Games Help Make Learning Fun

Playful design, the blending of serious educational games (SEGs) with immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, is becoming the next big thing in higher education. Playful design works because people like to play games and games make learning fun, according to David Chandross, professor of education, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

“Serious games work by practicing skills and tracking achievement, but also by giving learning an addictive quality,” he wrote in an article for The Conversation. “The ‘one more move’ thinking that keeps video gamers up all night is harnessed for learning.”

Chandross noted peer-reviewed studies show SEGs encourage students to use what they learn while playing, engage them better than most lectures, and reward learners for their achievements. It’s a form of active learning that helps students succeed.

“We learn a lot when we love what we are learning,” Chandross said. “It’s a basic trademark of achievement in higher education. Human beings love doing certain things, and learning to become a master of their own world, however fantastical it might be, is one of them.”

Calculus Gets Gamified at Texas A&M

With so many students being avid gamers, providing coursework within video games offers a chance to make learning more relevant and show how the concepts being studied can be applied outside the classroom.

To that end, Texas A&M University, College Station, gave researchers a $100,000 grant to commercialize 3-D video games in calculus and art history/appreciation as supplements to standard coursework. The games are offered by Triseum LLC, a company that grew from the Texas A&M Department of Visualization’s Learning Interactive Visualization Experience (LIVE) Lab. Triseum’s CEO is also founder and director of the LIVE Lab and an assistant professor teaching game design and development at the university.

In Variant: Limits, players work to save a fictional planet from imminent destruction by assisting the game’s protagonist in solving a series of increasingly complex calculus problems. Prompts within the game allow students to refresh themselves on theory or firm up the concepts involved.

The one-month, one-credit elective isn’t a replacement for a normal calculus course, but is instead intended to keep students motivated and engaged with the subject to boost retention. Of those who voluntarily took the course last year, about 72% said it increased their knowledge. When a high-school teacher in Milan, Italy, assigned Variant as homework for her calculus class, she saw the pass rate on her final exam rise from 80% the previous year to 100%, with grades overall notching up by 10%.

“Much of the content in the game was new for them, yet I didn’t have to push them to get through it,” she wrote in a blog post. “They wanted to apply what they were learning throughout the game so they could see what would happen next.”

Triseum’s ARTé: Mecenas game positions players as a member of the Medici family in Renaissance Italy to discover how local and international economic policies and negotiations influenced art patronage and the creation of artistic masterworks.

A mathematician who helped develop Variant said the games could be expanded into a suite of games to cover their subjects more comprehensively.

Attracting New Students with E-Sports

Video gaming is no longer just a favorite pastime for college students, it’s become a varsity sport because it drives enrollment, creates campus enthusiasm, is co-ed, and doesn’t cost much to launch.

“It’s on the cutting edge, if not already a little bit beyond that, of new opportunities to compete,” said Dave Gantt, vice president for athletics at the University of Providence, Great Falls, MN. “All of our admissions counselors are armed with the knowledge that we have this sport, and it has been something of interest at every one of their stops.”

E-sports have grown from a single team to more than 60 schools competing, with hundreds more looking into offering it. Gant’s institution is retrofitting its mailroom and bookstore in the student union for e-sport gamers, who will begin play in the fall.

Colleges are creating e-sports arenas in old computer labs and other rooms that were going unused. The competitions are often streamed live and have students providing play-by-play commentary, just like an NCAA football or basketball game.

The e-sports program at University of California, Irvine, is funded by university research into the learning applications of gaming. UC Irvine also offers summer camps for female gamers and underrepresented young people, and recently helped to launch a regional high school league.

“The research out there shows that women and men can compete equally, given equal access,” said Mark Deppe, acting director of e-sports at UC Irvine. “But online cultures can be toxic—there can be in-game harassment and bullying—and we think we can be an influence against that.”

Tool Brings Gaming into the Classroom

“Gameful” instruction allows students to choose assignments they think are challenging and uses software to guide them through those choices. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently launched a tool to make that learning approach available in the classroom.

GradeCraft employs competitive leaderboards, badges, and links to unlock information to help students work their way through the coursework. The web application also allows instructors to create course shells in the learning management system (LMS) where students are encouraged to try new things, as well as receive analytics about their progress.

“Everyone starts at zero and then they build toward mastery of the course material,” Barry Fishman, a U-M professor who helped developed the tool, said in a university release. “We get questions about how rigorous a course is given how many students earn high grades, but we consistently hear instructors describe their students doing creative and high-quality work. When you design these environments properly, you can create an incredible learning experience for students.”

The tool, developed in 2012, was made available to all U-M faculty through its LMS earlier this year. Some parts of the gameful learning software are now being used in 58 courses, serving more than 10,000 U-M students. A site license has also been purchased by the University of Arizona.

“We believe gameful is a great way to reconnect students to learning and we’re excited to bring it to a larger audience,” Fishman said.

Classroom Design is Being Upended

Games are becoming more integrated into education because students are demanding more engaging experiences. That, in turn, is changing the way classrooms are set up.

Instead of an instructor facing rows of desks, thought leaders in the field now envision classrooms equipped with desks on wheels, movable walls, and screens that allow students to work out gaming solutions in groups.

“It’s a huge deal,” Robert Brodnick, founder of the Brodnick Consulting Group Inc., said in an article for eCampus News. “Classrooms have remained unchanged for decades. We’ve learned this all really matters. If you build and create spaces in a more flexible way, you’re not dictating to students how they’re going to have to learn.”

Gamification is just one part of what is happening to classroom space these days, according to Brodnick. The space need to be flexible enough to accommodate multiple learning formats, such as makerspaces that encourages students to invent and learn. There should be room for immersive visual learning and enough space to promote personalized, project-based learning.

“What we’re starting to realize is that learning is happening out of the classroom more and more, as students are increasingly connected to each other and to information through their phones,” he said. “Learning by doing is much more powerful than acquiring content and apply it five years later on the job. As you move around throughout the day, you have learning experiences, and it’s having a significant impact on how campuses are designed. You might not need as many classrooms or as many bookshelves in libraries.”

Go Easy with Gaming in the Classroom

Gaming is being tried by instructors at every level as a creative way to engage and educate students. While games have a place in the classroom, they may be much less effective than expected.

Vic Vuchic, chief innovation officer and executive director of Digital Promise Global, told attendees at the 2016 Textbook Affordability Conference, held April 27-29 at the University of California, Davis, that games are so perfectly designed for the task performed in the game that information doesn’t always translate beyond the competition itself.

“To be honest, the hype is far beyond what the research is showing us is happening,” Vuchic said during a question-and-answer session that followed his presentation Collaborative and Innovation as Course Materials Strategy.  “If you learn something in a game, generally, when you step out of that game and have to apply it somewhere else, you really won’t be able to do it.”

Vuchic told the audience about work done at Stanford University by Daniel Schwartz, dean of the institution’s graduate school of education, that showed games are most helpful when direct instruction was part of the coursework. In the experiment, Schwartz had one test group play a game and then provided instruction before a test was given. A second group only played the game before the assessment and a third only received direct instruction.

“It ends up that the ones who played the game and got direct instruction far outperformed the others,” he said. “You get some loose concepts in understanding games, but it’s not enough to bring it home. Someone has to anchor it and say, ‘This is the theory.’”

Vuchic’s presentation was streamed live on the NACS Facebook page. Here is the entire 53-minute video:

#GoOpen Has Game Developers Worried

Although gamification and open educational resources (OER) are current buzzwords in education, game developers are concerned about the #GoOpen initiative from the U.S. Department of Education, which directs organizations receiving federal grants to make copyrightable intellectual property part of the public domain when completed.

The fact that more teachers will be turning to digital tools and resources is good news for game developers, according to a column by Lee Banville, editorial director of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. Another positive to the #GoOpen initiative is more open-source tools should also free up more funds for schools to spend on digital content.

However, a world full of free educational tools could also mean fewer educators willing to pay for learning games.

“So the Department of Education’s new push could go either way for learning-game developers,” Banville wrote. “It if goes the way some seem to hope, the far larger budgets connected to textbooks may soon become more available for schools to invest in digital learning tools, including games. The danger is if the perception is most educational content, like OERs, is free, then why pay for digital games?”

Ed Gaming Growing in Different Directions

To game or not to game may be a moot question for educators. All kinds of instructional gamification are in play these days, according to The Miami Herald.

“Educators increasingly see digital games as a language that many students seem to intuitively understand, so they’re trying to use that language to make playing facilitate learning,” noted the article, reprinted on Phys.org.

Some K-12 teachers are incorporating popular online games, such as World of Warcraft, into lesson plans to help students understand certain concepts and work together on problem-solving. Others are using consumer games as a launching point for teaching computer coding, fostering creative ideas, and aligning classwork with Common Core guidelines.

One Miami teacher discovered that Oregon Trail, a game first released 10 years ago—a long time for video games—helped illustrate history lessons for his special-education classes.

In tech classes at the University of Miami, college students are developing games for younger students, although not all are aimed at classroom instruction. A new game called Zoo Rush, for instance, is designed to help youngsters who have been newly diagnosed with sickle cell disease. As the players attempt to round up escaped zoo animals, they learn about their disease and how to manage its symptoms.

Game design is also being taught at the high-school level, usually in magnet schools or summer programs. Miami-Dade schools set up an online portal to enable students to access a variety of gaming applications from home.

Parents have gotten into the act as well, downloading games to help their kids practice math problems or foreign-language pronunciation on smartphones or tablets.

Gaming Lets Collegians Build Real Skills

It’s easy to see how educational games might hold the attention of grade-school youngsters and help them learn vocabulary or practice math. But how do educational games work for college-aged students?

Two games created by Pearson’s Center for Learning Science and Technology, with its technical and testing partners, provide a means for postsecondary students to build their skills in argumentation and bioengineering through collaboration and role-playing in fictitious environments.

In the Argubot Academy game, students debate how the first colony on Mars should function, such as the best types of food for the inhabitants to raise. Students conduct research to prepare their arguments and use a “robot battle” format to present their points and refute those of their opponents. If student-players back their arguments with insufficient or irrational evidence, their robotic power diminishes and they lose the battle.

“They can see not only that their argument wasn’t strong, but also what the weakness was, based on the types of attack an opponent launched,” wrote Kristen DiCerbo, principal research scientist for Pearson’s center, in an Educause Review article about the games. Students proceed through multiple levels of mastery.

In the Nephrotex game, students act as interns working on a nanotechnology project for a bioengineering firm. The students collect technical information and data, develop and test hypotheses, and analyze results, all the while recording their activities and communicating with team members via chat and email.

To enable the participation of first-year students, who have just begun to study the field, the setup is adjusted to their knowledge level, with the game automatically filling in the areas the students haven’t studied yet. Students can also interact with live mentors through the game. The purpose is to build a sense of professionalism early on and points “to the promise of games to encourage student persistence in difficult STEM [science, technical, engineering, math] subjects,” DiCerbo said.

Both games allow instructors to track and assess students’ progress.

Games Aren't Trending in K-12

Maybe gaming in the classroom isn’t that big of a deal. At least that’s the word from the 2015 New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report, which retired the concept from its list of emerging technology for K-12.

“We don’t see it making the mainstream,” said NMC CEO Larry Johnson in an article for EdTech. “For most people, it’s just too hard to integrate and there are no tools to make it easier.”

Fundamental concepts of gamification are still on the list, such as awarding digital badges for learning games, which NMC lists as a trend that will be adopted within four or five years. Use of drones and visual data analysis, along with wearable technology, should also be mainstream education tools for K-12 within four to five years.

Classrooms allowing students to bring their own electronic devices for educational purposes, cloud computing, makerspaces with tools such as 3-D printers, and mobile learning are trends making an impact right now. Adaptive learning, 3-D printing, information visualization, and learning analytics should be mainstream trends in two or three years, according to the report.

Can Games Teach? Big Players Say Yes

For some, “educational games” mean the simple types that teach counting to preschoolers or vocabulary words to fourth-graders. They have a hard time seeing how computerized gamification, currently a flame-hot academic trend, can lend itself to serious learning for older students.

A couple of heavy hitters in the education world are betting on gaming to help high-schoolers build math and science skills. With funding from the Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade collaborated with Filament Games to create the Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game that sneaks in lessons about biology, geometry, algebra, probability, and statistics while students explore a mysterious island world and save its people from destruction.

The game has the look and feel of something students might play on their Xbox or PlayStation. Through their on-screen avatars, players must work together to gather and process information and come up with solutions to help the island’s inhabitants.

The Radix Endeavor is still in development, although it recently won a 2015 Cool Tool Award from EdTech Digest in the new product/service category. Currently, the developers are piloting a free version of the game to monitor how students interact with it, what they actually learn from the instruction, and whether gaming can be implemented in a classroom environment. Teachers can set up an account at no charge for their classes to try it out.