Jen Helms - Immersive, Playful Learning in the Real World vs. Video G…

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- This talk is based on my unique experience first as a teacher in environmental education and then flashing forward to today as a video games designer.

How did the environmental education program work? Students were brought out of the classroom and into a natural ecosystem to learn about ecology and into one of the greatest geologic wonders on earth to learn about geology.
The experience is essentially a game in which students are exploring and interacting with this new world and playing mini-games that further reinforce their understanding of the world as they explore.
Teachers would often describe students that were completely disengaged and difficult in the classroom being totally transformed.
Students could touch the thick spongy bark of a sequoia and understand how protected that bark would make the tree from forest fires instead of reading about it from a book.

Now just throwing people into a national park doesn’t result in learning in and of itself. It just provides an excellent foundation for learning.
As educators we would map out our day to foster three pillars of learning that were our core educational framework. I want to highlight the two that I see as most relevant.
Sense of place ex: playing the food web game in the forest to teach students about the animals that live in the park and how they interact with each other.
Interconnections ex: for instance while cross country skiing in the high country in winter, measuring the snowpack and learning about how the Sierra snowpack affects California’s water supply

Echolocation is used by several types of animals to locate objects. A sound is emitted by the animal and then they use the echoes that bounce off the objects. One animal that relies on echolocation to find food is a bat, an animal that comes out at night.
The game works by blindfolding a student and another student would volunteer to be the moth. The rest of the students form a circle around them. When the bat claps the moth has to clap back. The student that plays the bat is blindflolded and has to use only her sense of hearing to try to capture the moth
The game had a few purposes, the game served as a way to demonstrate how echolocation works. Secondly, the game helps connect students to the night by helping them understand creatures that come out at night and their behavior. Finally, this got students to feel comfortable and have some fun in the dark of the night in a National Park. We mostly had city kids and so there was a lot of discomfort for many of them and this helped break it.

There are physical experiences that can’t be replicated through other mediums – the crackling of fallen leaves beneath your feet, feeling the mist of a waterfall, being blown away by the grandeur of a giant sequoia.

Ex 1: While we could devise games to help students understand processes like the water cycle, there was still a layer of abstraction and the students aren’t able to discover how how the process works on their own
Ex. 2: In order to keep participants safe, certain aspects of how the park functions have to be explained, restricting student exploration and the feedback received from failure.
These are both issues that a great educational video game can address well

- Before we go any further let’s think through some questions we can ask when we are designing an educational game.
- Is it the system of algebra? The syntax and semantics of a new language? An ecosystem and how it functions?

Next we want to think about sense of place. How do we teleport students into the subject matter we want them to learn?

Next we want to think about interconnections

Question 4 is the key to educational outcomes in game design. The previous three questions are the most important questions for all game designers, just change the word student to player.

No, of course not. I will say, however, that I believe in what Raph Koster proposed years ago in his book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design”, that games are fun precisely because we are learning.
Whether or not a game is an entertainment game then or an education game depends on to what extent the game designers built a game mechanic that results in transferable learning. So to what extent can the learning happening in the game transfer outside of the game world and into the real world.
We are going to look at some examples to further demonstrate the idea of a spectrum

- First let’s look at a mobile game that is very clearly entertainment but also clearly involves a lot of learning. Cut the Rope is an incredibly popular game, has anyone here played it?
It is super fun, and you are learning constantly. You have to learn to cut ropes at the right times to collect stars and feed the character Om Nom his candy.
You also have to learn to squeeze cushions the right way and do many other tasks that require learning but these skills aren’t transferable to the real world. This game is purely for entertainment.

- Here players are asked to model the rules of English grammar and syntax in their heads.
- Players are asked to connect words that form syntactically correct sentences and are given feedback to inform them when they have achieved that goal.
- While this game can be used to strengthen grammar skills, it is not giving explicit feedback about the different syntactic structures in the game.

- We’ll see some examples of games on the far education end of the spectrum as we delve into our next segment, looking at real-world games for learning in comparison to video games.

Before beginning the game, teacher leads a broader discussion of photosynthesis and the importance of plants to the overall ecosystem
Students are divided into two equal teams
An adult becomes the sun
One student from each team plays the role of a plant containing chlorophyll
The other students hold signs for water and carbon dioxide
The plants run from the sun to a teammate holding a water card and brings it back to the sun, giving up an oxygen, the plant then runs back and gets a carbon dioxide molecule
This continues until the first team has linked all of their players in a chain.

Reach for the sun is a resource management game and as a player you have the goal of managing the plant to produce the most seeds possible in one season.
You manage your water, nutrients and starch to grow from a little seed to a plant with a root system, leaves, and flowers.
What do you think? What benefits do you see over one or the other?

Both games are able to effectively teach the basic concept of photosynthesis
Reach for the Sun is able to better represent photosynthesis and the life of a plant and allow the player to more deeply interact with and communicate with the process.
Race for the Sun benefits from numerous intangibles and allows the students to learn a new concept through a game that feels very familiar.
Can the stronger emotions created with Race for the Sun promote deeper learning?
Is one necessarily “better” than the other?

Players learn how to read and understand their spoken target language. This is possibly because players are able to thoroughly deconstruct the meaning of sentences in the game by playing with the objects and seeing how the description sentence changes.
Because the visual representations tie to the the written and spoken language, players learning is grounded in a reality they are already familiar with. A picture of a boy eating an apple is clearly a boy eating an apple, allowing players to connect their prior understanding of the world to an entirely new model.

Both games are able to effectively teach the basic concepts of a foreign language
Stagecraft has you closely interacting with the world of language and ties into the players understanding of what different images represent.
A study abroad program has you learn language through communicating with others, the very essence of what language is all about.
What else would you add? Do you think a video game like Stagecraft can really be used as a substitute for the experience of studying abroad?

Jen Helms - Immersive, Playful Learning in the Real World vs. Video Games

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Jen Helms - Immersive, Playful Learning in the Real World vs. Video Games