Interactive Gaming for Pre-Literacy Development

I'm starting to focus on studies about the involvement of interactive games for preschool/primary students in the building of pre-literacy and pre-math skills, given some mounting evidence that this is an underutilized area in education.

The latest: THE Journal reports on a study from the Educational Development Center that suggests preschool students learn pre-literacy skills better in an environment with repeated exposure to interactive games. The specific skills were letter recognition, letter naming, letter sounds, and understanding story concepts.

Take this study with a grain of salt. I'm not convinced of the methodology, as the comparison group was a science curriculum, not a literacy curriculum, and it was commissioned by PBS, which while I admire their overall work in helping students learn, they still have a vested interest in seeing a positive correlation.

Best news though is that it is leading to further studies. Given available technology that is more accessible to young students than ever before, this will lead to more purposeful game development for that age, with a better tie-in to the Iowa Core.

What I'd like to see for an iTouch

While I looked at what's out there yesterday, I still see quite a bit of potential to be reached, and reached within the next two years. There's even potential for these needs to be developed locally. Grant Wood's Andy Crozier and I recently attended a session on Apple iTouch App development, and given the (nearly) free developer kits out there, there is potential for the AEAs, and enterprising schools, in partnership with developers from the state's universities, could produce items such as these, in perfect alignment with the Iowa Core.

1. An easy-to-use flashcard program, where a teacher can quickly go in on the internet and upload curriculum related information that the student's iTouch would then draw upon, giving students an interactive way to check their understanding of teacher notes immediately after a lesson... and anytime thereafter.

2. Tools that mash geochaching information, such as photos or data, that tie in with a geographic location. Google Earth's iTouch app works well, and with the availability of free Google Sketchup licenses for Iowa, students can build 3-D items in addition to adding photos and data. Research is coming out that, given students increasing acclivity toward visual references for a schema to house non-visual information, geocached mapping serves as a referential package for student learning (such as Google Lit Trips).

3. Simulation-games, where a student has an interactive lesson to experiment, explore, and practice the skills they have acquired, such as what UW-Madison is doing. Here's a screenshot of a simulation-game created for students to interact with the Milwaukee Museum of Modern Art.

4. Clicker-style formative feedback, where a teacher poses a question to class, students select one of the answers, and the teacher can pull up live feedback from the "polling" via computer and display over a projector. The data could be displayed anonymously, or tracked by students when they log in.

5. In the same vein as above, a way to quickly generate online quizzes, especially ones that can be dynamically generated.

6. Personalized data programs, such as health and fitness monitors, musical composition devices, visual arts portfolios, allowing students to track their own learning. This one will be a ways off, as there needs to be better ways to import data and images into the ipod.

7. Apps that give practice for skill acquisition. This is the place where the first educational apps are, including ones for math facts, spelling, vocabulary, scientific equation balancing, etc. These are much more interactive than a simple multiple-choice quiz problem. Problem right now is they aren't customizable--I can't create a vocabulary activity over the first grade sight words in my curriculum. But this could change with advances in the software.

Madison - Pre-conference workshop

The first day pre-conference featured two workshops, one of which I left early as we hadn't moved past introductions after an hour. It's never a good sign when you are almost half-way through your presentation and you are still saying "In this presentation, we're going to...".

The other workshop, however, was very interesting for me. Entitled "GameQuest: Designing and managing educational game projects", it was held by Les Howles, David Gagnon and Cid Freitag from UW-Madison. The three serve as eLearning and Infotech consultants for the university, and described their work as working with professors to take content from their courses and to create games and simulations to enhance learning.

While it is at the university level, it is interesting to see the process in motion. They showed a game on material engineering, where the user needed to construct a structure that cryogenically secured liquid hydrogen. Choosing different compounds to build the structure's containers, struts, etc., the user got to experiment and see the result. They also showed a simple simulation of dropping a ball down a pyramid of pegs to understand the concept of probability (and what happened to that probability if you tinkered with certain variables).

First thought I had was how this can expand our thinking of educational gaming. They mentioned the following distinctions:

• Simulations = artificial scenario set up to test or demonstrate natural or artificial phenomenon.
• Game = activity that is rule-based and has an easily-identifiable goal to motivate the user.
• Simulation-game, or "serious game" = one that combines the features of both, becoming a bigger project with more potential uses.

Second, they gave an excellent overview (by no coincidence through a simulation-game that the audience took part in) of the project management of simulation-gam development. This overview mimicked what their process is, everything from RFP's from college professors for possible products (and the accompanying selection criteria they use to select one), to how to assemble a team and handle the most pressing issues, which were more group dynamics than troubles with technological bugs or pedagogical uses. They showed the delicate balance in weighing those group dynamics with building quality, and yet, meeting deadlines.

THE TAKEAWAY FOR IOWA?
They mentioned a 6- month timeline with a group consisting of 1 instructional designer, 1 graphic designer, 1 programmer, a teacher assistant, and the content expert (the professor who provided the RFP). And they came away with a dynamic educational game that met the professor's objectives.

We should do this in Iowa. Putting together a project team of people working part-time on the project, we could output 2 quality simulation-games per year that would fully align with the Iowa Core and could be used for free by all of Iowa's teachers.

Think about it. A simulation-game where students are colonial explorers setting up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and trying to survive. A simulation-game where students create a species and experiment with different structural features to evolve and thrive. A simulation-game where students analyze real MRI data from other individuals and make diagnoses, and then compare their conclusions with conclusions drawn by doctors from the same data. A simulation-game that shows the effects of greenhouse gas, as well as the adjusting of carbon emissions by different policial or business-related proposals.

The constraint to this, I believe, is ultimately not money. If we are ahead of the curve, a well-built gaming project could save districts from purchasing other software, and these projects become costly only if you lose the focus on the educational objective and get too engrossed in the immersive nature of the game. As the person sitting next to me (himself an educational gaming designer) mentioned, once the game reaches the point of complexity where it is more of a movie than a game, the learner becomes passive. Cheaper 2-dimensional graphics and cutting out audio synchronization and graphical effects puts more focus on the user's interaction in the game itself.

On the contrary, I feel the constraint is vision. It is understanding, and then communicating to others, the importance of this type of learning, which is considered "playing" by many disapproving teachers. If a vision is established by Iowa's leaders, this can be done, it can be done immediately, and it can be done well.

BTW - hashtag for the conference on Twitter is #DistEd09.

Around the Blogosphere - 7/28

A couple of quick jabs from the internet for your perusal:

Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperless responded to the same question about whether educational games suck that I took on recently.

What I came away with was a feeling that we're approaching this whole matter of gaming and education from the wrong direction. As a longtime educator and gamer, I'm thinking we should go at this from a different angle.

Instead of trying to make better 'educational' games, why not take an educational approach to the classics of gaming as it exists today?

Think about it: we don't ask authors to write 'educational' books so that we have something to teach in school. Rather, we choose books to read and use in teaching. Likewise, we should choose games to 'read' and use in teaching.

In the same way that you can learn about American history from reading Huckleberry Finn, you can learn about economics and cooperative activity by 'reading' World of Warcraft. In fact, gaming -- especially that of the MMOG variety -- has come so far, we really shouldn't have much of a problem teaching all sorts of logic, learning, and abstract thinking via playing and analyzing games that were never originally meant to be 'educational'.

In all honesty, I really like this perspective of basically adding metacognition and reflection to the playing of industry games, and his analogy to novels is very poignant. Still, it doesn't address what Mark Prensky would advocate, that being to take all your learning objectives and deliver them through gaming instead of traditional instruction, because "gaming is where students learn best." It brings up an interesting way to frame the question; should games be used in school as textbooks are or novels are?

Also, (hat tip to Matt Townsley) Rick DuFour of PLC fame has weighed in on the issue of grading and homework in a well-written piece. He starts by pointing out the various definitions teachers have of what a grade represents, and even if teachers agree a grade represents the level of mastery of a student, often their grading practices don't follow their beliefs. Here are his suggestions:

Therefore, I submit the following propositions:

1. Homework should be given only when the instructor feels it is essential to student learning. If, for example, the teacher believes that by practicing a skill and receiving prompt and specific feedback students will learn at higher levels, homework is very appropriate and should be assigned.
2. The teacher then has an obligation to monitor the homework carefully and provide individual students with precise feedback based on their specific needs.
3. If the work is deemed essential to a student’s learning, that student should not have the option of taking a zero but instead should be required to complete the work. This necessitates a coordinated, schoolwide approach to responding when students do not complete their work because there are limits as to what an individual teacher can require. The schoolwide response should be timely, directive (non-invitational), systematic (not left to the discretion of individual teachers), and should never require the student to be removed from new direct instruction.

Which I couldn't agree more with. And for kicks, he adds this anecdote:

My friend and colleague Bob Eaker elected to stop having all fifth graders in the school he was leading complete the annual homework project of building a replica of a frontier fort because, as he put it, “We discovered some Dads just built better forts than others.”

Educational Gaming--A Hopeless Cause?

Scott McLeod posted an analysis of the graphics of education games vs. commercial games, which is very telling. There is no comparison in the quality of the graphics, as educational games have a limited budget and typically do not sell on the basis of their graphical quality. Scott asked the questions 1) Does the quality of the graphics make a difference? and 2) How bad are games on the basis of other factors (he cites "game complexity" as another factor he sees lacking)?

As much as I'd like to say that graphics do not make a difference, indeed I think they do. A tremendous difference. One commenter mentioned that graphics create an immersive experience, which is a good way of phrasing it. Not everyone needs an immersive experience that Madden or Grand Theft Auto provide, but I'd say a substantial amount do. Give a student a Sudoku puzzle and see if they are enthralled after 15 minutes. Those that are can handle educational games with a good challenge but limited graphics. But my money is on 3/4 the class not being interested.

What's even worse is that educational games for secondary students suffer worse on other levels. They tend to be very specific in their objective, looking at math facts for example, and as Russ Goerend put it, become a glorified worksheet. This is because they are packaged as "standards-meeting". And in doing so, they eliminate the opportunities for creativity, problem-solving, and ingenuity on behalf of the student.

Educational games are also slow to adopt the techniques that work in commercial games--the process of "unlocking" stages and items to spur motivation or the using tie-ins to characters from already-known story lines like Harry Potter or Star Wars. Worst of all, there is no market for inventive games. They are overly expensive to make just to reach a limited audience (the percentage of the top education games in total schools is much less than the percentage of commerical games in total households). Plus, unlike webquests or iLife projects, it is impossible for teachers to develop them themselves.

Of course, all of this applies to secondary grades, not elementary, where the simple games can be a positive, and simple graphics meet the expectations of students. The simplicity of games being yet another reason why the iPod Touch platform, where simple games are easier to come across, works well for elementary students.

But I'm not sure gaming is the perfect solution for students in the secondary level. Not because the concept of gaming isn't a motivation for students... it is. Its when you couple the amateurish nature of secondary level games with the inadequacy to cover content comprehensively, the reality of gaming falls flat. At least for now.

Perhaps our stimulus money should go to Nintendo for some educational R & D?

Related Posts About Gaming
• Game-Based Online Courses
• One Year of Webkinz
• Mark Prensky
• Recovering from Second Life

Game-based online courses

Just a couple thoughts from day 1 of the Iowa Association of Alternative Education conference

• Attendance at the conference is definitely down from previous years, no doubt due to budget crunches and moratoriums on travel. I would say offering a virtual conference through the state's new 500-seat virtual Adobe Connect Pro meeting room is something to be looked into.

• While the numbers aren't big (I only had 19 in my breakout session), there was quite a bit of passion about the possibility of online. We hope to build on that during today's 11:00 conversation about sharing resources.

• Scuttlebut seems to be that the legislative study bill for statewide online education for students at-risk isn't going anywhere. Representative Roger Wendt, chair of the education committee, made no mention of the bill during his update, and there appears the possibility that the lobbyists for the outside vendors stopped pushing once they saw ILO already exists.

• Most interesting to me was seeing a preview of Florida Virtual School's new game-based online course. They are partnering with a group called 360Ed, who features some past software engineers and designers from EA Sports.

The preview was of a course called "Conspiracy Code", which is a game built on the following premise: Some would-be felons are trying to re-write America's history and have managed to infiltrate the country's institutions in many different ways. As the chief detectives (and of course, you have special powers to maneuver past the bad guys, so there is some gaming in the game), it is your job to find the inaccuracies, research the truth, and then restore the truth in the game. The makers advertise that it is project-based work that takes the American History course and uses student curiosity to drive the curriculum.

My first impression of the game was that it looked a little young for high school students and that its story line might be a bit contrived. It is tough to tell from what is basically a movie trailer. But, that might be expected for the first foray into game-based education.

This leads me to two conclusions. There will be more, not less of this in the not-so-distant-future (and given that Iowa is still in the past when it comes to online education, this means we have further to go). And second, the chief conversation will be around how the theme for the game can be comprehensive enough to be the full curriculum for a course (not just a supplement or enrichment). I loved playing Carmen Sandiego when I was a kid, and playing it definitely didn't hurt my understanding of American geography, pop culture, and history. However, it definitely isn't comprehensive... it doesn't cover everything you need to know. I see this as a tough challenge. We'll see with more courses how tough this really is.