Nicola Osborne : Weblog items tagged with questatlantis

Week 4: Pedagogy and Design

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:31:28 GMT

"Pedagogy and Design" sparked quite an interesting cross section of discussions around the readings partly because of the quite different approaches taken by those discussing games design for school age children versus those designing for adults/older learners in Higher and Further education. I started with reading Whitton (2010 [1]) who specifically addresses the needs of adult and older learners drawing on Knowles' (1998 in [1]) key premises of adult learning theory/andragogy as a framework. I think it is quite interesting that Whitton addresses the difference between the needs of children and older learners - she questions the idea that "games are motivating" or that "all students like playing games to learn" - though she does not seem to recognise that this assertation is also likely to be flawed for some child learners as well. I actually think many of Knowles' premises also apply to a wider group of learners, in particular the idea that "Adults need to know why they need to learn something before they are willing to invest time and energy in learning it..." (Knowles 1998 as quoted in [1]). Although children are certainly obliged to attend school I think this particular principle actually holds true for children, older learners and even training contexts. Motivation is a key factor to making any learning environment work so whilst I agree with Whitton's observations about adult learners - and her findings from studying leisure game usage even with non-gamer adults - I think that Whitton's comment that "It is crucial also that students are aware of the educational benefits of any game and feel that it has a true purpose in the context of their studies" (p. 41 in [1]) is thus applicable to the engagement of any learner regardless of age.

Whitton's highlighting of the fact that not all games will suit all types of gamers does, however, raise some interesting issues for including games into a teaching programme. There will, however, also be limitations of access in many games since the most immersive and engaging games are often slick and multimodal and that offers challenges ranging from game and learner style through to accessibility (e.g. compatibility with screenreaders etc.) through to the types of hardware needed to run a game. As a mac owner I have occasional but important problems gaining access to games that PC using gamers have access to. For instance games like The Sims - which explicitly advertises it's Mac version - can take months or years to port from PC to Mac though even this puts it in the minority of PC games since most do not bother to create a Mac edition at all. My Unix and/or Linux using friends also find themselves excluded from using various games. Since higher education students are increasingly expected to provide their own computing equipment (with institutions providing wifi and power points rather than a profusion of computing labs), that compatibility issue will form a (minor) part of learners' expectations along with the (major) issue of pedagogical justification.

In terms of motivations for playing, learning and learning through games I found Malone (1982 [2] and 1980 [4]) really interesting but very flawed. Malone's Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces (1982 [2]) for instance seemed to be based on examples where many more factors were at play than Malone chose to recognise. Discussion around this reading we have examined the role of gender in feedback and the construction of fantasy in learning games. Malone draws on a Darts game for his example here (a fairly male dominated sport/representation to use) and it's usage in a teaching analogy for math (a subject ) where a positive outcome results in destruction (balloon popping) and a negative outcome results in a numeric indicator (on what appears to be a more logical part of the number line than is actually shown if a positive outcome is achieved). It's a baffling visual analogy in terms of the maths it intends to illustrate and I have found myself failing to see either the fun or the achievement of learning outcomes in the game

The intrinsic fantasy in the game may tie skills to plot but they do not provide much in the way of motivation if the popping of balloons (quite an odd reward) is not sufficient. In his experiment Malone found the addition of music (at the end as a reward for achievement) to be the most popular addition with his female subjects. This addition is an additional pay off for the balloon popping. For the boys observed I think the balloon popping was seen as a reward itself, much as is the case in first person shooter games where it is the process of violence (gory effects, sounds, etc) and the process of inhabiting the character than it is about the reward of reaching the end goal. I suspect in the Darts fantasy the girls may have seen the balloons popping as a form of feedback but not a reward in itself, making the addition of music that much more motivating. Indeed accounting for individual expectations, cultures and experiences is a difficulty for any teaching but particularly in games design I think as the immediacy and human interaction and feedback cannot always be taken for granted as easily as any more direct relationship between tutor and/or course designer and student.

Malone (1980 [4]) seemed stronger as a paper to me - despite being based on 'intuition" rather than experiment - as Malone highlights convincingly the importance of intrinsic fantasy in games as opposed to the extrinsic fantasy of unrelated goals and rewards. This sits really interestingly with research I have recently heard about that has been undertaken on the motivational effects of performance related pay which has shown financial incentives often do not map to better achievement and sometimes lead to worse performance - this would seem to be a wider confirmation that there is something innately more engaging about tasks and objectives that can be motivating in and of themselves than tasks where one is encouraged to perform only in order to receive some abstract reward one desires.

Finally this week I wanted to turn to Quest Atlantis and the two remaining readings Barab, Arici & Jackson (2005 [3]) and Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux & Tuzun (2005 [5]) where the authors, also co-creators of Quest Atlantis (QA), talk about their work on the project and their conception of a "Learning Engagement Theory" and, interestingly, the development of QA the brand, rather than the technology. I think what I found interesting about both papers was the background information on the evolution of QA through research and ethnographic observation of quite an eclectic mixture of schools and community groups and the co-creators immersion in existing childrens games and environments. This shows through in the game - it is clearly a well founded concept (though as a test user it is hard to experience the collaborative and social aspects (Turkle 1995 quoted in Barab et al 2005 [3])) but also perhaps a few years out of date and based on what is available rather than what might exceed expectations in quite new and different ways. Nonetheless the visual panache of the game is impressive even when game play seems, as a lone player of the game as a stand alone experience, rather constraining (see my earlier post for more on this).

What I would be interested to see after this week, if such a thing exists, is a paper outlining the design process of a successful commercial game that could be compared. I think a genuine issue with educational games and in making them fun is that the funding to test and iterate designs is simply not as viable in the education sector. Thus it is not the educational content that makes many educational games seem particularly dry but the more academically structured development process that seeks not only to embed pedagogy in design but also seeks to ensure that the design process is academically valid - which is an interesting restriction to place on a design process that needs to be creative and original as well as educationally valuable. It's certainly something that I will need to consider further before developing my idea for the final game assignment for this module.

    •    [1] Whitton, N. (2010) Chapter 3, 'Understanding the Pedagogy of Digital Games'. In Learning with Digital Games: A practical guide to engaging students in higher education, London: Routledge.
    •    [2] Malone, T.W. (1982) Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games. Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems table of contents. Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States. (pdf)
    •    [3] Barab, S., Arici, A., & Jackson, C. (2005) Eat your vegetables and do your homework: A design-based investigation of enjoyment and meaning in learning, Educational Technology, 45(1), pp.15-20
    •    [4] Malone, T.W. (1980) What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems table of contents. Palo Alto, California, United States.
    •    [5] Barab, S., Thomas, M., Dodge, T., Carteaux, R., & Tuzun, H. (2005) Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns, Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(1), pp.86-107

Week 4: Education Games

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:22:13 GMT

I have found this week to be really frustrating in a way that I think reveals some of the weaknesses of educational games. The first problem this week was that although there were only two games flagged up as core examples it was near impossible to find a way to play them. This was a two part conundrum. Both Quest Atlantis and Thinking Worlds appeared to be PC-only. Though it transpired that Quest Atlantis (QA) actually was newly available for Mac (and worked fine) all my efforts to install Thinking Worlds (TW) on the PC I have regular access to (my work machine) failed – on start up TW would simply break down and state that there was an “error” but no indication of what was wrong, how it could be fixed or reported or how I could move past it. I was at least able to download and install software on my PC which is something many PC users on institutional machines are not given access to do, and thus a concern for any educational usage of a game.

Frustration number two (again before I even got to play any games) was that I had to wait to get a login for both games. In the case of QA this is a case of good practice to ensure new users are kept separate from school age children who use the game as part of the curriculum. I am not entirely sure why there isn't a test world clearly signposted as such that you could set up instant access for but I do respect their core aim to keen QA safe and friendly. TW required a login for the very different reason of commercial interest – which is fine but I was a bit put off to get an email from a representative. This is probably a bit perverse – humans should be better than machine responses I guess – the problem is that educational games/tools seem to, unlike commercial web tools, tend to directly contact you so it feels a bit like giving a salesperson your phone number rather than just being on an email list. The pitch is often the same but somehow it feels less invasive in in-service reminders or e-newsletters.

So, anyway, I have finally managed to have a play now that I am all set up.

Quest Atlantis is, I think, a rather weird beast. Although it is genuinely innovative in appearance, ambition and pedagogical scope I found it very problematic. Now I have to say that I realise I am not the core QA audience. For a start I am neither a kid nor a teacher so I am used to services and spaces pitched at Higher Education audiences or public audiences. I was also not experiencing the game in the context of a tailored QA-specific teaching experience and this seems to be the sort of context it is expected that people will interact with QA in. With those important provisos stated on we go...

At first I was really impressed with the look and feel of QA. When I first tried it it was on my work PC after I had closed all my usual programmes for the night. This meant it ran fast and the graphics – after a few weeks of fFogger and the like – looked slick. A few minutes in (as I started moving in the direction of my first quest) I started to wonder why the main area of play was such a small part of the screen estate.

I found Quest Atlantis hugely dictatorial and difficult to become immersed in. Though there were numerous choices to be made they were all predefined for you and highly signposted at every turn. You could not, for instance, pick the "wrong" choice and follow the game on this route, you cannot ask background characters for help unless they are preprogrammed to answer questions. It is an incredibly frustrating environment to operate in as you have open options to move and explore but almost no choice in the order you complete tasks, the way you gain new information, etc. I can see that the game would work in it's intended environment - a structured classroom context - but as a stand alone game it is not the high quality of the animation but the inflexibility of play that holds up most poorly against commercial offerings. However I am acutely aware that I am very much older than the core QA audience and that I was playing the game on my own - it is a more social affair including teacher participation in it's intended context - which may have made a substantial difference to my experience of the game.

Both QA and Thinking Worlds did leave me wondering whether the development of separate dedicated educational gaming environments can ever or should ever try to compete with sophisticated commercial games when it comes to capturing attention outside a structured classroom playing environment. Thus using commercial games as learning experiences seems to offer many pluses, though there are of course disadvantages to the type of content and game goals inherent in such games particularly for creating games suitable and pedagogically sound for older/adult learners. It is certainly interesting to move from these educational games to looking at designing our own games (using Google Earth).