What I've learned about Educational Games

Last Spring, I took the class Advanced Game Design as part of my master's program at Teachers College, Columbia University to stretch my mind in the unfamiliar, yet rapidly emerging area of education. In this class, we played games, reviewed games, read about games, and last but not least created our own games (because what is the point of learning about games without creating a new game). Below is the collection of my weekly reading reactions that show how my thinking about educational games has evolved and changed over the course.

Week 1

I found these articles very interesting as they provide different perspectives to look at game design. While Hunicke et al. (2004) looked at games through the eyes of scholars, Papert (1998) offered viewpoints of researchers and practitioners and Clark (2012) brought to the discussion insights from game developers and players who actually interact with games. What I liked the most about Hunicke et al.'s article was how they defined and categorized the "fun" aspect of games which I never thought of before. In fact, we all know people enjoy playing games because games are fun, but we don't really understand what makes games fun and why some games seems to be more fun than the others. Regarding Clark (2012), after reading the entire article, I still don't quite get why the author named his article "The Most Dangerous Gamer." Did he think Blow was the most dangerous gamer? Why did he think so? Overall, Blow's story seemed to be a typical successful story in the technology world. You have a great idea, you take tremendous risks, and the last piece is working hard until you achieve success. I must say my experience with games is very limited and I never play any video games like Braid before. Therefore, Clark (2012) really blew my mind as I can't imagine that game plot could be so sophisticated like what the author described. I also agree with the way he framed game as an interactive movie with regard to visual experience and interaction. When it comes to Papert (1998), with instructional design background, I was more in favor of Artinian's viewpoints and arguments. Frankly, I am always skeptical about the advantages and benefits of games to learning process, but I will surely keep my mind open to what I am going to learn in this course and I can't wait to see how this course will change my mindset regarding how games could benefit learning.

Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI (pp. 04–04).

Clark, T. (2012, May). The Most Dangerous Gamer. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/308928/

Papert, S. (1998). Does easy do it? Children, Games, and Learning. Game Developer.

Week 2

In the first article, Steinkuehler and Squire (2014) asserted the effectiveness of videogames for learning was inconclusive and even debatable. As I am always skeptical about how and what players could actually learn by playing videogames, I am not surprised with this assertion. This article also reminded me the ongoing debate with regard to the effectiveness of online learning. I noticed that when we considered videogames as a medium or environment where learning takes place, videogames and online learning shared many common characteristics and factors which were often complicated to study and evaluate. In fact, over the last three to five years, there has been a growing trend of instructors moving to blended or hybrid models as they believe that blended model might engender better learning outcomes than either online or face-to-face alone. However, existing literature on this topic have indicated mixed, even contradictory results.

As I am more familiar with e-learning and especially online learning, I employ it as a framework to help construct my thinking about games and game-based learning which are something I am not quite familiar with. I like to think games as online learning and game-based learning as blended learning which is mix of face-to-face and online. As many research studies have pointed out as well as from my personal experience, I think blended learning seemed to be an ideal model as it can take advantage of the benefits of both modalities. With that mindset, I believe game-based learning similarly could benefit many crucial aspects of learning and actually enhance learning outcomes.

Regarding the second article, I really like the way the authors laid the foundations and looked at games from cognitive, motivational, affective, and sociocultural perspectives. These theories and frameworks (e.g. cognitive load theory, multimedia learning principles, motivation theory, etc.) have been used pervasively in literature and thus very familiar to me. It really helped me in getting deeper understanding of game based learning and convinced readers of the argument "the need to view games as complex genres that cannot be understood by taking only one perspective of learning."

Steinkuehler, C. & Squire, K. (2014). Videogames and Learning. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. (pp. 377-396). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Plass, J. L., Homer, B. D., & Kinzer, C. K. (2015). Foundations of Game-Based Learning. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 258–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2015.1122533

Week 3

First of all, I found this week's articles too hard for me to comprehend and I guess the reasons might be either that the ideas discussed in the articles were beyond my capability of understanding or there must be some missing pieces in my knowledge base that obstruct my comprehension process. In addition, both science education and game design are knowledge domains that I am not familiar with, so when these articles discussed the theoretical frameworks and rationale behind the design, no doubt I was totally lost. It might be too late to wonder if this class is good for someone who has very limited experience with games like me to learn how to design an educational games. I would really appreciate if anyone could recommend any fundamental resource that could help me build more solid foundation of knowledge in game design in general and educational game in particular.

Second, I guess my main source of confusion is that I often consider game as some kinds of tool or technology that are integrated to education to supplement and/or foster learning in classroom. However, after reading articles over the last three weeks, now I think game is more like an environment where learning is integrated and facilitated; scholars and researchers are trying to look for evidence that learning actually takes place in games. With that being said, I guess my big question is between classroom and game, which is the primary learning environment? In addition, what role do games play in learning process or to what extent that games facilitate learning? The idea of differentiation came to my mind when Clark et al. (2015) distinguished conceptually integrated games and conceptually embedded games. Again, I just want to reiterate my confusion, games and learning, which is integrated to which?

Holbert, N., & Wilensky, U. (2014). Constructible Authentic Representations: Designing Video Games that Enable Players to Utilize Knowledge Developed In-Game to Reason About Science. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 19(1-2), 53–79.

Clark, D. B., Sengupta, P., Brady, C. E., Martinez-Garza, M. M., & Killingsworth, S. S. (2015). Disciplinary integration of digital games for science learning. International Journal of STEM Education, 2(1), 2.

Week 4

I really enjoy this week's readings, especially the Berland and Lee (2011)'s article. In the first article, as the idea of analyzing discussion forum using content analysis was used pervasively in the literature of computer-mediated learning, I found it very familiar and also interesting to see how the methodology was applied in different subject and environment. This article also reminded me the concept of "community of practice," where a group of people who are in the same profession or share a mutual interest gather together to exchange information and experience. I am wondering if massively multiplayer online game can also be considered as a community of practice?

The Berland and Lee (2011)'s article was very useful and my most favorite among three articles. I would say the presentation about Pandemic that we had in class last week was very helpful for me to understand the MDA of the game described in the article. Big thank to the team (sorry I forgot your names). With programming background, I found it was very fascinating to see how computational thinking could be developed without using any digital device as I always thought that we need some sort of hands on experience with computer in order to know how computer works and further how to do computer programming. For the final project, as I am thinking of designing a game that teaches programming and/or develops computational thinking, this article provided me very good background knowledge with regard to theoretical framework and an example of how the game play help achieve that learning goal.

Steinkuehler, C., & Duncan, S. (2008). Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17(6), 530–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-008-9120-8

Berland, M., & Lee, V. (2011). Collaborative strategic board games as a site for distributed computational thinking. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 1(2), 65–81.

Barendregt, W., & Bekker, T. M. (2011). The influence of the level of free-choice learning activities on the use of an educational computer game. Computers & Education, 56(1), 80–90.

Week 5

I really like how Itō (2010) categorized games into three genres of practice: killing time, hanging out, and recreational gaming. In my opinion, this categorization was very helpful to understand the context where a certain game or game genre is played and better inform the design process. While the author made his points very clear with regard to "killing time" genre, the boundary between "hanging out" and "recreational gaming" was quite blurred to me. For these two genres, I feel that the social aspect was a huge component that differentiated them from the "killing time," but it was unclear that how the role of social involvement plays differently between "hanging out" and "recreational gaming." Regarding augmented game play, I found it interesting when some players in the study didn't perceive using cheat codes as a form of cheating. Speaking of cheat codes, I don't quite get the reason why game developers create cheat code and how they disseminate it. What is the point of establish set of rules and constraints, but also creating a mechanism to break it? To make the game more fun? I would love to learn if someone has the answer. I am also fascinated by the idea of "machinima" as I often know that many game titles are transformed from the same movie, but never expect movies could be made out of games. In addition, this idea also changed my perspective that games are a platform not only for consuming, but also producing new media. For the sake of curiosity, I have checked out some machinima video clips on Youtube and was really amazed by the creativity and the production quality. Some people are really into it!

Itō, M. (2010). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Ch. 5

DiSalvo, B. J., Crowley, K., & Norwood, R. (2008). Learning in Context Digital Games and Young Black Men.Games and Culture, 3(2), 131–141.

Week 6

I really enjoy watching Damsel in Distress video since it not only widens my perspective about how women are presented in games but also provoke lots of thoughts about the intertwined interaction between game design and culture. I played many games mentioned in the video when I was younger, but I never realized that the way female character depicted in the games as a victim awaiting to be rescued or a reward for heroic actions of male character is problematic. Over the course of history, we have been seeing that the representation and the role of women have been substantially adjusted on various forms of media especially newspapers and movies. However, though video games have long been an integral part of our culture and history, unfortunately there is not much attention to bring those changes to game world. While I was watching this video, I tried to think so hard about why I and maybe many other male game players out there never think it is a bad idea to see women the way they are characterized in the games and how the game play has been affecting the way I think about women in real life. In many cultures and societies, born to be a man is really an inherent privilege that allows men to think about and treat women the way they want. The lack of female representation in game industry in particular and tech field in general may help explain why Damsel in Distress has existed and burgeoned over the long history of games.

As female players are my target audience of my final design project, I have gained some helpful insights from Alexander (2014)'s article. I totally agree with the author that there is nothing wrong about pink games and the games should be embraced rather than criticized by feminists for promoting sexism or reinforcing gender roles because it is so true that "there are plenty of girls who just like pink, or who want to wear tiaras, and that their agency and their experience deserves permission and respect." (Alexander, 2014).

Sarkeesian, A. (2013, March 7). Damsel in Distress (Part 1) Tropes vs Women. Retrieved from http://feministfrequency.com/2013/03/07/damsel-in-distress-part-1/

Alexander, L.(2014, June 5). Girly video games: rewriting a history of pink. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/girly-games-history-of-pink-rachel-weil

Lees, M. (2016, December 1). What Gamergate should have taught us about the “alt-right.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

Week 7

Our group has four people and we played two games Magic Maze and Set together. As we spent most of the time playing Maze, so I am gonna reflect on this game only. Our top priority when choosing a board game to play is quick and easy to learn game rules and Maze does very good job about that. It took us about 15 minutes to learn basic mechanics and rules. Before we started getting tired of and confused by all the rules, we decided to play to see how it goes and kept learning the rules along the way. It was possible because Maze is designed to have two phases of game play: 1) acquiring the weapon for each character and 2) finding the exit and escaping. This design made lots of senses to us as it allowed us to get to play without knowing all the rules of both phases from the beginning. In addition, it is worth mentioning that at the end we were still not able to pass the first phase :), so learning what happens in the second phase would be useless and time-wasting for us. I don't know if the Maze's game designers have any intent to create the evolving game rules (e.g. games become more and more convoluted with more rules introduced over time) that allow us to learn as we go. This way of design can be seen pervasively in video games, but I don't think I see much in board games, so I found it very interesting.

The mechanic of Maze is pretty much similar to that of Pandemic that was presented in class a few weeks ago. Each player has different capabilities (e.g. move left/right/up/down, go up/down stairs, etc.) and we have to collaborate to accomplish the mission of helping four characters escape the maze. In my opinion, what makes the game so "fun" is two constraints: limited time and no communication among players allowed. These really brings the game to another level and requires players to think collaboratively and strategically. After the first failed trial round, we immediately realized the importance of sharing and setting common strategies upfront before the game starts. What made us failed from time to time was running out of time without even notice as we were just too focused on moving the characters. I must say the time constraint is obviously a great pressure, but the push from peer players is even more stressful especially when you don't know what they want you to do. Anyway, it is a very fun game to play and we really enjoyed our time playing it though we couldn't win.

Squire, K., & Barab, S. (2004). Replaying history: Engaging urban underserved students in learning world history through computer simulation games. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Learning Sciences(pp. 505–512).

Week 8

I wish I could have read Weintrop et al. (2016)'s article earlier before working on the design studio as the article was really enlightening to me. Since the instructional goal of my final project which is to teach computational thinking and the basic idea of game play are pretty similar to those of RoboBuilder, I found RoboBuilder as an exemplar model that provides not only theoretical framework but also empirical design principles for creating a constructionist game that develops computational thinking for young learners. Thanks to this article, I have better understanding on what and how I am gonna do with my final project.

Reflecting on this ongoing design process, I have realized and experienced that transforming a desired learning goal into a meaningful game play is extremely hard as I had very hard time brainstorming and imagining the core mechanics of my final project while doing the design studio. Therefore, three core design principles - "the construction of personally meaningful computational artifacts, the opportunity for learners direct explorations, and the centrality of powerful ideas" (p. 5) proposed in Weintrop et al. (2016)'s article are very helpful as it established a solid foundation for my thinking. I could comprehend and relate almost immediately to the first and second principles since they seem more obvious, but I am still not quite sure about the idea of powerful ideas mentioned in the third principle. It would be helpful to me if there was one more example from a more recent game demonstrating that idea.

In addition, I highly value and appreciate the review of different design approaches that have been used to develop computational thinking in existing literature (e.g. programming the actions of game entities, training virtual players, and the idea of microworlds). I noticed that most of programming games that I have encountered so far employ the first strategy, so I am curious to learn how the games that implement the other approaches look like.

Kafai, Y. B. (1996). Learning design by making games: Children’s development of design strategies in the creation of a complex computational artifact. In Y. B. Kafai & M. Resnick (Eds.), Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Weintrop, D., Holbert, N., Horn, M., & Wilensky, U. (2016). Computational thinking in constructionist video games. International Journal of Game-Based Learning. 6(1), 1-17.

Week 9

The email chain is so interesting and fun to read. From the beginning, they have mentioned and explained why 2048 is a broken game and I totally agree with that. I can also feel their passion for creating something better in terms of mechanics to make the game more fun and keep people playing for a long time. With that being said, while reading I aimed to look for features that differentiate Threes from 2048 because as Asher & Greg said Three is literally not a copycat. The aesthetics is definitely more fantastic than that of 2048 and we can clearly see how intricate each design detail is. As I have done lots of graphic design, I really feel their pains and frustration as well as the desire of perfection and the satisfaction when came up with a visually appealing design. However, at some points I feel that they seem to be overthinking and lose their focus and direction. In this email chain, I didn't see they mention what informed their design. I wouldn't be surprised if their design was not informed by any research including academic and market research as they seem to be just two passionate game developing hobbyists. Most of their design decisions were simply made based on their own assumptions or their friends' feedback. That makes me wonder if their approach was right and if this was the reason why the game was not as successful as they expected. In addition, I am not sure what the roles of different people mentioned in the chain are. Are they just Asher and Greg's friends? Mentors/Advisors of some sort? I believe that it is crucial to have a group of people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives to review your idea and give you feedback since you would never know what you think is great might be something nobody wants. This suddenly reminds me the idea of filter bubbles that we all should be highly aware of.

Threes Emails http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

Read the intro bits the sections below, and the “final statement” 12/7/12 “Holes” and Argyle Style 12/10/12 New Version with a Hungry Monster 12/14/12 Walls and New Schedule 2/17/13 Asher is Dissatisfied with Threes 3/8/13 One Last Effort Before the Hiatus 6/20/13 Asher Finds Threes 6/27/13 A Little Encouragement 9/13/13 The Rise of “Mergesters” 9/24/13 Moving back to Monsters 11/4/13 Important Email from Zach Gage 11/13/13 Zach Returns & The Faces of Threes 12/10/13 Upsetting Texts from Adam Saltsman 12/30/13 Trailers and Battery Conversation

Double Fine Adventure EP04: "Walking Around In Our Drawings"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a7SLcK2_h4

Week 10

The Boss Battle article was very interesting to read and had lots of things that we can learn for our own design. First of all, I really appreciate how the author broke down boss battles into 8 consequential beats and demonstrated each beat very clearly with vivid examples. After reading this article, I will surely never look at the boss battle they way I did before. There are three main ideas that I took away from this article: "boss as a test", "boss as a reward", and "boss as a story." I totally agreed with and was struck by the idea of "boss as a test." As the author mentioned that the idea could also be applied in other game genres, I am curious to see how the boss battle can be transformed into non-action games such as puzzles and especially how to apply this idea into more conventional educational games.

With regard to the second idea, I often thought that the boss was the obstacle or the challenge players have to overcome in order to get the reward of the game instead of a reward, so this idea is something unexpected to me. However, I would say that the author totally convinced me because at the end of the day, the feeling of victory and satisfaction are definitely more rewarding than getting high scores or saving the princess and this kind of emotional attach makes games fun and keeps people playing the game. Regarding the idea of "game as a story," I am not quite sure that I get it correctly from the example that author referred to in the article. I would really appreciate if anyone could share with me your thought about that.

The second article broaden my understanding and perspective of scaffolding. I heard about scaffolding a lot before as it seems to be a buzz word in education nowadays. However, I realized that my understanding of scaffolding was so limited since I had thought that scaffolding was some sorts of supportive instructions or tutorials that assist learners to catch up with their learning. After reading this article, scaffolding was more like a pedagogical methodology and it could be in various shapes and forms as word recognition strategies and word adaptation program scaffolding students through the process of adapting an oral vocabulary word into a sight vocabulary word mentioned in the article are good examples.

Stout, M. (2010, September 15). Boss Battle Design and Structure. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134503/boss_battle_design_and_structure.php

Pinkard, N. D. (1999). Lyric Reader: An Architecture for Creating Intrinsically Motivatingand Culturally Responsive Reading Environments. Interactive Learning Environments, 7(1), 001.

Week 11

I think these two articles really made the case for the question "Does it work" and I would say that after reading these, I was totally convinced that games really hold many educational values and learning didn't necessarily happen during the game play.

The second article was really a joy to read as it recalled lots of good memory of how I played games when I was a kid. For instance, I used to be the boy in vignette 4 who played with unconnected controller and still thought that I was controlling the character and playing the game. However, the reason was not to learn a new skill as the article described, but I was tricked by my older cousin, so he could play the game alone. I laughed at myself when thinking about how naive I was. I also totally relate to Rachel the Novice in the vignette 1 who seek very specific advice from her younger brother on how to overcome a challenge in the game. I think this case is very interesting as it really proved that learning actually happened while playing game, but not in game without us even notice. In addition, I also found the comparison between game play and homework was really surprising and it clearly made the case that game was able to generate a low-stake learning environment where kids were not scared of failures, willing to do trial and error, and provide assistance to others even when they were not really experts. Besides, I could see myself in Katarina, the girl in vignette 6 who added extra monuments and artifacts for the sake of decoration while I was playing The Sims. Indeed, I always built beautiful and luxurious house with fancy, but unnecessary stuff (such as a maze in the garden) for my characters and building nice million-dollar mansion was even more important for me than actually playing the game. And yes I used cheat codes to get million dollars to build the house.

Kafai, Y. B., & Burke, Q. (2015). Constructionist Gaming: Understanding the Benefits of Making Games for Learning. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 313–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2015.1124022

Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids’ lives. In The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (pp. 41–66). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Week 12

The article reemphasized that each student learns differently, so definitely there is no one-size-fits-all teaching methodology. While schools often can't provide personalized learning experience that fits each student's learning preferences and needs, there might be chance that students who are identified as having some sort of learning disability are just intellectually normal students like others but they just can't learn in the same way others do. Though this article was written more than 20 years ago, this argument still hold its validity and our school system hasn't done much to change that. Hopefully with the substantially rapid development of edtech, there soon will be an effective learning platform that can provide truly personalized learning experience for each student.

Besides, I also found the author's struggle with recognizing and memorizing flower names and how he overcame his illiteracy very interesting. I could really relate to what he described in the article as I have had the same problem with recognizing different kinds of veggies. Indeed, sometimes I can't tell which is cabbage, which is lettuce, which is spinach, etc. While reading this article, I tried to reflect on myself and realized that while I can see the difference among various kinds of veggies, the problems are 1) I can't remember their names (even in my native language, not just English) and 2) in the case that I remember the name, I often can't associate the name with how the veggie would look. The author's approach that connects his knowledge in different domains to help him differentiate and remember different flower names sounds very interesting and I really think it could work for me. However, as someone has pointed out in his/her discussion post, the intrinsic motivation definitely plays a huge role here. As a consequence, it is hard to say if the author learning approach was really effective or his motivation was the key driver of his success.

Papert, Seymour. "A word for learning." Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking and learning in a digital world (1996): 2-24.