We kicked the workshop off with a brief talk. Here are the slides for that short presentation.

Integrating Games in Instruction

•    Remember there are a lot of ways to introduce games in your classroom, you can start by simply recommending them to families, media resource leaders, or special educators
•    Make sure learning objectives can be met within the amount of time you have dedicated in the classroom period
•    When evaluating a game, consider how the game helps you meet learning objectives more effectively (more engaging? Better visual explanation? More efficient?)
•    Have a student volunteer help you evaluate games you consider.
•    Make sure you know the source of the game. Games on dedicated educational website from a familiar place are less likely to have unwelcome pop-ups or comments.

Learning Games Directories

Playing History:      Open directory of history and civics games
Playing Science:     Open directory of science games
Games for Change:     Directory of social issue games
Super Smart Games Wide range of free and commercial
PBS Kids Games:     Great  set of early childhood k-6 games
**NOTE: Many of these directories link out to external sites. Over time links may break and we have no control over the content of external sites.

Game Recommendations

Marjee Recommends
Coaster Creator
Students learn about potential and kinetic energy in order to build a successful roller coaster that provides riders with lots of thrills, but brings them to the end platform safely!

Gravitee 2
A “casual game” meant for entertainment but is an “addictive” and fun way to examine satellite/ falling body behavior.

Trevor Recommends
Do I Have A Right
From Justice Sandra Day O’Conner’s iCivics project, Do I Have A Right, does a great job helping students explore and understand the Bill of Rights.

The Jamestown Online Adventure Game
In this alternative history game students chose different strategies for the Jamestown pioneers. The Jamestown Online Adventure Game does a nice job helping students develop a sense of both what happened and why it happened.

This is very much an “its just nice to be nominated” situation. Winning was highly unexpected and a huge honor. I’m really proud of our energy suite of games as it highlights the most important learning objectives in a middle school energy unit using a variety of game mechanics that are all engage and all privilege engagement, learning, and classroom usability.

Check them out!

Best Educational Game 2010

Play the Games I Mentioned Right Now:

Operation Resilient Planet, Mentioned on Slide 4: It is a big, 6 hr game. We also allow teachers to pick small 20-25 min experiences from the game to use in classrooms.
Transform-It and Energy City: Mentioned on slide 5: Free browser based flash games that provide a range of different challenges. Both have something you can do in 20 minutes in a class but provide hours of play later at home.
Coaster Creator and Eco Defenders. Mentioned on Slide 6: Both of these games provide spaces for direct classroom objectives, but also provide deeper experiences for players to try to best their own scores.
Here is an example of how videos model practices for classroom teachers. Mentioned in Slide 10:

You can log into the Jason Mission Center to browse some of these supporting classroom materials. Mentioned in Slide 11.

This is of course, lame for so many reasons and it carries various absurd implications, etc., but it isn’t all that unfamiliar for anyone who has reviewed the types of video games that are designed specifically for girls. For the most part, video games for girls are insipid. Check out the screen grab from the Tinkerbell DS game: outfits and material possessions. Really? Just about every/any game that has ever been designed for the pink ghetto has a clothing/ outfit fetish.

Oh good, this game has outfits in it! Phew! AmIRight?

I can say a lot on this topic, but for now I just want to focus on one thing. Why stop at “outfits”? Why not go the next level?

What annoys me most about the girl-game outfit fetish isn’t necessarily that 1) all little girls don’t really care about outfits (and the second a video game box goes pink, I promise you outfits are involved, if not for your avatar than for a horse or puppy/kitty)  or that 2) the idea of having content revolve around outfits paralyzes any hope of designing a cognitively captivating game. Rather, what bothers me is that this interest some girls have in fashion or styling can link into some legitimately challenging and fascinating problem spaces, and this never seems to be taken advantage of. Fashion design, as Tim Gunn has shown us, is tricky business. It requires serious spacial intelligence, design thinking, and problem solving. Looking at two-dimensional patterns and fabrics and cutting and stitching them to fit onto a 3D person is an engineering feat if ever there was one. So why stop at just “outfits”?

In the more male-dominated game universes of racing games or god-game strategy games, successful titles frequently have sequels, and those sequelsget more challenging. They add nuance and difficulty in response to faithful fans whose skill and thus thirst for challenge has grown. This is the real failing of the “girl game” genre. It forever infantalizes and flatters its players by repackaging the same cosmetics and ego-stroking easy puzzles. It never builds on itself and it doesn’t reflect on its own content, whether it is fashion or care-taking (and it probably is only those two things). It is ready to allow its player to grow out of it and leave games behind, because it sure as hell isn’t interested in growing with the player the way so many more typically male genres do.

…and I don’t necessarily lay all of the blame on the 4th tier game designers who are clearly out-of-the-loop regarding the  specifics of sugar and spice  that little girls are made of. Parents buy these games and I find it revealing that if a girly game is ever bagged in a review, the review comes from a father who probably knows that there is something better for his little girl out there, if only  these game companies ever wanted to get serious about expanding their market. What is great is that these dads not only cut in to the poor premise of the games, the recognize that all design elements are hurried, crappy, don’t utilize the current technology, and just not thought through.

Some choice angry-dad quotes reviewing a Wii “game for girls”:

“Great reinforcement of how a girl or a woman should look… Expect better from your kids and you just may get it.”

“It is a 2D side scroll game, poorly written…The graphics are lame. The game play is lame. Inventory…Lame. Character controls. Lame….Word to [redacted]- Your game makes me want to meet you in a dark alley outside a bar and beat the living tar out of you. This game sucks that much…”

“This is NOT a Wii game, this is a gameboy-level 2D platform jumper with decade old graphics….”

“I don’t know why they even bothered making this a wii game…The graphics are lame and the games are boring. Your duaghter will have to collect gold coins …which she [can] spend at the shop. However, they make the items overpriced and the girls can’t “try on” the clothes. They can just buy them and hold them in inventory. Lame….

…after a few tearful fits when the avatar wouldn’t do what she was telling it to do, we took it away from her. It’s going in the yard sale.”

I hope more dads that grew up with games continue to advocate for their daughters. Too many moms don’t even know what they were missing and what their daughters were missing out on. Home video gaming is ~30 years old, girls are one of the fastest growing markets, and yet the pink ghetto remains…

Probes help teachers do what they were all ready doing, but a little bit better

What Gee was talking about  is that schools should rethink their design to be more akin to games. What if curricular design had as much depth as the design of major commercial video games? For the most part, this topic was never explored. Instead, media and foundations alike concentrated on funding the development of educational games. Fair enough. I certainly won’t complain because this is my passion and livelihood. In our excitement, however, some critical ideas were confused…

…Here is the problem. Gee argues that games, unlike schools, offer deep, meaningful, and somewhat inefficient learning experiences. This is in contrast to schools, where we go for shallow and aim for efficiency. Standards, for instance, are all about efficiently know which kids will know what key information by when.

So realistically, what does that mean about the games we design for schools? If schools won’t dedicate 40 hours a week to history or science, why design games that demand just that? This is where the original funding for games in education started to head: trying to recapture the magic of best-selling commercial platform games.Therefore, games that required 8+ hours that focused on really cool, but really not standard-aligned content were bandied about for funding. Immersive 3D environments that could barely make it over a school’s firewall were greeted as liberators from the oppressive school curriculum. In the mean time, schools ran about business as usual and by the end of the decade, funders and academics were scratching their heads, blaming teachers for their lack of tech savvy and deciding that when it came to games in classrooms, it couldn’t be done.

But of course it can be done. Educational games are the top draw on our site at work and they’ve found incredible use in the classroom (check it out here and here). Part of the reason for the success, I believe has to do with the fact that I design my games to be more like other technologies that have been easily absorbed in the classroom as opposed to a commercial opus. EDC researcher Katherine McMillan Culp identified those features as being something similar to Vernier Probes, smartboards, or graphic calculators:

• The technology needs to address conceptual “sticking points” for students that teachers are familiar with
• The technology needs to be flexible and adaptable
• The technology needs to be able to be used simply at first, and allow teachers to grow the sophistication of use over time

Part of the implication here is that we need to turn our attention to more casual games for ideas and examples of how game designs can inform learning. Games in education are not only a worthwhile, but vital pursuit because of their ability to engage all students and transcend learning, langauge, and motivation barriers like few other curricular implements can. But we have to work within the realities of schools. We’re stuck with the bathwater, but that is no reason to walk away from the baby.

Image from Retrotyoys.com

Weird huh?  How did this happen?  Are we graduating incompetent people?  Hardly.  But somehow, we keep hearing from politicians, educations, and folks in the business community that we need scientists and engineers.  There is a dearth of talent.  We need to improve science education!  We need to inspire kids!

Looks like the main stream  message is finally starting to catch up the the reality:  We don’t have jobs for all our scientists.  Got that? We can stop the mea culpa about not having enough scientists.  We have too many, and we can’t give these people the jobs they’ve been preparing for for 10-14 years.

This doesn’t diminish the role of science education by a long shot, but it should make us reconsider what science education is for and why it is important.  The key focus should be science literacy for citizens.  There is of course, nothing new about this, but it is a good time to reflect on our priorities.  Do we need another unemployed nuclear scientsits, or do we want to have an informed citizenry that avoids ghosts, gouls, and the alignment of stars in making policy decisions?

Recently, I came across  Shape it Up, which is my favorite geology interactive so far.   Players try to make one landscape look like another by choosing a force of nature (volcano, wind, water, glacier) and choosing a time period.

This is a wonderful game for young kids.  There are several components that I think can be added or modified in order to make the game more sophisticated for middle school kids. 1) I’d like to see a more rule-based structure around it in order to make it more game-like.

2) Choose geological features that are the result of multiple natural forces and allow students to experiment with those forces.

3) Let students fail and see the results of their failed states.

4) Add elements where students are using forces to create smaller items such as various rocks and minerals in addition the the buttes, islands, and rivers.

Of course, it speaks to the original idea that it can be scaled up or down quite dramatically depending on the students’ age.  Nice work!

Image originally from www.digitalfrog.com

My blood was a’ boiling this morning after reading an article on  edweek about an investigation done by the College Board:

… can a student get the same level of experience from a virtual dissection online, without actually smelling the formaldehyde or making a cut?

In recent years, the College Board, which authorizes AP classes and offers college-level material to high school students, has been trying to determine whether simulated labs in some science courses can take the place of real-world experiments. It’s a debate that online science providers and hands-on teachers are grappling with as well.

The very first comment on this post insists that virtual labs can never replace “real labs” (in this case, fetal pig dissection is the example used).  From Dr. Brad Huff:

Simulations represent how the programmer thinks the real world should behave, not how the real world does respond when explored by a student.

Learning science is learning to be a skilled observer and accurate recorder of what is observed, not a participant in a computer game purporting to teach the nature of Nature.

Here is  the thing:

Let’s disregard the fact that the article mentions formaldehyde, which no one uses anymore…
1) Cost- dead animals are expensive, and disposing of these dead animals, year after year, means you have to keep ordering and keep buying them.
2) Evidence- What exactly do students get out of dissecting animals? DO we have empirical evidence that they make students better recorders of nature? That they motivate students to become scientists? Why don’t we hold our previously held assumptions to the same scrutiny that we hold tradition?
3) Real Science -There are numerous physics, meteorologists, chemists, immunologists, that deal STRICTLY in models and simulations, and never hold a messy piece of nature in their hands. They are scientists in every bit and in fact, quite frankly, they are the scientists that are leading the way in contemporary sciences. Modelers get much more of the funding these days and make headlines far more often than zoologists. They need to learn how to understand and interpret a coder’s “bias” (BTW- no coder works in isolation outside of subject matter experts and instructional designers these days) just as much as any experiment has bias and noisy data.

Do parents start to disengage with their children's learning at adolescence?

At the EdubloggerCon Unconference this year, I ran into a woman who had a great insight for me.  I told her a little bit about what I did (produce  core science games for middle schoolers) and my ambitions for the conference (thinking about design consideration that will ease game implementation in the classroom, and she quickly said,  “Parents. You have to get it to the parents, make them put pressure on the schools.  That is the only way it is going to happen.”

It’s a compelling point and it made me reflect on some of the awards Operation: Resilient Planet Game was up for this year, awards we ultimately  didn’t win.  Many of our fellow finalists, and the ultimate winners, were targeted toward elementary school math and reading.  The games were designed to give parent’s progress reports, thus demonstrating a core understanding of a certain thriving market.

So these winners kind of figured some stuff out.  Parents have the tenacity and desire to get their kids playing games in order to learn.  And perhaps, as these types of efforts gain popularity among involved parents, schools receive pressure to bring these technologies into schools.

But what about those of us who are making games aimed for older kids?  Games with core, but challenging content?  Will we ever capture parents?  Will parents ever sign on to learn how their kids are doing on acquiring science content?  Tweens start to get a little scary for parents.  Parents back off.  Parents are less involved with their kids learning.  And besides, science is still seen as being periphery to skills like math and reading.  Will we even accomplish the first step towards getting parents to think about games for kids out of elementary school?

This is still a nascent field, but it was certainly odd to find our game about trophic models and ecological population counting methods going toe-to-toe with games where fairies and cowboys hold your hand as you master short and long “a” sounds.

At any rate, I think the unconference-goer I mentioned at the start of this post is on to something, and I think I see her poignant observation playing out with younger students.  I just really hope that despite my hunch, parents do remain interested advocates of their kid’s education beyond  2nd grade. It may not be the only way to get quality educational games into the classroom, but it is certainly vital.