potential of games to teach critical systems thinking through interactive exploration and mechanics. Not because the students are not ready for college, but because colleges have not invested in serious game-based teaching and learning.