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Fall 2003
Class: CEP 911 Intellectual History of Educational Psychology
Instructor: David Wong, PhD
College of Education, Michigan State University, Lansing, Michigan, USA
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Hellen Keller inspires us and shames us with these famous words. She reminds us that living should be a bold act, and scolds us for our hesitation. As her teacher, Anne Sullivan connected with Keller through bold and uncompromising expectations. Such daring distinguishes effective teaching and learning. Students must overcome many barriers to engagement, including fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, and aversion to losing control. Teachers need tools and methods to foster and compel such daring in their students. Teaching using computer games is one approach to making learning a transformative adventure.
Computer games offer many advantages for engagement and learning. Educators need a theoretical framework for understanding, appreciating, designing, and using games. This article lays out a foundation for such a framework. I begin by connecting a pedagogy of co-opting with the primary advantage of games: interactivity. I include a possible curriculum and genre, as an ongoing example. A theoretical framework must offer a compelling answer to the question, "Why games?" I offer a piecemeal answer, by recruiting a series of useful ideas from educational psychology. I conclude by combining the pieces, and revisiting the value of bold living.
Computer games are typically perceived as only a recreational or "toy" technology. Such technologies are usually banned in schools, because educators' first impressions are unfavorable. In some cases they're justified: not every technology belongs in school and not all learning can be fun. However, many toy technologies are opportunities for serious learning. Educators should consider co-opting the technologies students already play with. (Buchanan, 2003)
Here, co-opt means "steal, nicely, for the common good." Educators should look at the technologies that already intrigue and excite students, and use that engagement for better teaching. Such engagement is necessary for mastery of any skill or idea. Proficiency can be coerced with extrinsic methods, like grades or praise. But mastery comes from within: it's a sense of accomplishment and pride of ownership. Children master games because they enjoy success that depends on their motivation and achievement. Playing and beating a game is its own reward. As educators, we want students to strive for that same feeling of ownership in their learning.
Mastery depends on proficiency and engagement.
Game engage players through interactivity. Players take ownership of their choices, because those choices influence the outcome. A good game offers a semi-unique experience to each player, based on their choices. Success in a game can usually be clearly traced to effort and ability. This causality can be more immediate and clearer than conventional feedback in schools, like receiving a letter grade on an assignment days later. Furthermore, experienced players demonstrate a variety of self-initiated remediations when they fail, like experimenting with a different strategy, learning from others, and practicing in easier contexts. Players voluntarily and persistently interact with games, so educators should co-opt them.
Interactivity is also useful for assessment. When students take a test or play a game, they may be demonstrating observation, contemplation, and decision-making through pencil marks or mouse clicks. Or they may be wildly guessing. The results of a short multiple choice test are a very ambiguous indicator of learning. There is less ambiguity with a more open-ended assessment, like an essay question. In other words, the results are a more complete and compelling indicator of a student's learning. In general, as students' freedom increases, it's more plausible to attribute their success to intention instead of chance. All this assumes a curriculum of mastery and application, not just facts.
Good games are often distinguished by great freedom. The freedom of a sophisticated game can be figuratively described as a series of multiple choice questions with many right answers and many distracters. Multiplayer games tend to be the most sophisticated, because they foster the range and diversity of human interaction (e.g., friendship, love, betrayal).
Attributing success to intention, rather than chance, is more plausible with greater freedom.
Computer games span a range and diversity of "genres," from reflex-based "shooters" to dialog-driven role-playing games. Education also encompasses many dissimilar purposes and methods. To appreciate the potential value of games, consider teaching teamwork using an adventure/survival game.
Teamwork is a powerful and elusive phenomenon. It's valued across human activities (e.g., business, research, families). Teamwork is part of a poorly understood domain of knowledge and skills that includes empathy and tact. Howard Gardner has described this domain as interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. Daniel Goleman has described it as emotional intelligence.
In early elementary grades, some teachers employ an explicit curriculum for learning skills and ideas related to teamwork (e.g., impulse control, getting along with others). But this curriculum is tacit in later grades and beyond. As children mature, they may struggle to master these "people skills." Nevertheless, relating and cooperating is useful or essential across human activities, so mastering this domain becomes a "gatekeeper" for opportunities. Higher grades, better jobs, and healthier relationships are more accessible to people with stronger people skills. Computer games could be used to explicitly teach this curriculum to upper elementary, middle school, and high school students. Adventure/survival games would be particularly suitable.
Adventure/survival is a sub-genre of adventure, fantasy, or science fiction. A typical story centers on a small group of accidental protagonists, trapped by terrible circumstances. Some possible circumstances include a natural disaster (e.g., earthquake), accident (e.g., plane crash), or mad science (e.g., an experiment gone wrong). Isolated or chaotic settings are the norm, like a remote temple or a devastated city. The protagonists are seldom professional adventurers or soldiers, so they must rise to meet extraordinary challenges. They typically have a special destination in mind, like escape, treasure, or loved ones. They may fight enemies, but combat isn't the focus of the story. Films with elements of adventure/survival include The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Adventure/survival is an ideal setting for studying and learning teamwork. In an adventure/survival films, the plot often turns on moments of extraordinary cooperation, or lack of cooperation. An adventure/survival story can be equally driven by threats to the group (e.g., collapsing bridges, monsters) and conflicts within the group. The protagonists must demonstrate ingenuity and willpower. If characters do nothing, they will be trapped or captured. Players must be daring for their characters to survive and succeed.
There are some potential obstacles to using adventure/survival in education. Games that glorify violence and death are controversial, and some commercial adventure/survival games are very graphic. However, a game with an emphasis on survival over conflict need not be gratuitously violent. Challenges can be puzzles and traps rather than battles, and/or enemies can be non-human (e.g., mutant insects). A story can eschew bloodshed for themes like corporate or governmental responsibility, human endurance, and countering corruption or evil.
For this article, let's pretend we're creating an adventure/survival game, called The Tower. Four players will assume the roles of teenagers in a fantasy world. They have been enslaved by an evil wizard. One of the wizard's experiments has gone wrong, so the tower is infested with destructive giant slugs. While the wizard is distracted, the teenagers will try to escape. They must beware of the slugs, as well as the many puzzles and traps the tower is laced with.
Games and gaming are sophisticated phenomena. A theoretical framework for teaching using games should be built on a plurality of perspectives. Such plurality will offer better explanations and predictions, while improving defensibility. For these purposes, educational psychology offers many useful ideas.
Behaviorism offers some useful models for understanding and using games. A model of reinforcement and conditioning predicts that players will repeat behaviors that are rewarded and abandon behaviors that are ignored or punished. A game is enjoyable if players face obstacles that are challenging but surmountable. So rewards and punishments should be proportional to the behaviors that trigger them, and such feedback should perpetually shape toward desired behavior. New skills and knowledge should be taught incrementally. Players will adjust their behavior based on feedback, especially if the feedback is systematic and not random or capricious. Most games teach a player progressively complex behaviors and associations, through progressively difficult challenges followed by regular positive reinforcement (e.g. progressively difficult enemies, each of whom yields new and better spoils).
As artifacts, games inherit some design and research methodologies of programming, multimedia, and interface design. Many of these fields have strong behaviorist roots. (P. Mishra and M. Koehler, personal communication, September 12, 2003) For example, interface design researchers depend heavily on observing user behavior. In general, fun gameplay can be fostered with behaviorist principles. People continue to play games when they're rewarded with novel, satisfying experiences. These experiences are often very physiological (e.g. the satisfaction of mastering a complex sensorimotor behavior, attended by an audiovisual success animation).
In The Tower, the early levels should teach the basic skills of the game stepwise. Players should become familiar with the interface and environment before facing the game's challenges. They should be rewarded for mastering the basic controls and actions. The general types of puzzles should be introduced one at a time, and the slugs should initially be slow and stupid. Since the curriculum is teamwork, some minimum level of teamwork should be necessary early on. Some puzzles should only be passable by working together, like standing on separate pressure plates. Each new level should pose harder and more complex challenges, steadily building on the behaviors already conditioned.
Some of the controversy around games is based on a seemingly-behaviorist perspective. For example, some people believe a schedule of regular reinforcement for anti-social in-game behavior (e.g. fighting fictional enemies) conditions a player to demonstrate anti-social post-game behavior (e.g. real violence). Actually, the few empirical studies of such possible conditioning are conflicting, and proving definite causality may be impossible. (Smith, 2002) There are many confounds. For example, people predisposed to violence may also play violent games. A true behaviorist perspective carefully considers stimulus-response-reward patterns. Viewing the stimuli of enemies in a video game may not be equivalent to viewing real human beings. The respective sensorimotor behaviors are certainly dissimilar: pressing a button versus wielding a gun.
This controversy highlights a possible dilemma in teaching using games. As Squire (2002) explains, some researchers assert that games can teach desirable behaviors, yet also deny that games condition anti-social behavior. A behaviorist perspective would seem to require that games must be effective for conditioning both kinds of behavior. However, this is like questioning how a thermos can keep water either hot or cold. (D. Wong, personal communication, September 23, 2003) An underlying principle may explain both possibilities (for the thermos, insulation). Games may teach desirable behaviors, yet any kind of teaching isn't always effective. Games that reward anti-social behavior may increase such behavior, or games may only be one of several possible factors. Like books or films, games can be powerful influences on human behavior. But they aren't necessarily powerful influences.
While advocates of teaching using games may detest fearful misconceptions about games, they need to consider their audience and pick their battles. For example, educational games may want to avoid player-initiated violence against human characters. The Tower should use giant slugs, and emphasize puzzles over combat.
Jean Piaget viewed children as "little scientists." He argued that students should be free to discover new ideas autonomously. "Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing and consequently from understanding it completely." (Piaget, in Miller, 1993, p. 90)
Piaget described learning as a process of discovery and equilibration between students and their environment. This equilibration alternates between assimilation and accommodation. Through assimilation, students incorporate new skills and knowledge into their existing set. Through accommodation., students confront and resolve a tension between their existing set of skills and knowledge, and a novel phenomenon in the environment. For example, if students' concept of "bug" is equivalent to "insect," counting the legs on a spider may compel accommodation.
Games can foster discovery learning. In a good game, players succeed through equilibration. During periods of assimilation, players "read and respond" to the game. For example, in an adventure/survival game, players must recognize and solve puzzles. During periods of accommodation, players must adjust to anomalies in the game. Continuing the example, a new type of puzzle may not yield to previous kinds of solutions, so players must experiment with alternative tactics. Over the course of a game, players will experience periods of accommodation. and challenge, interspersed with periods of assimilation and success. Such adaptation is a vehicle for learning. "If taken seriously by students, anomalies provide the sort of cognitive conflict. that prepares the student's conceptual ecology for an accommodation." (Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog, 1982)
A good game fosters periods of challenge and reward. Plateaus of mastery are palpable but fleeting.
Accommodation can be stressful, especially if it requires trial-and-error. Non-gamers may be surprised by the frustration and apparent unpleasantness of challenging games. Good games offer frequent periods of challenge, and any sense of mastery is seldom long-lived. Yet players claim to enjoy such games, and persist in trying to master them. Co-opting games can direct that persistence toward more meaningful learning.
The Tower should alternate between periods of assimilation and accommodation. Since the curriculum is teamwork, anomalies should cause players to revisit their appropriate skills and knowledge. For example, in later levels, players may be shackled together in pairs. Forward progress may depend on new strategies and simultaneous action.
Piaget asserted the importance of considering developmental stages in children. Like all instructional materials, educational games need to be developmentally appropriate. A specific game should be appealing and accessible to the target level of development. The game should challenge the learner to "move up" from his current Piagetian stage. Piaget's developmental stages are controversial (Miller, 1993, p. 87), so game designers should use them loosely, and depend on user testing for making final decisions.
If The Tower is designed for very young children, they will probably be moving from the "sensorimotor" to the "preoperational" stage. The game should have simple controls and challenge players to interpret symbols. In contrast, older children will probably be approaching the "formal operational" stage. The game should hide some cause-effect relationships and challenge players to develop abstract models for these relationships. For example, a set of switches may need to thrown in a specific order.
Like Piaget, Jerome Bruner argues for the importance of discovery. Bruner also argues for the importance of structure in learning, in the sense that each subject has structure (e.g. mathematics has set theory). He asserts that learning is the process of discovering and appreciating structures. "To learn structure... is to learn how things are related," and "unless detail is placed into a structured pattern it is rapidly forgotten." (Bruner, 1977, p. 7, 24) From this perspective, educators should guide learners in discovering and appreciating structures.
Games are potentially useful tools for such guidance, especially games that simulate structures. Good games guide players in learning their underlying relationships. The player is compelled to experiment and to develop mental models, and rewarded when his models have predictive utility. As an experienced player, I have become skilled in this process of experimenting and predicting. My wife calls it "gamer sense," while James Gee calls it "the Intuitive Knowledge Principle." (Gee, 2003) Bruner believes "intuitive thinking... is a much-neglected and essential feature of productive thinking." (Bruner, 1977, p. 13) People with intuitive thinking have an intellectual, appreciative familiarity with the structures of a domain, as demonstrated by their efficient selection of effective strategies. For example, experienced players with "gamer sense" can quickly find solutions to puzzles that resemble puzzles they've previously encountered. The zenith of intuitive thinking is selecting the correct strategy the first time, thus appearing certain while actually experimenting.
Bruner believes that "any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form." (Bruner, 1977, p. 12) In the case of teamwork, young children can be taught to consider other people's feelings. Older children can be taught committee processes. Bruner would probably suggest a "spiral curriculum" for teamwork. It would start with basic skills and knowledge, and continuously revisit and build upon earlier learning. Within a computer game, a spiral curriculum is a necessary element of good design. Players are introduced to the simplest gameplay and ideas first, and proceed through increasingly-complicated challenges. These challenges are often explicit levels, so players have a strong sense of circular, upward progression. They use earlier skills and knowledge in new and complicated ways.
Bruner emphasizes recruiting subject-area experts to help create curriculum. A simulation needs high external fidelity (i.e. it should accurately reflect real-world relationships). Only then can students be reasonably expected to transfer and generalize their learning from a simulation-based game to broader application. So subject-area experts should be part of the teams that design games for learning. Furthermore, gameplay should be naturalistic or "endogenous," requiring the player to "learn the properties of a virtual world through interacting with its symbology, learning to detect relationships among those symbols, and inferring the game rules that govern the system." (Squire, 2002) In other words, the interactivity of the game must require the player to master the curriculum of the game.
The Tower should regularly build on general skills and ideas about teamwork. For example, players could be encouraged to take on specific roles or work in partnerships. Later levels might force players to exchange their accustomed roles or partners. The Tower should be designed in collaboration with experts on teamwork, as well as experienced educators. Teamwork is the curriculum, so successful teamwork should be necessary for progress, not merely solving puzzles.
Rand Spiro offers a useful model for discovery learning, at least in "ill-structured" domains. Such domains are distinguished by "breadth, complexity, and irregularity." (Spiro et al., 1987) Ill-structured domains don't yield to general principles or prescriptions. Instead, mastery can only be gained through interaction with a variety of cases in their natural contexts. Ideally, these cases allow learners to "criss-cross" the "landscape" of the domain and thus explore its underlying structures and relationships. (Ibid.)
Relating to other people and working with them is an "ill-structured" domain. Every individual is unique, and successful interpersonal interaction is necessarily improvisational. Relevant skills and knowledge can only be gained through specific cases. Students learn best through first-hand experience, rather than lectures or reading. For example, the only way to fundamentally improve as a leader is to practice leading.
Spiro's model comports with an information-processing (I-P) perspective. In turn, this perspective comports with good game design. For example, both I-P researchers and game designers are interested in how people absorb and process information. For effective learning or good games, information must be clear and sufficient without being overwhelming. Without good interface design, sophisticated games are effectively inaccessible.
Both I-P researchers and game designers want to successfully model human learning and behavior. Researchers hope that "artificial intelligence" scripts will reveal more about the nature of learning and thinking, while game designers want to challenge players with adaptive "bots" to compete with and against. The Turing Test is a grail in each field: an artificial system with enough "intelligence" as to be externally indistinguishable from a human.
From the I-P perspective, people use "control processes" to interpret perceptions, evaluate a situation and available options, and execute appropriate routinized algorithms of behavior. (e.g., Miller, 1993, p. 244) This is a metaphor of metacognition: consciously monitoring and influencing one's own thoughts and actions. This metaphor of "executive" decision-making is especially powerful when coupled with a metaphor of a problem space: an abstract, mental space for representing and manipulating problems. (e.g., Putnam, Lampert, and Peterson, 1990, p. 79) A problem space can be said to be "equipped" with skills and knowledge, like tools on a work bench. For ill-structured domains like teamwork, "executive control strategies require flexible knowledge structures." (Spiro et al., 1987) In other words, for problems like teamwork, solutions depend on applying a variety of tools and possible approaches.
Experienced gamers may develop powerful problem spaces for solving challenges in games. For example, in a puzzle-based game like The Tower, players may visualize a puzzle, probe the visualization with a variety of possible approaches, select the optimal approach, and apply that approach in the game. In other words, players must visualize success in their minds to achieve it in games. Experienced players can also be described as "fluent in the genre" of the game. Such players are able to "read" and strategically respond to the game. (C. Aldrich, Personal communication, November 18, 2003) A team's success in the game may depend on their ability to communicate strategies, i.e., to express in words what they've achieved in their problem spaces.
Games challenge and thus strengthen control processes and the use of problem space, just as physical exercise challenges and strengthens muscles. Non-gamers are often amazed by gamers' abilities to multi-task and sort information. Ideally, the mental "strength training" of games should transfer to other settings. For example, consider a player who practices leadership by leading a group of other players in The Tower. The game may help the player learn to perceive and process signs of satisfaction or dissatisfaction among followers. If the game fosters more effective processing of such information in general, the player should become a better leader in other settings.
Lev Vygotsky believed that higher psychological functions develop through social interaction. (1978) He described discourse between people as an "interpsychological" phenomenon. He asserted that children learn how to think and behave based on discourse with adults and other children. In this way, discourse causes an "intrapsychological" phenomenon. For example, when children play "house" or "school" they model their behavior on past interactions with parents or teachers. Their beliefs about how to be a parent, teacher, child, or student are based on those interactions In this model, discourse can be spoken, written, or nonverbal. Vygotsky also believed tools, including toys, affect thinking and learning. Thus, educational tools are a form of discourse between society and children. For example, chalkboards and worksheets inculcate certain ways of thinking and behaving.
Vygotsky also believed that children learn and appreciate social norms, especially adult roles, by playing. When children play, they're in a state of "identity fluidity." (Vygotsky didn't use the term "identity fluidity" but I believe he would approve of it.) This fluidity is children's capacity to pretend, to temporarily play new roles. Their identities aren't limited by everyday constraints, like age or education. Children can pretend to be adventurers, and thus becomes adventurers, in a limited way. They can temporarily adopt the speech, mannerisms, and other behaviors of adventurers (or, rather, their concept of adventurers). In a similar fashion, when actors talk about "getting into character," they are deliberately making their identity fluid.
Many survival/adventure games are also role-playing games. In role-playing games, much of the fun comes from exploring alternative identities. Stories are the vehicles for this exploration. People like stories, especially stories about themselves. Role-playing games offer players intimate roles in stories. They invite players to take ownership of alternative identities, to care about the well-being and success of in-game characters. In The Tower, players are invited to "immerse" themselves in the roles of imprisoned teenagers, thwarting an evil wizard and out-maneuvering vicious slugs. Many games use a "first-person" camera, in which a player sees through the game world through the eyes of the protagonist. Perhaps The Tower should use a first-person camera to foster greater player identification with the characters.
Tools can increase identity fluidity, especially toys modeled on the real tools of the role. For example, a baby doll facilitates playing the role of a mother. An adventure/survival game facilitates playing the role of an adventurer. Vygotsky saw language as a special kind of tool, and language increases a child's identity fluidity. For example, a child who mimics "how adventurers talk" can play the role more expressively, and hence more intimately. (e.g., Countless children grew up mimicking "Hi ho Silver! Away!") Collaborative play, as in a multiplayer role-playing game, may also increase the intimacy of the new identity, since the child becomes socially identified with the role (for a limited time, at least). Vygotsky described two sisters who decided to "play sisters," and how they used play to explore and experiment with those roles. (1978, p. 95)
Vygotsky saw play, especially role-playing, as a mechanism of development. While identity fluidity generally means a child sheds the role when he's done playing, if the child plays the role intimately and regularly, his enduring identity will be changed. For example, a student who regularly plays a leadership role in The Tower may be developing the real rules and skills of authority (e.g., a commanding tone). Also, identity fluidity is a valuable skill outside of typical play and games. For example, Peter Elbow has suggested a methodological "believing game" in which scholars can better understand new ideas by playing the role of a believer. (1986)
Computer games are a complex phenomenon, as is learning. Effectively teaching using games will depend on a robust theoretical framework. The pedagogy of co-opting and these ideas from educational psychology are a useful beginning. One test of this developing framework is the question, "Why games?"
The answer is interactivity, because it fosters discovery. The spirit of discovery is daring. Unlike reading a book or listening to a lecture, the freedom of a sophisticated game compels players to discover things for themselves. A simulation-based game fosters discovery of the underlying structures and principles. An exploration-based game fosters discovery of a virtual world. A multiplayer game fosters discovery of people skills, like empathy. A role-playing game fosters discovery of identity, through vicarious experience in fictional characters. Games compel players to explore and experiment, offering a "spiral" of challenges and rewarding successful accommodation. and metacognition. Games can foster learning in ill-structured domains, by allowing players to investigate cases first-hand. Educators can use this interactivity to foster discovery of meaningful curricula. For example, The Tower is designed to teach teamwork in the context of collective problem-solving.
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." Keller encourages us to live boldly and play hard. Seymour Papert has argued for more "hard fun," in which children learn joyfully through challenging games and other activities. (Prensky, 2001) Computer games can be fun and challenging. Educators should find ways to leverage their compelling interactivity for meaningful learning.
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Created by Kym Buchanan | http://KymBuchanan.org | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
