Effective Games - Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Yet)Erin Hoffman-John (formerly) of GlassLab
“Teaching well is really freaking hard”
Moved into the education world with inspiration from Raph Koster, who said that “fun is learning”
The idea behind GlassLab was that school is boring, and maybe video game designers could make school less boring
Also wanted to apply big data to help create adaptive, personalized learning
Brought SimCity into the schools and the kids said that it was fun but they weren’t learning anything
However, the kids really were learning, but didn’t realize it because it wasn’t packaged as a traditional lesson they were used to
When kids are “really engaged in learning” there was something going on that wasn’t “fun” but something deeper
What games can do is that they do a lot of things at once -
Create situated context - gives learners a shared experience they can use
Prepare for future learning - there’s a groundwork the teachers can build on
Inspire & Engage
but they don’t teach, they support the teaching done by the teachers
What does a teaching game need to do?
Need an assessment, but what kind of assessment and how valid is it?
Even greater need for those assessments without over-the-shoulder supervision
Need to scaffold the lessons (in game terms: “level design”)
Needs repetition / multiple representations: people can internalize lessons through repetition
The assessment in most video games is “The Boss Battle” - now that you’ve learned how to use all the powers you need along the way, can you integrate them
How do you validate the learning against the standard?
Scaffolded learning = level design toward the boss battle at the end
How do you move the current user through a learning standard toward an assessment
— dependent on where they started and assumes they all want to get to the same place
DragonBox = example of good scaffolding to teach algebra
Multiple representations
Minecraft as an example that lets multiple representations exist (sort of)
Design from the starting point of a “pain point”
Antithetical to good UX design, which is designed to minimize pain, but pain is necessary to ID where / how to grow and push that growth
Part of the ‘selling point’ to users is “what’s the payoff” that users will get on the other end
How did Pokemon trick the kids into doing all this math, and so quickly, and so obsessively?
Complexity isn’t the problem
There were meaningful and resonant relationships between the cards that mattered to the kids
How to map argumentation skills to the skills used by players in a traditional game?
identify
organize
use
evaluate
explore
equip
battle
