play think learn

I was fortunate to be asked to talk at the Open University’s Computers and Learning Research Group conference yesterday. The afternoon was dedicated to the topic of game-based learning and this game me the opportunity to watch some very interesting talks and meet other researchers in the area, most notably Shaaron Ainsworth,  who specialises in investigating the psychological and cognitive effects of games, Richard Joiner, who is doing some interesting work on games and gender, and Jo Iacovides, who is half-way through her doctoral research on engagement and motivation in games.

I presented my first talk since returning from maternity leave, and found it more daunting than I had been expecting. It was lucky that they were a friendly, interested group (even last thing in the afternoon) and what the presentation lacked was compensated for by the lively audience participation at the end. The presentation centred around what I think will be the three biggest challenges facing game-based learning as a discipline in years to come. These are:

1. Perceptions of games, fuelled by media sensationalism, overly emotive language, erroneous causality and unsubstantiated and unquestioned claims regarding games and violence, addiction, etc. This should really be a non-issue since no-one is actually suggesting using violent video games for learning, but somehow the facts that most games aren’t violent (and that if children are playing violent games it says more about the lack of parental control than about the games) don’t fit neatly within the media narrative.
2. The commercial focus on teh development of behaviourist learning games, which highlight repetition of fairly trivial tasks, because they are easy to design and easy to evaluate the immediate learning impact. I’m not saying behaviourism doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t have a place in learning, but simply that if the focus is on behaviourist games then we are missing out on a big opportunity. While many games exist that clearly show higher-level learning (for example, the lateral thinking, problem-solving and strategizing required in the Zelda games) these have not yet been translated into games for formal learning.
3. The barriers to entry into the field for most educators. Except in areas such as computing and engineering, it is almost impossible for a teacher with a good idea to develop a learning game, which means that innovation is limited to commercial developments (where markets for sophisticated constructivist games are unproven), research projects or enthusiastic individuals in technical disciplines (where the outputs are often unsustainable) .

I would suggest that what the field needs is to focus on two areas: rethinking the research methodologies by which we investigate the learning impact of complex games, drawing on the whole range of disciplines that make up the field of game-based learning; and rethinking the development models that exist for involvement the creation of games to become a possibility for more people. I think we also need to create an environment for innovation and be more open to the possibility of failure, including its open discussion and dissemination, if we are to learn from our mistakes and build up a robust body of evidence in a relatively new research field.

Doug Clow’s write-up of the session can be found here.

I was sorry to have missed being able to attend GamesBasedLearning 2010 in London last week, but found I was able to follow it surprisingly well via twitter. Alex Moseley has a good write-up of the event.

Paul Hollins presented our joint paper, Ten things educators might learn from the games industry, and from what I hear it went down very well (poor quality Wii-related jokes aside). We now intend to write this up as a full journal paper and were hoping to be able to use the audience criticism on the day to develop the lines of argument further - the only problem is that there wasn’t very much of it. So if anyone would like to read the paper - with as critical an eye as possible, be harsh, please (I may regret saying that) - and give us some feedback (either as comments or to me directly) it would be very much appreciated.

On Wednesday we were lucky enough to have Dr Richard Hall, from de Montfort University, come and present a seminar on autonomy and the read/write web at my work. Richard managed to hit the balance just right, I felt, between catering for those who are interested in the theoretical and socio-political angles and those with an interest in application and practice.

You can view the slides here (without video clips).

On Thursday I spent the day at my Faculty’s Learning and Teaching Conference, and was pleasantly surprised with the focus on play spaces, creativity and ‘messy’ learning. I presented an introductory session on using games to support learning, which seemed to go well (in that I no one left half way or was physically sick). My presentation is available here.

It’s been a long time since my last post - mainly because I’ve been tied up with writing (as well as the Christmas and New Year festivities of course). My first resolution is to get back on track with the several postings I’ve got in the pipeline… watch this space.

I know it’s some time ago but I also wanted to quickly mention the excellent  Let’s Change the Game Conference I attended before Christmas. Alex Mosely has already posted an excellent summary of the day so I won’t repeat that here - except to add how much I enjoyed Dan Hon’s closing session on the design of ARGs. I’m not usually too awake after five at conferences but it’s amazing what a bit of swearing and comedy PowerPoint will do.

I was at the Becta Research Conference last week, presenting with Cathy Lewin on our work on the MILO project (well, actually it was Cathy’s turn to present and my turn to sit at the front and nod knowingly).

I was particularly interested in the way that there was an artist in each room, taking what they called ‘visual minutes’ of the session (the one from our session is available courtesy of Andy Black’s blog). Although my opinion is currently divided between ‘cool, shiny, pretty, accessible, I like’ and ‘waste of public money, bah humbug’, on the whole I think that any attempt to do something different at these types of event has to be applauded.

Well it all went so quickly, but another excellent European Conference on Game-Based Learning, organised by my friends Jordi Sánchez-Navarro and Dani Aranda. For me, this is one of the best conferences of the year - lots of relevant and high-quality papers, interesting and fun people, and good food and too much wine. What’s not to like?

Although there were loads of excellent papers, here are some of the highlights for me:

Boyle and Connolly (2008) provide a theoretical overview on theories of enjoyment, looking at the following theories:

• Ryan and Deci’s self determination theory - behaviour is governed by three innate psychological needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness; behaviours that satisfy all three are intrinsically motivating.
• Malone and Lepper’s motivations to play computer games - challenge, curiosity, fantasy, control.
• Lucas and Sherry’s research based on uses gratifications theory - this identified six reasons why people play computer games: competition, challenge, social interaction, diversion, fantasy and arousal.
• Arousal theory - there is an optimal level of arousal linked to best performance and greatest pleasure.
• Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory - the optimal experience when a person is fully engaged in an activity.
• Apter’s Reversal theory - there are two different ways of experiencing arousal: excitement seeking and anxiety avoidance

Boyle, E. & Connolly, T. (2008) A Review of Theories of Player Enjoyment in Playing Computer Games. In Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Games-Based Learning. Barcelona, Spain, 16-17 October 2008.

Connolly, Stansfield and Hainey (2008) present a framework for evaluating games-based learning based on an extensive literature review that was undertaken as part of Thomas Hainey’s doctoral research. First the paper provides some examples of existing frameworks and then presents a framework based on the following components:

• improvement in learner performance
• motivation and interest in participation
• perceptions such as realism, complexity, support and proficiency
• attitudes towards the subject and games for learning
• regularity and effectiveness of collaboration (optional)
• preferences, such as learning styles or modes of interaction
• GBL environment (environment, scaffolding, usability, level of social presence, deployment)

Connolly, T., Stansfield, M. & Hainey, T. (2008). Development of a General Framework for Evaluating Games-Based Learning. In Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Games-Based Learning. Barcelona, Spain, 16-17 October 2008.

There’s a one day conference, organised by Alex Mosely, running at Channel 4 in London on December 5, on the use of ARGs in charity and education.

I’m getting excited already.

I had another good day yesterday at ALT-C 2008, and was very pleased to finally meet Juliette Culver, Alex Moseley and Daniel Livingstone - all doing excellent work in games and education.The talk here has been very much centered on the potential of ARGs in teaching and learning and it’s great to talk to other people without having to explain the concepts from first principles. Looks like ARGs might be the next big thing?Alex did an fantastic talk on the educational lessons that can be learned from ARGs, which struck a lot of chords with some of our recent ARGOSI findings. In his sample of ARG players he found that the three reasons that people took part were: a) to solve puzzles, b) to uncover the story, and c) to be part of a community. He also presented seven key features of ARGs for education:

1. Problem solving at varying levels (graded challenge)
2. Progress and rewards (leaderboard, grand prize)
3. Narrative devices (characters, plot, story)
4. Influence on outcomes
5. Regular delivery of new problems/events
6. Potential for large, active community
7. Based on simple, existing technologies/media

I’ve just arrived at ALT-C in Leeds after attending a 24-hour meeting run by Lawrie Phipps. Usually I feel very flat after this sort of event, but just now I am buzzing with excitement and ideas.

This was essentially an unstructured event in which like-minded people were given the space to chat about their thoughts and share ideas. And it really did involve being given space - there was no agenda, no plan, we didn’t have to feed back to other groups, people could dip in and out when they wanted and we could talk as long as we liked. So myself, Dave White, Andrew Middleton, Simon Ball, and a few others who popped in and out, spent a whole day kicking round ideas around game-inspired learning environments, the integration of virtual, real and alternate worlds, and the potential of mobile technologies.

In all, an excellent, truly participant-centered event. Watch this space for the paper… 

I’m currently at my first British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, conceptual difficulty of some of the papers, and unpleasantness of Heriot Watt food.

Been to a couple of papers on games this morning.

Graham  Downes and Susan Haywood from Bath Spa University presented first with a talk entitled Gaming and Learning: Computer Games and Education. They presented a model of computer games as ‘ludic texts’ with both narrative and ludic elements, and a continuum from stories (picture books) to talking stories (with hotspots, music, narration, embedded games) to games.

Their research has been carried out in the context of children’s computer gaming, and they put forward the following characteristics of children playing computer games: a) compulsive problem-solving; b) simultaneous objectives; c) multimediation (simultaneous activity); d) flow. They suggest that there is an issue of home-school dissonance and that the integrity of games are lost when they are moved into a classroom context.

Secondly, Harry O’Neil from UCLA/CRESST presented a talk called Instructional Interventions to Make Computer Games a Learning Environment. His background is with adults in a training environment and was interested in whether games increase players’ problem solving and whether there are instructional strategies that can be added to commercial off-the-shelf games to make them more effective.

He first presented a model of learning with five outcomes: 1) content understanding; 2) problem-solving; 3) self regulation (metacognition and motivation); 4) communication; and 5) collaboration, and argued that whether a game is to be used in-class or out-of-class is critical to the choice of game, as the two learning environments are so fundamentally different. He presented empirical work on the effectiveness of different supplementary activities  to increase problem-solving knowledge from off-the-shelf games, concluding that worked examples offer the best opportunity.

While this was an interesting talk, I fundamentally disagree with Harry on two points, first, his assertion that you have to use off-the-shelf games for the game to have appropriate production values, and secondly, that games that use “inductive instructional strategies” (discovery learning) are not appropriate for learning.