Upgrading Literacy: Reboot

Engagement is becoming a very prominent component of most educational curricula. It’s no secret that engagement and content retention go hand in hand, so it comes as no surprise for this shift in the educational field. Engaging your learners doesn’t happen overnight, it takes a well-outlined design process to create something that stays with a learner well after the course. So let’s take a look at some of the characteristics that you would expect from an engaging content-driven course.

• Utilize problem solving skills
• Define clear goals
• Offer constant feedback
• Create a well designed experience
• Mentor during the learning process
• Performance before competence (learning through failure and experience)
• Well ordered problems (progression in difficulty)
• Smart tools and smart teams (collective efforts to solve problems)
• Information on demand (learning to pull information when needed)
• Promote innovation
• System thinking (learning the relationship between 2 separate problems and the impact of one decision on both problems)

It’s surprising to see that some of these steps are never given a second thought for many educational courses offered today. Given the chance, you would probably stand behind a course knowing that it was developed on the premise of learning through experience, teamwork and innovation. What you might be surprised to know is that the above traits aren’t actually characteristics from any particular curriculum but are in fact the design steps for creating a video game.

Coincidence? hardly.

Eye opening? definitely.

There are many parallels between the gaming world and education, so let’s take a look at what makes a video game such a compelling base for future educational platforms and a few examples of how video games are helping students learn even today.

Engagement through Experience

“Video games are nothing more than solving a complex set of problems designed to create a memorable experience” – a very eye-opening quote from Dr. James Gee, Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, at a presentation I recently attended. That line alone resonated with me as I felt it should be the motto for any learning process.

We spend about 3 billion hours per week playing video games. That”s a lot of time invested, which only shows the high level of engagement seen in video games; players keep coming back for more. Somewhere down the path of education, we became focused on pushing out information rather than attracting students towards learning. Of course this is easier said than done, but that’s one of the things we can take from video games. We never play a game because of what we might learn, we play them because they’re fun, challenging and rewarding. The learning that takes place is an indirect result of the experience that we crave.

A great example of this is Valve’s 2007 game, Portal, where players have to escape an abandoned facility using a device capable of creating inter spatial portals. The game’s expansive use of physics and philosophical view on moral decision-making have made Portal a critically acclaimed title with certain colleges incorporating Portal into their curriculum. To give you an idea of the type of game Portal is, check out the video preview review (update: Portal 2 was released on April 19th) for its highly anticipated sequel, Portal 2.

Group Solving

Solving a problem on your own can be downright frustrating at times. We’ve all experienced a moment where we hit a wall and resort to pulling out our hair by the handful. By the same token, tackling a problem within a group poses many benefits. The notion of bouncing ideas off other minds and perspectives generates a wealth of creativity and discussions, a concept that is seen very often in the video game world. For every game that boasts a substantial audience, the players collaborate (in most cases without the aid of the game developers) to create informational wikis for sharing information and discussing difficult problems. Sounds like something the educational field could use, right? Well, to some extent they already do. More and more courses offer discussion forums to their students in order to generate productive conversations and solutions, however, where educational forums fall short is in their level of scale. Most educational forums are exclusive to the learners directly affiliated with the course, whereas gaming forums are open to anyone. While this can give an educational institution a grander sense of control, it seriously inhibits a wiki’s ability to grow and become a powerful tool. The more people that join a discussion, the more robust the content becomes, but in turn the more moderating parameters are needed, and the gaming world has found the perfect balance.

By far, the best example of an extensive gaming wiki is the World of Warcraft’s wiki, WOWWiki. Second only to Wikipedia in pages (at just under 89,000 pages), the WOWWiki hosts a goldmine of information for its users. Everything from beginner guides to game-play tips to gaming terms are discussed in this wiki, creating a universal hub of information for the game’s players. Here are a couple of excerpts from the WOWWiki that show how technically detailed the wiki has become.

“Weapon skill represents your proficiency with a particular weapon. The basic formula for your maximum weapon skill at a particular level is (5 * level). Each attack which is not evaded has a chance to increase weapon skill, with low weapon skill, the skill gain rate is at or near 100%, however the skill gain change begins to sharply decrease once the weapon skill cap is approached. At 10% away from the cap, the skill gain chance is roughly 50%, and gaining the final skill point can take hundreds of swings. The chance per swing seems to be unrelated to weapon speed, making low spead weapons better…“

The XP (experience points) required to advance to the next level is found by:

XP = ((8 × CL) + Diff(CL)) × MXP(CL) × RF(CL) where CL = the current Character Level

Note that the XP is always rounded down to the nearest hundred.

The function MXP(CL) is the basic amount of XP earned for killing a mob of level equal to the character

MXP(CL) = 45 + (5 × CL) (mobs in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor) MXP(CL) = 235 + (5 × CL) (mobs in Outland) MXP(CL) = 580 + (5 × CL) (mobs in Northrend) MXP(CL) = 1878 + (5 × CL) (mobs in Cataclysm areas)

The function Diff(CL) is an extra difficulty factor that starts around level 30 and increases by level:

Diff(CL) = 0, CL <= 28 Diff(CL) = 1, CL = 29 Diff(CL) = 3, CL = 30 Diff(CL) = 6, CL = 31 Diff(CL) = 5 x (CL-30), CL >= 32, <=59

The function RF(CL) is an extra difficulty reduction factor added in patch 2.3. It is:

RF(CL) = 1, CL <= 10 RF(CL) = (1-(CL-10)/100), 11 <= CL <= 27 RF(CL) = .82, 28 <= CL <= 59 RF(CL) = 1 60 <= CL

Measuring Progress

How do you know how much knowledge a learner has absorbed? You test them on the information they should be familiar with; this is the current standard seen in any educational process. The shortcomings of this method is that testing can only take place periodically, leaving enough of a gap for students to learn their new subject material. So if a student were to struggle with any given material, it would never come to light until their next test. In the gaming world, progression is measured on a continuous basis, allowing for a much more in depth look into an individual’s learning process. For every step a player takes, the game records it across a multitude of measurables. This approach not only helps you understand a player better, but it opens the door for a unique rewarding system based on the player’s own strengths and weaknesses.

An example of continuous tracking can be seen in Brain Age 2, a game designed to increase your intellectual capacity through rapid cognitive games. When you first play the game, it assesses your ‘brain age’ based on a few simple quizzes. As you continue to play, the game then tracks your progress as you either raise or lower your brain age, mapping your overall progression over time. Given that the game can track multiple players, it offers a very interesting look at comparing the progression of several players as well.

We are already on the path of blending gaming and learning, but we still have ways to go. The gaming industry is the fastest growing entertainment sector and we should take note of what works for them. Don’t be discouraged every time you hear a negative story about a game because the essence of video games has a lot to offer. There are millions that engage through video games, and we want to see that same engagement in literacy and education and gaming could be just what the education system needs to gain an extra life.

Rita

xoxox

Bonus

Gaming for a Better Future

Video games can change the landscape of the educational industry, but they also have the ability to make a brighter future in other areas as well. Here are a few examples of games that challenge you to make a difference in the world.

Foldit

A video game developed at the University of Washington, Foldit lets players solve problems regarding protein folding, a feat that cannot be done by computers very well.

Phylo

Developed at McGill University, Phylo allows players to help genetic research in the form of pattern matching puzzles by aligning nucleotide sequences from various phylogenetic taxa.

Tags: Brain Age, Curriculum, design, Dr. James Gee, engagement, experience, Foldit, gamers, IGN, learning, literacy, Phylo, Portal, problem solving, test, Valve, video games, Wiki, World of Warcraft, WoWWiki