Digital games and learning:

1. Digital games and learning: Week 3

2. Brainstorming… • Which games do you currently use in your learning? • No, really…

3. Remember Bloom (1956)? What is learning? Human skills fall into 3 domains: • Cognitive skills – which drive our intellectual judgement; • Psychomotor skills – which drive our physical judgement; • Affective skills – which drive our social and behavioural judgement. • Learning is any person’s ability to assimilate information from the external world to create a “new and improved” set of skills.

4. Bloom categorised learning into 6 levels of growing complexity

5. An Individual Approach – The Self-Help Toolkit • Evaluation tools and toolkits • Evaluation Learning Toolkit(Oliver, 1999) • Evaluation Cookbook(Harvey, 1998) • Flashlight Evaluation Handbook(Ehrmann & Zuniga, 1997) • Guided self-help on most aspects of evaluation • forming evaluation plans • deriving evaluation questions • data collection and analysis • preparing evaluation reports

6. Limitations of Self-Help Toolkits • unreasonable to expect practitioners to undertake • evaluation without more support; • no small task for practitioners to become experts in the evaluation of educational technology.

14. Formative Evaluation Domains and Criteria

15. Formative Evaluation Cycle Development Cycle

18. Initial Conceptual and Technical Review Review of: Outcome:

19. Informal review by: Formal review and written reports by: Outcome:

23. How summative evaluation is conducted will depend on:

24. Summative Evaluation • Evaluation Criteria • - Learner and Learning-Centred • - Focuses on Learning Processes and Products • Summative Evaluation is not restricted to • - Experimental Designs (eg.pre-post test, comparative) • - Quantitative Methods (questionnaires, tests) • Encouragement to consider “alternative strategies” • - Interpretivist Designs (eg. case study) • - Qualitative methods (focus group, observation, interview)

25. Example of a Summative Evaluation Case Study: “XXXXXXX Tutorial” Aims of the Program • Allow students to explore how XXXXX concepts and paradigms affect YYYYYYY parameters • Emphasises conceptual understanding rather than • mathematical formulae • Employs examples, analogies and interactive tasks to provide “hooks” into the content?

26. Design and experience • Growing interest in digital games for educational purposes (e.g. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2004; Dawes & Dumbleton, 2001). • Two areas of research focus on: relationship between the design of the game and the experience of the player during play - examining how and what players learn through play and - how games function pedagogically, or how they teach players how to play. • Design of the game research adapts standard software evaluation procedures to identify the informational content of games – what they might be said to cover in terms of subject matter. • BECTaand TEEM (Teachers Evaluating Education Media reports examined the cognitive and social processes involved in playing a number of games (Dawes & Dumbleton, 2001; McFarlane et al, 2002). • This kind of research defines the educational potential of games in terms of opportunities for players to evaluate information, hypothesise solutions and work in groups. • But…, the processes involved here and howsuch opportunities are taken up, is rarely researched.

27. process of playing • The TEEM report reviewed the informational content of a number of digital games and collected feedback though post-play focus groups and questionnaires. • But it did not observe the process of playing, or research the nature and quality of moment-by-moment social and technological interactions and how these might relate to each other. • As a result, although BECTaand TEEM concluded that learning was taking place, their findings remain largely inferential. • The reports suggested that skills such as strategic thinking and problem solving could be developed through game play, but were not in a position to offer accounts of how students develop specific skills, what might count as evidence for such skills within the context of playing a game and whether there was transference to other contexts. • This is largely because there is not yet an established theory or method for analysing the process of game play in terms of learning.

28. The gap in the research • “What’s missing from contemporary debate on gaming and culture is any naturalistic study of what game-playing experiences are like, how gaming fits into people’s lives, and the kinds of practices that people are engaged in while gaming. Few, if any researchers have studied how and why people play games, and what gaming environments are like. […] Investigators might benefit by acknowledging the cultural contexts of gaming, and studying game-playing as a cultural practice. If nothing else, it highlights the importance of putting aside preconceptions and examining gamers on their own terms”, (Squire, 2002) • His critique of research into learning from games is stronger still: “we know very little about what [people] are learning playing these games (if anything)” (Ibid. p4).

29. A new methodology for researching learning from games? • Squire’s review of computer game research suggests several theoretical frameworks that could provide a social, cultural insight into learning and game playing. • One of these is Activity Theory. • Activity Theory emerged from Vygotsky’s psychological research into learning (and specifically from his discussion of the mediating role of artefacts in cognition). • Initial formulation of Activity Theory = intentional human action is invariably mediated by a tool, although it is noted that the tool may be conceptual or symbolic (such as an idea or language) rather than necessarily being embodied (such as a hammer or computer). • Within this system, the person acting = the Subject, their intention (or objective) = the Object and the mediating artefact = a Tool.

30. Activity Theory • This initial analytical framework had to be subsequently expanded to take the cultural and historical context of activities into account explicitly (Engeström, 2001; Squire, 2002). • This extended the representation to cover the community within which the activity takes place, the rules that hold within that community and the way in which work is organised in order to achieve an objective (its division of labour). • TASK: example/s please from a game of your choice. • So, in the following figure of an Activity System: the proposition that human activity is always mediated by tool use is represented by the dashed arrow; this relationship is implied by the two other relationships (between Subject and Tool and between Tool and Object), rather than being a direct relationship.

31. Within this perspective, ‘contradictions’ (breakdowns, disagreements, etc., in the activity system) are recognised as an important motivation for learning (Engeström, 2001). • This implies that learning is an active, creative process motivated by problems, rather than something that follows from the smooth operation of successful activity systems.

32. The challenges • gap between educational and game software: educational software is less interesting than game software. • Major challenge for educational software designers = provision of meaningful interaction to the learners that allows them to immerse in the learning process. • Interactivity in educational software should not be limited to allowing the learner to navigate the content. • Lander (2003) claims that many commercial interactive multimedia resources are no more than presentations of information to a passive recipient who has only to point and click. • “What is needed is technology that encourages students to actively engage in carrying out activities, answering questions and solving problems” (Ibid). I.e. Task-based learning

33. Reformation & revolution in learning? • Development of educational software is undergoing a reformation; various theories of learning are proposed and adopted by the researchers and developers in this field. • Constructivism one of the most oft-cited theories. It states that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past knowledge (Mayer 1999). • By participating actively in knowledge construction, learners are motivated intrinsically; [certainly intrinsic motivation is one of the most pivotal components constructivists are seeking in order to make things fun to learn]. • Also asserted that students need to develop an understanding of a new domain through challenging and enjoyable problem-solving activities (Jones 2001). • Digital games seem to represent the instructional artefact most closely matching these characteristics. The ability of computer games in sparking interests among the players can hardly be denied, and some educators have started to see the capability of these highly engaging games. • TASK: how to make educational software as interesting as games? • Your ideas, please…

34. e-learning with digital games [Rpt. From last week] • Based on the Ludology / Narratology arguments, e-learning could be studied as digital games. • Examined closely, it is found out that e-learning has paidea rules: click the menu buttons and scroll the text with the mouse button, etc. • Ludus rules are usually stated as the learning objective: to understand the concept of metamorphosis. Like a book, e-learning software could be paidea or ludus depending on the existence of an explicit goal. • But why is it not as engaging as commercial games? According to ludology and narratology, at least three reasons are identified: • The lack of the sense of narrative • The lack of semantic paidea rules • The lack of explicit ludus rules

35. spatiality • Re: spatiality of the software - many traditional e-learning systems present learning content linearly, offer textual explanations, and give a particular spatial organisation that does not reflect physical experiences e.g. Raptivity. • The learners should not regurgitate the context-free facts; rather they expect to utilise knowledge in a contextually rich situation. • Instead of drawing on the metaphor of book or desktop, e-learning should be created as a world that is inhabited with anthropomorphic objects, in which the learners lose track of their physical surroundings and immerse into the learning environment through make-believe and pretence.

36. characters • Anthropomorphic objects or characters are indispensable in a digital narrative environment, as narratives need human entities for the reader to retain interest (Grodal 1997). • But, how can we integrate this component into the e-learning/CALL design? • Some designers have attempted to incorporate personification by including verbal instructions and animated agents. Characters are supposed to be user-friendly, motivating, and able to suggest task-relevant ideas (Hoorn 2003). • Although it is fairly easy to construct this character-like figure, but the tasks at hand are to contextualise and maintain interest. Animations provide models for believable characters, but not for character interaction. • We need characters that live in the narrative world, and motivate the learners to proceed toward the learning goal

37. More on motivation • An event needs to occur in a chain of causal relations and must follow logically from the event preceding it. • Cognitivists believe that a connection of information in a form of network is easier to remember. • Connections between units of information improve the memory of this information. Thus, narratives aid recall through the network of causal links. • Narratives also generate motivation of the learners by engendering their curiosity and making them want to continue reading.

38. user control • Most significant difference between interactive media and traditional ones is user control. • The player must experience feelings of control over actions and environment for the activity to encourage playful, exploratory behaviour. • The interactivity of a digital game provides feedback to the individual in a way that is not possible with more static technologies. • Unambiguous feedback is important for the learner to feel in control of their actions where they feel that they are in charge of mastering their learning.

39. Another example • http://reconstructors.rice.edu/index.html • The journey of "The Reconstructors," a multimedia computer game designed to both teach and entertain middle school students. With dramatic music pulsing in the background, students conduct virtual experiments with mice, don their "virtual information viewer" to travel around the world and help their companions Alpha and Beta, and a robot, Delta, explore a medical mystery of the future–what did people in the year 2000 and earlier use as painkillers? • "We are trying to teach students about science within a context of history, scientific methods and public policy," says Leslie Miller of the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning (CTTL), the group that created the Web-based program.

40. So, for this Friday’s discussion and blog entries: • TASKS from today • – summary of discussion. • What exactly do I learn from gaming? • Acquired skills? • Knowledge? • Which level of Bloom? • How do I learn from gaming?