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Recently Browsing 0 members No registered users viewing this page. Back to top. Sign In Sign Up. Important Information This site uses cookies - We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. I accept. The original SimCity , along with its multitude of sequels and spinoffs, was at its core a system of relationships among elements of a city. Some of those relationships are intuitive: if I add an amusement park, my people will be happier.
But others may take more probing: if I build a nuclear power plant, how will that affect the neighboring residential zones, and in turn, how will those changes affect the residential zones across town? Players form hypotheses about how the simulation works, and they can test those hypotheses with the inputs they have access to.
On a larger scale, players may even extrapolate some of these questions to the real world when they notice urban planning issues in their own communities.
While SimCity was not a great model of urban planning, it did give people a vocabulary and curiosity to ask those questions. This potential for making connections among systems within the game and out into real life is something that learning games can capitalize on for both presenting content and practicing more generalizable skills. The flowers you might breed in your first generation affect the flowers you can breed in subsequent generations, so it is more complex than a simple virtual experiment.
Many interesting game systems are simple and elegant. The key to designing them is to recognize that the game experience becomes compelling when the models are rich enough to actually experiment, not simply input something and get out an answer.
Social experiences are an integral part of learning, as we discuss in chapter 4. Opportunities for social interaction were provided in Vanished by designing challenges that required collaboration to solve them. Opportunities for social interaction are also provided in Radix , but through the design of the tools in the game rather than the design of the tasks. The goal of including these features was to contribute to the inquiry-style learning environment being created.
This makes the world feel alive and can create a sense of community. Often if a whole class is in the same region during a class period, players know who the other players are. Other times, they may be students from other classes or other schools, but depending on the permissions set, they can use in-game chat to talk to each other.
Similarly, once players have added each other to their buddy list, they can send each other in-game mail, including attached objects. Additionally, if I find a crazy new species in the swamp, such as a plaid schloggen, I can send one to my friend to share my new discovery. In typical MMOs this means players can form a group with a private chat channel, with many types of accomplishments shared across members.
This enables groups to complete a task with less work for each person, or to achieve goals that would be too difficult for any individual player.
In Radix , the partying feature centers on data collection. When a player examines the phenotype, genotype, or any other attribute of a species, that data is stored in his data log for him to analyze later with the data explorer tool. When that player is in a party, data that his fellow party members collect is also automatically stored in his data log.
This means that he can carry out studies with larger sample sizes or that cover more geographical area. In Radix this means that the work players can do in groups has a different quality than what they can do on their own.
Additionally, providing these opportunities for collaboration necessitates communication. When players want something specific, they need to use accurate language to describe the traits they are looking for or how many data points they need from each area. The approach used in Radix to help build those skills is to embed opportunities for social interaction directly into the game play.
The multiplayer functionality currently built into Radix is content agnostic. They are also not essential to completing quests in the game, which can all be finished by a single player. While there are reasons we built the first version this way, there is huge potential for other multiplayer experiences that tie directly to discipline-specific practices.
For example, players might need to collaboratively draw up plans for a set of buildings, contributing to the same scale map. Another example is on an ecology quest, players might have distinct responsibilities that complement each other. So one player might need to reintroduce a species into an ecosystem, while another player breeds more of that species, and yet another monitors the effects on other species in the relevant food web.
Running up against the different ways in which other players approach a certain task can be eye opening, but it is not something that happens often in individual learning experiences.
A rich game world with well-designed challenges provides a safe space to make those different approaches visible and then work to integrate them into a solution collaboratively.
This type of deep learning experience not only improves understanding of STEM concepts but also leads players to think in an open-minded and connected way.
Well-designed games or software can be tools to both spark and sustain those valuable social interactions. Skills and practices, not only content knowledge, can be taught within games in unique ways.
Drawing out these goals explicitly in bridge curriculum activities can build on and solidify the learning. A game with meaningful ties to the curriculum, in terms of not only content knowledge but also skills and practice, provides a starting point to make connections to other activities. Thoughtful bridge curriculum builds on the game to create a rich array of extended learning opportunities.
It becomes difficult to design quality bridge curriculum that goes beyond practice problems and gets at complex concepts. Radix was primarily designed for teachers to use with their classes in schools. We were careful to make it accessible to players outside school as well, but many of our design decisions were driven by a vision of how the game would be implemented in classrooms and incorporated into existing curricula.
It is a large game with a lot of content, and it is designed to be played at multiple relevant points throughout an existing year-long curriculum. They could work at their own pace and not worry about how far the student next to them had gotten, while still taking advantage of the social features to communicate with others working on the same quests. Once students had had this personalized but shared experience working with the content, teachers could use in-class time to conduct activities that facilitate transfer, go deeper into certain concepts, and explicitly make connections to other related activities or topics.
In science these are things like modeling, scientific inquiry, and data analysis; in math they include optimization and problem solving. Games, especially ones that provide rich experiences, are one way to put students in a situation where they can practice those skills. Yet when it comes to both content and skills, completing a questline in the game does not imply that players will have discovered the meaning of adaptation or the idea of optimization all on their own.
Some players who have prior knowledge of these terms do make connections, becoming cognizant of what phenomenon they are witnessing. For most students, though, it takes some additional activities to reflect on the game experience and generalize it to a broader context. The use case for these activities can be compared to the field trip model that is common in schools.
To make the most of these firsthand experiences, students are often given guides or worksheets to complete while at the field trip site, which can help organize their thinking and situate their observations within the context of what has already been taught. Additionally, a thoughtfully integrated field trip will include related activities that take place back in the classroom. These activities may extend the learning or synthesize what students saw and connect it with larger concepts from the curriculum.
But it is easy to see that if learning ends when the field trip ends, there is a missed opportunity to deeply integrate hands-on experience with classroom learning.
Similarly, games can be considered the hands-on experience after which learning should not simply be considered finished. Like field trip experiences, the learning in game experiences can be built on and magnified by closely integrating them into other class time. We saw this occur through Labyrinth materials that provided additional opportunities to apply the math concepts from those puzzles. Given the importance of this model, when Radix is used in schools a heavy emphasis has been placed on discussions and activities outside the game.
Some of these activities were designed by the Radix team and provided to teachers; others individual teachers designed themselves to make connections to materials used in their own classes.
We often call these activities bridge materials, because they are meant to bridge the game experience to a more formal learning experience. Regardless of who designs that bridge curriculum, the critical idea is that these out-of-game experiences must be thoughtfully designed and implemented.
Class discussions are one of the most basic, and yet underutilized, ways to solidify learning that can happen in a game or other hands-on activity. Facilitating a discussion in which students recap what they did and reflect on how the experience went can be very powerful. Often when a game is played during class time, however, the bell rings and the students leave, and the next day the teacher has to move on to the next topic.
For example, after playing the geometry questline, in which students complete partially drawn scale maps of an area of ruins, the teacher might start the discussion asking students what ratios they set up to find the missing sides of the buildings.
Students may have different strategies for this, some finding the ratio of building to drawing, and some finding the ratio of width to length. Both are interesting variations on the same method, but without the class discussion, students may never realize that there are other approaches than the one they used.
During game play people naturally tend to have some tunnel vision, so some guided reflection is required to connect the idea of ratios to architecture, engineering, or social studies. Finally, teachers could introduce some authentic materials into the discussion. If they show a model train or a map with a legend, they can challenge students to identify the scale and compare that to the scale of their Radix maps. Making connections in this way can help students broaden their view of mathematical applications, as well as strengthen their conceptual understanding of scale at various order of magnitude.
Teachers can also explicitly make students aware of the skills they have used, such as modeling or estimating, bringing in a layer of metacognition to their learning experience. As illustrated, there is a lot of value in whole-class discussions. Yet it is not a format that enables a teacher to hear from every student equally.
This is a very simple method that many teachers already use, and it is also perhaps one of the most useful when questions are carefully crafted. After her students had played through the menji questline involving different distributions of menji traits in different regions, this teacher wanted them to apply the concept of natural selection to a new situation.
To scaffold the experience and retain the clear connection to Radix , she kept the question about menjis but added a new context. She asked the students to predict what would happen to the population of a group of menjis that moved from the forest to a dark cave. This is a good inquiry-based question in that there is no right answer, so whatever the students come up with has to be supported with evidence from what they have learned in Radix or other parts of their biology class.
Some students said the menjis would improve their sense of smell, and others said they would adapt their vision to see in the dark. Regardless of the outcome, their teacher was looking for key elements in their answer, such as an explanation of the selection pressure involved, and a mention of the time scale over which this might happen.
Building on the context set up in the game gave her a good way to conduct formative assessment in the middle of the evolution unit. It also gave her feedback on where she needed to draw explicit connections back to what students saw and did in Radix.
For her, assigning a question that started with the game content but extended out was an ideal level of challenge for her students. Another way in which bridging activities can help complete an experience with Radix is by taking an abstract embodiment of a concept in the game and helping students discover what that same concept looks like in a formal academic setting. The algebra marketplace is a perfect example of a questline that makes people wonder where the math was after playing it.
This is because there are no traditional math problems or equations that appear in the marketplace, so many players feel as if they are just trading goods. Players using the bartering system are in fact doing mathematical reasoning but it is also important for them to be able to express their methods with math symbols. This is when teachers can drive home the point that equations are not just right or wrong answers on a test, but they are actually a useful tool we can use to communicate and solve optimization problems like the ones encountered in the market.
In this case, neither putting the equations into the game, nor bringing the market into the real world, would work quite as well as having two separate experiences and then making a connection between the two.
For teachers that have more flexibility or time in their curricula, there are even more constructivist and project-based activities that can effectively build off a game like Radix. They could have their students work through the ecosystem quests, constructing food webs and analyzing the ecosystem simulation tool, afterwards using a tool like StarLogo to create their own food web simulation to respond to different events. Students could even design a Radix -inspired educational game to teach the same concepts to younger students in their school.
Whatever the activity is, it should help students make their own connections from game content to other school content, or from game content to their everyday lives. And it should help them reflect explicitly on what they are learning and how they are learning it. When creating games for deep learning, we cannot assume that players will learn without a teacher, but we also cannot assume that they will learn simply by having a teacher there.
What teachers do with the game and how they do it is of utmost importance and must be as carefully designed as the game itself. An inquiry-based game must be supported by a culture of inquiry in the surrounding educational setting. In a classroom with an existing culture of inquiry, students have the time and space to try, fail, and figure things out for themselves in a game. They ask each other questions and consult outside resources.
The teacher stands back but offers resources, conceptual help, and encouragement. As a result the teacher is often overwhelmed and underprepared, and everyone involved gets frustrated with the process. Inquiry-based learning is built around the idea of learners identifying their own interests, asking questions they want to explore, and then conducting activities independently to construct their own knowledge of the topic.
Skilled inquiry teachers act as facilitators in the process of synthesizing knowledge and solving problems in an open-ended educational space.
Although Radix was designed to create a space that fosters inquiry learning and exploration, a completely open-ended game would leave players confused about where to start and what to work on. Therefore, game designers aimed to strike a balance between directed quests and open-ended experimentation. In many quests, this means that a problem is presented to the player, and a question is posed.
Often the game goes so far as to suggest a tool that may be useful in solving the problem, and players are aware of what type of artifact they are expected to turn in. As for what to do and how to solve the problem, though, players are on their own to experiment and see what works before ultimately settling on a solution. This creates a space for inquiry activities that may take some students outside their comfort zone, but provides the opportunity for authentic discovery and problem solving.
Another game that does a good job of creating an inquiry experience in a digital space is Portal. Portal consists of a series of puzzles in which players must use a portal gun to create portals between flat planes laid out in a test chamber. Because momentum is retained while traveling through the portals, players must experiment to figure out what trajectory will help them reach their goals.
While the room design and the tool available create constraints, players can create portals anywhere, and they must experiment to see what happens while figuring out how the world works. Digital games, as designed and programmed experiences, by definition have constraints and directed goals. In a good inquiry game, these bounds work as scaffolding to help the player understand what they can try and where they can push those bounds.
Players usually have an expectation of independent experimentation and repeated failure along the way to success. There is situated feedback, but no one telling them exactly what to do, which creates a feeling of ownership and satisfaction when they figure out for themselves how to complete a level. Unfortunately for games designed for in-school use, this expectation does not often exist in the classroom. The most prevalent teaching methods consist of a teacher who has the knowledge, students who are supposed to follow instructions, and problems that have right answers.
This is true for textbooks, worksheets, and even many science labs done in schools. Because this is the norm, students and teachers both bring certain assumptions with them even when implementing an inquiry-based game like Radix. In a large class full of students playing a game in different ways and at different stages, keeping track in this way is not feasible and, more importantly, counterproductive.
Trying to fit an inquiry activity into a didactic frame is doing a disservice to everyone involved, because the tasks at hand will feel incredibly frustrating, and no one will reap the benefits of independent exploration. These are behaviors that are so ingrained because of the classroom culture that we all grew up learning in.
Nonetheless, there are ways to overcome these challenges and prepare learners for an inquiry experience. For example, Kolodner and colleagues describe how they create a culture of collaboration, independence, and scientific reasoning in the Learning by Design curriculum. This was an approach to middle school science learning designed by researchers and learning scientists who worked to address some of the big challenges in classroom inquiry learning.
The students worked together to identify the investigation, argumentation, and other practices the experts were doing, which helped create community and acclimate students to new classroom norms.
Making these science practices explicit and recognizing when they were occurring helped students understand what was expected of them in the class and as a community. These methods were implemented in the Learning by Design project to prepare students for design challenges and construction tasks. Although the Radix project was centered on a video game, both involved curriculum that allowed students to take ownership of their own learning.
As we have seen, simply providing that type of opportunity does not automatically change the expectations of the people interacting with the intervention. That must be done over time and with intentional changes to the classroom culture and conversation. To bring about this kind of cultural shift in Radix classrooms, our first step is to make teachers aware of the difference in approaches so that they know what to look out for.
Bringing these actions to the front of their minds helps them notice the ways in which they create a didactic classroom culture.
The next step is for teachers to explicitly tell their students that during Radix game play, learning may feel different, and they may not get the answers they want right away.
Finally, teachers can use some specific strategies to promote inquiry. Any time a student had a question, they were not allowed to ask the teacher until they had consulted three other sources. These could be fellow students, the Internet, or the class wiki, for example. When they came up to the teacher, he would ask them to explain which three sources they had already tried. By being consistent with this policy, the teacher helped his students know what to expect, and they got used to giving each other more advice.
When they were stuck on a quest, he would tell them that getting stuck was part of the learning process, remind them about the last time they had figured a problem out, and encourage them to keep going. Gradually over the course of a semester, students got used to the change in expectations and came to enjoy the independence of figuring out how to use the world map or build a perfectly sized animal pen.
They felt a strong sense of accomplishment each time they turned in an object they had created, and they were quick to give each other help and encouragement. When implementing an inquiry-based game that is different from the activities usually done in schools, some amount of disconnect between the old and new approaches is inevitable. That disconnect is not to be feared, however, but rather a motivation to analyze the existing classroom dynamic and an opportunity to purposefully make changes.
In fact, Radix can be seen as an on-ramp to more general inquiry-learning techniques, as it provides an entry point for teachers to change specific aspects of their practice, giving them a focus as they get a feel for the role of an inquiry facilitator.
The task of making changes and moving the needle in this area is not just for the teacher, but should also involve the game designers and curriculum developers. Designing an amazing inquiry-based game is not enough to be successful in an actual classroom.
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