Game-based Learning: A Paradigm Shifting Opportunity For Innovation

PreK-12 / by

What Gamers Know

Gamers understand something that was a bit of a revelation for me last week. My brother gets together with friends and games with cards and dice when he’s social, and he’s on his Xbox 360 and PC when he’s gaming solo or sometimes synchronously with friends. For him, to technology or not to technology is not the question. My oldest friend, Adrian Dunston, a computer programmer at SAS, feels the same way. He has as much fun playing a board game (I’ve never heard of) as he has gaming on a computer.

It didn’t occur to me until now to apply what these gamers know naturally to Game-Based Learning in the classroom, which is a hot item among a list of innovative 21st Century Teaching and Learning best practices. It’s not about the technology; it’s about the game. In the case of education, it’s about the game and the learning, but the point is lost if the game isn’t fun.

Education’s Wrong Turn

About a year ago I led a team that tried to create a game-based online course with a videogame company. We started with the assumption that Game-based Learning had to be a video game in a virtual reality. In our heads, it looked something like Fallout 3 from the perspective of a scientist, not a soldier. To say the least, my team had no idea how to create a video game, and a major challenge we faced was the rigidity of game design versus the necessity in education to take advantage of creativity and teachable moments. I was reminded by Adrian Dunston this week that gaming is in no way lacking flexibility and creativity. Video games, however, by their nature are. My challenge to you in this article is this: Videogame-based Learning is expensive to design for the education sector, and it lacks flexibility and creativity; Game-based Learning can be cheap to design and is made more fun and valuable with flexibility and creativity.

One Possible Approach:

  1. Create a narrative progression of events sort of like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. Have an idea of where it’s going, but only plan one week ahead at a time.
  2. Utilize a Facebook page or an LMS platform for the initial introduction of the setting and situation
  3. Share an understanding that students will use and have access to Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, Gmail, Google Talk, Evernote, Google Calendar, Youtube, and Soundcloud, among others.
  4. Integrate some deliverables to game challenges as triggers in ifttt.com so that when the deliverables are completed new game challenges are delivered via web 2.0 tools.
  5. Integrate some answers to game challenges as triggers as well, but create the trigger in such a way that only the correct answer will deliver new game content.
  6. Prepare to be flexible and change the direction of the game as students bring creativity to the game!

A Creative Example Connected to Curriculum

With a classroom of ninth graders, I’d go cross-curricular and try to bring in a couple more geeky teachers itching to innovate. Ideally, I’d try it with a Freshman Academy like the one at South Caldwell High School in North Carolina. 9th graders in NC typically study World History (Revolution and Nationalism, Monarchies and Empires, Emerging Civilizations, and Historical Tools), Language Arts (writing, researching, and mechanics), Biology (scientific inquiry, basis of life, evolution, ecological relationships), and Math (real numbers, measurement concepts, probability).

Videogame-based Learning is expensive to design for the education sector, and it lacks flexibility and creativity; Game-based Learning can be cheap to design and is made more fun and valuable with flexibility and creativity.

A creative role-playing game that addresses areas of each of these curriculums might start with five students on a gaming team with the teacher as the architect, a player who is in charge of enforcing the rules and defining how the world reacts to the characters’ actions.

A Dose of Math

While most traditional role playing games deliberately make the math simple to keep game play fast and easy, I imagine the complexity of the math behind games like Warcraft III, where a computer calculates things like gear weight, character stats, experience, etc. as much, much more complicated. Consider an educational game that works on rules of probability and calculation that are a bit more complicated so that students get practice as a course of moving forward in the game.

A Dose of World History

Further, imagine setting the game in an emerging civilization at first, but players have access to something like the Tardis, an item most geeks remember as the phone booth that moved Dr Who around in time. Using creativity like this can get players a snapshot view of World History as they level up, solving problems and encountering famous historical events and people.

A Dose of Biology

Also, imagine each character starting out with a little bestial buddy at the beginning of the game. Each time the characters move in time, there is a mathematical function that moves their bestial buddy up or down an evolutionary chain as a consequence of time travel. Using this buddy, which can be as creative and varied as anything the game Spore might be able to create game can address evolution and ecological relationships.

A Dose of Technology

If we could keep a class to one teacher (The Architect) and five students, what a world it would be! Alas, I’m afraid it would be next to impossible, however, to have one Architect running 6 games of 5 players without some kind of assistance. Technology is the solution to this challenge. This game doesn’t occur on grubby character sheets and greasy dice; it occurs all over the web and incorporates a fascinating web 2.0 tool called IFTTT.com.

IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is a website that makes your web 2.0 services talk to each other via recipes, making one trigger actions in another. For example, you can set up IFTTT with your account information on Craigslist, Gmail, Twitter, your RSS feed, SMS, and Facebook among others to create hundreds of different possible tasks, or recipes. One example recipe is that if someone follows you on Twitter, you will automatically follow them back and send a thank you tweet. Another example is that if someone tags you on a Facebook photo, you immediately receive a text with the URL to the photo. Or, as an example in our game example, a student who delivers an email to the architect’s email address with the word chlorophyll in the subject line might release a Facebook page post that explains why the characters’ bestial buddies are all looking sickly green and how to go about finding a cure for a fungal infection.

Give It a Try

One teacher, as architect, could run six simultaneous games if he or she utilized IFTTT.com to release game content. Students are given challenges through the game that they have to respond to. Their responses trigger IFTTT.com reactions automatically, and these automatic reactions would advance the game and deliver more challenges and game narrative. The unique thing about using IFTTT.com in the framework is that a teacher familiar with IFTTT.com and the web 2.0 tools within it would have a unique blend of automation and flexibility that straight videogames don’t yet offer in the education sector. I’d like to find an innovative school leader and a couple of teachers daring enough and geeky enough to give this a shot. It would take a ton of time to

-Shu

Mike Shumake

Mike Shumake

Mike "Shu" Shumake is an edtech and 21st Century Teaching and Learning consultant. He has been an English teacher for more than ten years, developing blended and online teaching methods while impacting kids in western rural and downtown urban settings. He was the online teacher of the year for the state of North Carolina in 2009, and he joined the NC E-Learning Committee in 2010, where he makes statewide policy recommendations.

7 Comments

Sean Norrey /

Completely agree with your article. A game does not need to be technology based and yes they can be expensive to make and write.

I am currently reading Kurt Squire’s ‘Video Games and Learning – Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age’ An excellent read about using video games as teaching aids. While Kurt has created some video games as part of his studies ( I imagine through grants etc.) he has also used games such as Civilisation to teach history and geography.

Perhaps if teachers are also interested in technology based games but are put off at the thought of development they could explore what is already available and how those games might be incorporated into their class. Kurt found that at the end of one his classes for the semester the students (high school) were suggesting ways that Civilisation (for example) could be used in other classes.

If teachers are interested in games they absolutely need to play them first to learn how games work. It is not always the game that produces the result but the community that develops around the game. The same community that would likely build up around your non-technology based concept.

All the best Mike.

Tracy Hanson /

There are pockets of “revolutionists” that believe we need to build a mastery-based, “Global” Curriculum Continuum which will allow students to move seamlessly through as they show the ability to apply the concepts to real-life situations. Students aren’t place on the continuum by age but by where they are in their learning. And the curriculum is designed to address all learning styles. Now we have truly individualized programs that teachers can facilitate. Teachers can use their expertise to target the problems quickly and effectively because they are no longer trying to teach to a group but to a specific child(ren) have a specific difficulty. Now we have students being successful and teachers being successful. (And we know that success is a great motivator.) And if we must waste their learning time with mindless assessments then assess who they are and where they are – not who and what the system wants them to be. In any case, is that worth the time and money if we have good PBL built in which would allow students to apply their learning in a cooperative way with other children in a global educational environment. And more then just “solving a problem” they learn about the ramifications of their choices; the effects their choices may have on other things – and learn how to deal with them. And they learn how to work in a global society – one that they will be working in all their life. We not only erase the arbitrary lines of grades but those that outline countries as well. And I do believe that, “If we build it, they will come.”

Jonesy /

I’m intrigued by the ifttt experiment. I’d love to keep in touch and see what sort of things could be built. If I build something then I’ll certainly share :-)

Todd W. /

Great post, Mike. Came across it as I’m looking for options to liberate Open Courseware.

You’ve provided a ton of them.

Thanks.

Mike Shumake /

Thanks for the feedback folks! I think the challenge of running 6 games of 5 people all at once makes this impossible for the teacher without some kind of aid. I can imagine two routes to approach: Using students in the class who have shown themselves ready to take on a leadership role to run games might work. As Tracy points out, this might be a way to differentiate. However, I’d question ‘student in the role of teacher’ being overused in ed. The other route is the IFTTT.COM option, and it’s an exciting one.
Last week my wife and I went to NCTies, a statewide conference in Raleigh. There I learned of a ‘fakebook’ site that would make ifttt.com more manageable. Quite frankly, I couldn’t imagine keeping up with emails and passwords for fbook pages for every historic character I’d want to use. Now the challenge becomes getting ifttt.com to incorporate more and more triggers and recipes. Alas, I’m afraid I don’t have the expertise.
HERE is where there’s room to make some money though. Imagine creating a company that specifically builds these games a ready adventures, aligned to content, with the IFTTT ‘recipes’ already coded. As a teacher, all I’d have to do is set up the accounts and roll with the game! -one more brilliant business idea I’m too overwhelmed with work to run with…

shu

Jonesy /

I could be reading ifttt all wrong, but I’ve tried to set up a linking Quest using recipes that head and tail each other and failed. What I’ve found is that ifttt is designed for someone to create personal alerts, so the content I want to deliver as a clue has to be set up by the alert receiver when they modify the recipe (which kinda defeats the purpose). If anyone has had success trying to create a questing series of missions, I’d love to hear from them

kristianstill /

I am sure you have seen http://3dgamelab.org.shivtr.com/ but I think that this format has potential and it would be irresponsible just to assume…

Second, and where my interests / efforts lie is with IF – or textadventures. There is so much more to text adventures than just CYOA. In fact its CYOA on steriods – there is design, coding, narrative and with Quest (via textadventures.co.uk) it is on the Open Source ticket.

Love the IFTTT idea BTW.