Joan Ganz Cooney was honored at Sesame Workshop’s 12th Annual Gala on May 28, 2014. Photo courtesy of Sesame Workshop.

Last night, Joan Ganz Cooney was honored at Sesame Workshop’s Annual Gala.  This is the first time that Joan, who co-founded the Children’s Television Workshop 45 years ago and remains Chair of the Workshop’s Executive Committee, was honored by her colleagues.  It won’t be the last honor conferred—though Joan, who is incredibly modest given the revolutionary contributions she has made—might prefer less pomp and circumstance as she looks back at her unprecedented impact in the children’s media space.  At the gala last night she received kudos from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Diane Sawyer, as well as Cheryl Henson, the daughter of her creative alter ego Jim Henson.  In her remarks, Joan, as always thoughtful, witty, and memorable, expressed the passion that animated her vision of a better society with one compelling phrase: Put the children first!

Two wonderful highlights of the gala were the announcements by her granddaughter Chloe that a new award will annually be conferred for outstanding leadership in educational  media in her honor, and by Sesame Board Chair Vincent Mai that to recognize Joan’s remarkable work (and their original contribution to the launch of CTW in 1969), Carnegie Corporation of New York and Ford Foundation have awarded a two year grant to support the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Fellows program.  Our team is delighted that we will have the opportunity to support young leaders who will be inspired by Joan’s legacy to pursue issues of great substance, and to make their own impact on the field.  As she remarked last night, the legacy of the Workshop is a living and vibrant community that has much more work to do! See the Workshop’s lovely tribute video, below.

My own experience with Joan goes back—at least indirectly—to the late 1960s when I was in elementary school.  My parents were activists—my dad a civil rights organizer and intergroup relations expert and my mom a children’s mental health practitioner and advocate.  I recall hearing about an evening engagement in New York City they had with Joan and her husband Tim, when she and co-founder Lloyd Morrisett, were on the verge of creating Sesame Street.  My folks couldn’t get over how creative and timely the idea for Sesame Street was—I think my dad was also smitten by Joan’s great beauty, sophistication and verve!

Four decades later I had the great good fortune of being recruited by Gary Knell, then CEO of Sesame Workshop, and Joan to start a new institution—the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.  We have built a team that is standing on her shoulders  to explore innovation and change in the digital space, inspired every day by her leadership, courage and wisdom to prod media designers to deliver delightful learning experiences that will help propel young people to reach their full potential.

Joan Ganz Cooney with Bert and Ernie

In the media saturated, cable news bloviating, uncivil public discourse of the moment, we rarely pause to recognize true innovation, quiet dignity, and a laser focus for doing what is important and right for the generations who must build a shared future.  Joan Ganz Cooney isn’t “on the media circuit”  these days (in fact she has always been a bit uncomfortable in the limelight.)  But like the “greatest generation” who made our nation a beacon of hope and light to so many across the globe, she is our rock star, a true trailblazer, a giant for the ages.  As recognition of her contributions are celebrated at events like last night’s gala, it is our firm hope that thousands of young women will be inspired by her remarkable contribution and turn their energies to—as she has done so magnificently—making the world a better place.  Warmest congratulations to Joan and her lovely family on a very special occasion!  Simply put: when the history of the past half century is written, there will doubtless be a special chapter written to document her leadership, wisdom and the indelible contribution she and the colleagues she inspired have made to make children and families across the globe smarter, stronger and kinder.

Check out Sesame Workshop’s blog post about the gala and see more photos from the evening on the Workshop’s Facebook page.

Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents
Edited by Amy B. Jordan and Daniel Romer

This spring, Oxford University Press released an important new contribution to the literature of media and developmental psychology with Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents, edited by Amy B. Jordan and Daniel Romer.

The volume examines the role that media play in the daily lives of families with children, from “traditional” media such as television and film as well as “new” digital media, including video games and mobile devices. Together, the research that comprises this volume provides an overview of the latest data and trends on children’s access to media, as well as examining various aspects of the controversial debates around the potential problems as well as benefits, of different kinds of media use.

The Cooney Center’s Lori Takeuchi and Michael H. Levine have contributed “Learning in a Digital Age: Toward a New Ecology of Human Development.” The chapter delves into the need for a more holistic examination of a child’s development within an ecosystem that includes microsystems of family and friends, school programs and community institutions, as well as the personal social networks in which they participate in the broader context of the dominant cultural values and beliefs around them. Former Cooney Center Fellow Sarah Vaala co-authored “Media Access and Use in U.S. Homes with Children and Adolescents” with Amy Bleakley, Amy Jordan and Dan Romer. Other contributors include Ellen Wartella, Alexis Lauricella, Sandra Calvert, and Melissa Richards. Our Sesame Workshop colleagues David Cohen, Jeannette Betancourt and Jennifer Kotler also contributed “Sesame Workshop’s Talk, Listen, Connect: A Multiple Media Resource to Benefit Military Families with Young Children.”

Click here for a preview of the book, which is available for sale on Amazon.

Part 4 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

For years, most people thought that video games were like candy: mostly bad, tempting to children, but okay in moderation. Now we understand that they can have more “nutritional” value than our parents ever imagined.

My brothers and I played Space Invaders and Pac Man, Asteroids and Breakout. We pulled the plastic casing off the Atari joystick and stuck the accordioned bottom end to our foreheads like a suction cup. These were still the early days of interactive home computing and because game consoles were so unfamiliar, the adults were afraid. Surely, they assumed, staring at a box of glowing light while pressing buttons in response to electronic triggers would cause some invisible neural damage.

Kids played video games for hours. They wiggled joysticks and maneuvered “paddles” until they discovered the game’s patterns. They talked about the games with their friends. They shared tips and tricks. Even if they were learning together, and if the arcade was always a kind of educational community, what exactly were they learning? Clearly, not the things that mattered. All learning is not good learning. Something had to be done.

Flickr/ Brad Flickinger

Along came Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster, and others.  Gamification was not yet a household word. Back then, folks “school-ified” video games. The shoot-em up alien attack narratives were replaced with educational curriculum: facts about letters, numbers, history, science. Each correct solution launched a missile at your enemy. If kids were going to memorize all the details of a video game, why not construct those details so that they align with classroom content? It made sense. And it worked. Many of us learned touch typing from Mario and geography from Carmen Sandiego.

Clearly, the world has changed considerably since then. Interacting with machines is commonplace. It’s normal to respond to screen-based electronic stimuli. Work almost always involves some interaction with digital platforms. Maybe this is why video games no longer inspire the same kind of anxiety and terror from parents and caregivers as they once did. In fact, we now know that games can teach much more than just content. There are social, emotional, and meta-cognitive benefits.

In 2013, the American Psychological Association published a study that identified some of the benefits of gaming, and the results were surprising. For example, in controlled tests, kids who played first-person shooters showed “faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities.” This likely has very little to do with the violent narrative and a lot to do with repetitive execution of reflex-based actions. Essentially, first person shooters are intricate 3D virtual simulations of the carnival classic “whack-a-mole.” Players need to react fast. This is why kids who play a lot of games seem to show “measurable changes in neural processing and efficiency” and a positive increase in creativity. Players practice quick thinking and hurried response.

Of course, neural advantages like these are vague and invisible. Research that assumes a biologically deterministic view of humanity should be questioned. When we imagine ourselves as cellular organisms first and only second as uniquely human, we equate ourselves with amoebas, insects, and animals. This theoretical approach implicitly assumes that our development and actions are determined by electrochemical and biological impulses alone. Instinct reigns. The classic conception that distinguishes humans as “moral” animals is rendered obsolete. These neuroscientific discoveries may be accurate, but when it comes to learning, is this approach useful? After all, our intention is not husbandry in a petri dish. Instead, we aim to nurture human citizens that contribute to an ethical civilization.

We want our children to develop strong meta-cognitive skills. We want students to become critical thinkers that are motivated to make a difference in the world. When it comes to motivation, look to the work of Carol Dweck, Stanford professor who writes about motivation and social development. She makes a distinction between an entity theory of intelligence and an incremental theory of intelligence. When kids develop an entity theory of intelligence, they believe they have innate, fixed traits. They’re praised for being smart, or being good at math. It has a negative impact on long term attitudes. When kids develop an incremental theory of intelligence, on the other hand, they understand that they have certain skills. They are praised for their effort: “you worked so hard on that problem, you solved that puzzle.” They have a growth mindset.

Video games nurture an incremental understanding of intelligence. Because players are rewarded for one task at a time — for overcoming one obstacle after another — they learn to understand learning and accomplishment iteratively. For example, each track in Nintendo’s classic game Mario Kart has its own particular challenges. Each time a player drives it he or she addresses the weaknesses of the previous attempt. The player iterates performance incrementally, addressing shortcomings and adjusting accordingly. He or she understands that mastering one course doesn’t necessarily equate to mastery of the next. A new learning process begins at the conclusion of the previous one.

Games designed for the classroom can leverage the same sort of motivational intelligence. Consider a game like Reach For The Sun (Filament Games). This resource management game is designed to teach plant life cycle sciences and photosynthesis. Players are challenged to “become a plant” and balance resources like starch and water. “Extend your roots, sprout leaves, and make your flowers bloom before winter hits.”

Succeeding in Reach For The Sun is about more than just trial and error. It involves an incremental approach that’s way more authentic than a workbook, lecture, or a quiz. It is not about right and wrong; it is about simulation. Students don’t just retain textbook bullet points of photosynthesis. They understand in an experiential way that the plant is a vibrant, dynamic life system that is constantly adjusting to its surroundings. They succeed when they comprehend the way a plant relates to the world around it. Learning is about incrementally applying content in context. And context is all about iterating relationships.

In the process of learning to incrementally iterate in context, students are developing metacognitive skills. Put simply, metacognition describes an individual’s ability to think about his or her own thinking. Among other things, it refers to the ability to self-evaluate a thought process and to iterate based on an analysis of strengths and weaknesses. For learners, strong metacognitive functions translate into study skills. Strong metacognitive functions mean students have the ability to identify problem areas and seek out the necessary and deliberate practice needed to compensate for weaknesses.

Metacognition is also another word for what educators are talking about when we say we want to create life-long learners. When we talk about critical thinking, problem solving skills, creating innovators, or nurturing perseverance, we’re talking about metacognition.

Those skills are not really unique to the new millenium. They are the same reflexive skills that have always been the prerequisite to critical thinking. Character education is code for metacognition. It’s all about producing individuals who have the desire, the drive, and the skill, to look at themselves and evaluate the way they think about their place in the world.

Most importantly, strong metacognitive skills translate into strong interpersonal skills. After all, the ability to look at yourself is one of life’s most important social skills. How can you relate to others if you can’t even relate to yourself? Not well. Relationships, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence all require strong metacognitive skills.

What does this have to do with video games? A lot: 70 percent of gamers play their games with other people. Contrary to the popular image of the gamer as an awkward, socially inept loner, players are actually engaged with one another. Think back to that educational community that emerged in every 1980s pizza parlor around the Ms. Pacman machine. Gamers play cooperatively. They play competitively. They share tips and tricks. They work together. The teach each other how to get better at the game-

Imagine a classroom where collaboration is the norm. Where assessment is collective and individual assessment and competition do not create a culture of “entity intelligence.” Game-based learning is one tool that can help make it a reality.

The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council.

Images from the Disney Infinity and Skylanders SWAP Force websites

This spring I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing two of last year’s most anticipated new games: Disney Infinity and SWAP Force, the latest iteration of the Skylanders franchise. I look at these two games as part of my broader interest in how contemporary toys bridge physical and digital play experiences. Both games operate on a similar premise: users connect a USB peripheral, a “portal” or “base,” to the console and collect plastic character figures (sold separately and in various combinations). When placed on the base, each figure appears as an avatar in the game. Figures store game progress and data, and each has unique capabilities and attributes. SWAP Force adds an additional layer of interactivity: each figure is split at the waist (held together by magnets) so players can easily swap them out to make new characters with combined features (for example, combining a character with an “Earth” element with one that has a “water” element gives the player the advantages of both).

Both games are targeted toward 6-to-12 year olds, which was apparent when, last fall, I waited in line at GameStop at midnight to take advantage of Black Friday sales. I jockeyed for position with more serious gamers awaiting the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. When the doors opened, I was among the only customers browsing displays dedicated to Infinity and Swap Force while the teens and adults gravitated toward the new, big-ticket items. Gaha Bala, President of Skylanders developer Vicarious Visions, points out the challenges of creating a game that appeals to such a broad age range. The physical toys are especially important to younger players, offering an easy “opt in” with a familiar interface and mode of interaction. One of my larger questions concerns how much kids play with these toys apart from the game; mixing physical and digital toys seems to be a logical way to address the social and developmental breadth of the 6-to-12 demographic.

Although SWAP Force and Infinity purport gender-neutral appeal, both may lean slightly toward boys. Of the first 17 Infinity figures released, only 3 were female characters, an imbalance remedied with subsequent releases of figures like Vanellope Von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph, the two female leads in Frozen, and Rapunzel.  Activision’s Josh Taub stresses SWAP Force’s appeal to both boys and girls between 6 and 12, though admits that research suggests more boys prefer the game.

As both games attempt to garner wide appeal from boys and girls, they similarly celebrate open-ended play. SWAP Force’s story mode initiates the player on a narrative journey, but the game offers multiple pathways (accessible with specific additional figure combinations) and in Infinity’s “play set” mode, players are guided through a series of missions set within a single story world (for example Toy Story in Space). Infinity’s hallmark feature is its expansive “Toy Box” mode, in which players construct levels with pre-made pieces ranging from blocks of terrain and props to set pieces like castles or the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin. I’ll admit that the Toy Box mode was initially overwhelming. Players start with a blank slate: a block of grass-green terrain set against a vibrant blue sky, and can build and transform that template into virtually anything. The radical possibility of Toy Box mode is that players can combine characters from across Disney properties: Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean can now interact with Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and the player can design adventures that take them through settings themed after any number of other Disney movies.

This nonlinearity and open-endedness is, of course, connected to each game’s expansive product line. One writer refers to SWAP Force as “a collector’s nightmare”: the 16 unique figures make 256 character combinations possible. The number of Disney Infinity figures continues to expand, as Wired Magazine reports, with particular figures exclusive to certain retailers, others only available in bundles, and figure variants, such as the “Crystal” Series only available at Toys R Us, featuring characters cast in translucent plastic. After playing SWAP Force for only a short time, I encountered areas only unlocked by figures that don’t come in the “starter pack,” integrating the need for more into the game like a tutorial. Infinity players unlock additional building elements for the Toy Box mode through game play, but here too, each new figure also makes possible different combinations and arrangements of elements.

Seasoned gamers may be frustrated by Infinity’s Toy Box level building interface, but given the platform’s younger target audience, the Toy Box is a productive entry point, enabling players to construct and share levels built from the fabric of their favorite franchises. Featured user-created Toy Boxes are available for download and play on the Infinity website, and individual players can also share their created levels with friends. PC and iPad versions of the game extend this universe even further. Building Toy Box levels further introduces kids to basic problem-solving skills, as they design obstacles and challenges and can finesse how easy or hard it is to obtain objectives. The physical toys allow for an immediate kind of interaction—particularly for younger kids—and as players begin to try out different characters in the game through this tactile input, they also become accustomed to these games’ expansive worlds

Meredith A. Bak is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and an incoming (Fall 2014) Assistant Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research interests include media archaeology and the intersection of “old” and “new” media, particularly in relation to children’s media and material culture. Her current project focuses on how pre-cinematic visual media like early pop-up books and optical illusion toys helped cultivate children as media spectators near the turn of the twentieth century. A second project on augmented reality toys in development. Before completing her PhD, Meredith worked in museum education at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and as a teaching artist in public schools for the Urban Arts Partnership, instructing in the areas of animation, video production, and game design.

Twitter: @meredith_bak

Are we living in a fantasy?

Dr. Michael Levine speaking at Games for Change 2014. 
Source: Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images North America

Of the 70 or so panels, celebrations, play tests, and keynotes that took place last month at the 11th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York, nearly all made some mention of the potential for educational games. So what’s with all the hype? Why games and why now? As the Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael Levine put it in his speech on the last day of the festival, “In the face of global stiff competition, the alarm bells are ringing if we hope to sustain our leadership in innovation.”

Games hold the potential to help our young people receive the education they deserve, said Levine, adding that continuing to improve the amount of “engaging content” in our children’s lives will be key to providing them “relevant and rigorous learning.” But is it possible that such ideas are only welcome at a utopian event like Games for Change? Maybe reality can’t accept the fantasy presented by educational gaming.

But maybe it can. “[My] fifth grader has used digital games extensively over the past two-to-three years,” said Kevin Bushweller, a journalist for Education Week and moderator of the G4C panel “Turning Fantasy into Reality: Building Games that Schools Need”. “She has gone from hating math with a passion to now attacking it in an analytical, creative, and persistent way. And I’ll be honest, I attribute that largely to the strong link between instruction and assessment in the learning games she has used.” The panel, curated by the Cooney Center, focused on the needs of the marketplace and the kinds of games teachers look for when designing a curriculum. The four panelists were:

• Chris Curran, founding and managing partner of Education Growth Partners
• Alan Gershenfeld, founder and president of E-Line Media
• Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games
• Constance Steinkuehler, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin

In order to steer the discussion in the direction of reality, Bushweller chose questions grounded in evidence from the educational world. Here are three stand-outs from the conversation:

What are the biggest mistakes game developers make when trying to create games for the K-12 market?

Jesse Schell warned against assuming that your great idea will sell itself. “Really, there are so many complexities and layers to the marketplace,” a point which the rest of the panel seemed to agree with. Chris Curran brought up a study he led last year that investigated 75 different learning game companies and found that game development for education focuses around providing automaticity, satisfying Common Core requirements, and enabling the instructor to multitask.

But once the game is made, the marketplace is open water. To navigate, E-Line Media (Alan Gershenfeld’s company) has developed four business models:

• licensing their games to schools
• sending company personel to teach or co-teach a class
• offering teacher professional development opportunities, and
• seeking sponsorship from third-party organizations

But, said Gershenfeld, it takes a lot of research and the results vary widely depending on the age of the students.

What is the state of educational gaming research?

Constance Steinkuehler pointed out that one of the biggest mistakes designers make is not including teachers in the design process. They should ensure they aren’t creating a “solution looking for a problem that no one ever had.” Additionally, Steinkuehler (a researcher) implied there might be an essential flaw in the way research is presented. “There is not a single event that I do where someone doesn’t ask me, ‘What’s really the state of research in games and learning?’” Maybe we, as researchers, should be asking ourselves: what more can we do to get our information in the hands of developers?

Members of the panel “Turning Fantasy Into Reality” at Games for Change 2014. From left to right: Kevin Bushweller, Alan Gershenfeld, Jesse Schell, Constance Steinkuehler, and Chris Curran
Source: @G4C, edited

Earlier this year, together with the Games and Learning Publishing Council (of which Steinkuehler and Curran are both members), the Cooney Center launched GamesandLearning.org, which “reports on the opportunities and challenges facing those seeking to unlock the educational power of games.” The website contains up-to-date material based on the latest in games and learning research, and a Twitter account that brings this research to the social web.

Fortunately, there is a lot of good news in gaming research. Steinkuehler made note of the exciting (and result-yielding) games being made on the topics of language learning, history, and physical education. And although math and science games show more mixed results (in spite of the ample funding attracted by those subjects), she said not to confuse “mixed results” with “no results.”

How do we convince schools that gaming is going to help make education better even though it’s not aligned to Common Core and academic subjects?

“I actually think it’s better aligned than people think,” said Alan Gershenfeld. And from his perspective as an investor, Chris Curran added that it’s important to consider how your game will help the teachers meet their Common Core standards more efficiently, or else “it’s going to be very difficult to get it into the classroom at all.”

Possibly the most positive thing to take away from this panel was that there is a significant opportunity for developers to take leadership in the world of educational gaming, the kind that, Gershenfeld said, comes only once in a lifetime.

The textbooks are going away, curriculum is becoming unbundled … technology is now in the classroom … you have the assessments changing, the Common Core, the NextGenSci standards … a lot of press about a disconnect between what employers need ? what people need ? to thrive and be successful, and what we’re teaching. Personally, I believe in general, when you look at the new assessments, you look at the new standards, you look at what employers want, you look at what people really need to thrive, they tend to align well with inquiry-based learning, blended learning. … But the fact is it’s really hard to design, develop, implement and support those types of learnings. I believe the people who can do that are going to experience enormous success.

Who will take this opportunity to build a bridge between fantasy and reality? Is there anywhere the bridge has already broken ground? Stay tuned for part two of this post to find out.

Part 3 of MindShift’s Guide To Game-Based Learning.

For far too long, school has organized learning into divided disciplines: English, science, history, math, and so on. It seems fine because we’re all used to it. The problem, however, is that students then internalize a divided conception of knowledge; they’re conditioned into a view of life where specialization reigns. While categorized subjects made some sense for the industrialized 20th century, they may not be the best bet for this century.

Game-based learning offers an alternative. Because it forces students to apply knowledge in a contextualized way, it creates an interdisciplinary learning experience where subject-specific knowledge is used in a context that requires diverse applications. The borders between disciplines become fuzzy and ambiguous.

Of course, “fuzzy and ambiguous” isn’t always preferable. Rigid specialization served the industrial age well. Corporations are departmentalized. The 20th-century shift to assembly line manufacturing was reliant on a way of thinking that divided whole products into disconnected parts. But specialized knowledge hasn’t always been privileged.

Mina Creations / Flickr

Although people have had specific trades and vocations since the beginning of civilization, some types of expertise haven’t always correlated to career or exchange value. The preference for specialization in both knowledge and vocation is a fairly recent development, one that transcends corporate culture and permeates the American ethos as a whole. Today this attitude is so prevalent that it even shows up among semi-spiritual empowerment health and wellness coaching where Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss” is ubiquitous. The very notion of one’s “bliss” implies particularity. Hence, specificity seems to trump generalization.

EMBRACING HOLISTIC LEARNING

Over the years, the term “Renaissance Man” has sprouted into common vernacular in order to identify the well-rounded intellectual who was an expert in a variety of subjects. It replaced the ancient Greek notion of the polymath (or polyhistor) and the 15th Century Italian notion of Uomo Universale (Universal Man) with the image of a distinguished man with James Bond like charm, etiquette, and sophistication. Despite its positive connotations, however, the new term Renaissance Man likely served as a way to emphasize and distinguish the modern efficacy of specialized labor–and by extension, specialized and categorized education.

Despite the fact that we’re increasingly committed to equality and information is more widely accessible than ever before, possibilities for a formal Renaissance-Man-Liberal-Arts education remain limited to the elite. The average, or common, student is encouraged to choose majors and institutions that track into a specialized vocation.

This may be sensible. After all, not everyone can be the next Leonardo Da Vinci. The trouble, however, is that our experience in the world is not divided and organized like the subjects in school. Adults draw on knowledge from a variety of subjects throughout their work day. Creative problem solving and critical thinking rely on the ability make connections across disciplines.

Unfortunately, it’s common to hear students identify themselves as “bad at math.” Some students believe that they’re “just not humanities types.” Already, in the early grades, students internalize specialized career tracks based not on their skillsets, but rather on the ease with which they achieve success in particular subject areas. They not only believe that they are good at the things that are easiest, but also that their identity and self-worth is tied up in those achievements.

I saw it first-hand when my son was six. He came home from school and told me that he wasn’t “a math person.” I explained that growing up meant becoming a math person. Just like it meant becoming a person who can read, and a person who can write, and a person who understands the basics of science, history, art, and music. Now he perseveres at math, often finishing his homework as quickly as possible so he can move on to playing video games.

Like most eight-year-olds, he’s especially fond of the “sandbox” style video game: Minecraft. Sometimes he plays for hours. I’m okay with the amount of time he plays because I like that the game requires a variety of skills. Everyday, my son sees how the creative and imaginative skills (which are usually relegated to the arts) are easily combined with the skills necessary to engineer structures within a fixed system. What’s more, the game involves managing resources in a way that calls on math skills. Literacy and semiotic skills are used as he constructs signage for his structures. And he is developing social and emotional skills as he interacts with other players around the world, constructing role playing scenarios for peers, and chatting through online instant messaging.

Like Minecraft, most complex video games require players to employ a variety of skills that reach across disciplines. This is one of the great things about game-based learning. Commercial games like Minecraft and The Sims are being adapted into school specific iterations. MincraftEDU and SimCityEDU provide flexible options for integrating familiar games with traditional classroom curriculum.

Because video games are basically simulations of particular kinds of experiences, or problems, they require a kind of active engagement that simultaneously calls on diverse ways of knowing. Similar to the way most activities in life require using multiple cognitive skills simultaneously, scenarios in the game world can be constructed in such a way that individuals are forced to apply a variety of intellectual tools.

Contrary to the popular view of game-based learning, then, the game is not simply a robotic teacher. It is not about drilling students with animated adaptive flashcards. It’s more interesting than that. Great game-based learning platforms do not attempt to trick students into memorizing facts. They are not “chocolate covered broccoli.” Instead, video games can be used as tools that encourage students to apply class content in contextualized ways.

Think of video games as another tool you can employ in your classroom. Consider them like projects that ask students to use the knowledge they’ve obtained, to grasp the subject matter with such proficiency that they’re able to play with it. True learning leads toward the ability to manipulate new knowledge in such a way that it transcends discipline specific specialization. Video games encourage this kind of comprehension.

The ability to apply knowledge across disciplines is important, but it is not enough. It is important to combine that knowledge with strong social and emotional skills that serve as the foundation for good citizenship in the 21st Century.

The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council.

Henry Edwards and Kevin Kopczynski, winners of the 2013 STEM National Video Game Competition in the Team Category

In England at the turn of the last century, a young man named Jacob (whose last name is not known) was on his way to a society event dressed in his finest attire and carrying only his umbrella in case of rain. Naturally, his journey was beset with obstacles. A barrier placed in the middle of the street (by a misguided commissioner, perhaps) that could only be escalated by climbing a delivery crate. Rain clouds hanging low like giant parade balloons threatened Jacob’s neat appearance. And, worst of all, the rats ― as this was Victorian England, during one of London’s worst rodent infestations. Yet with no more than his umbrella and a few good ideas (that is, using his umbrella as a floating device and rat protection), Jacob is able to make it to the party staying (mostly) clean.

Jacob isn’t real, by the way. He is the invention of two teenage game developers from North Carolina, joint winners of the 2013 National STEM Video Game Competition for their game Etiquette Anarchy. “In the beginning, Kevin and I both agreed on making an 8-bit retro style platformer,” says Henry Edwards. “Kevin came up with the idea of ‘Etiquette’ and having to reach the end of a level as clean as possible.” Henry’s developing partner is Kevin Kopczynski. Both were 14 when they entered the competition.

Other than designing video games that draw on English history and manners, both Henry and Kevin are pretty normal teenagers. Kevin says he likes “to hang out with my friends and watch TV.” Henry is quick to describe himself as “nerdy” and likes “video games, fantasy, books, cats, anime, food, sci-fi, Homestuck, and any other nerdy thing you can think of.”

Henry also likes making lists. His introduction to video games was a journey, he says beginning with the first PlayStation system. Since then, “I’ve owned an Xbox, Gameboy Advance, Xbox 360, Wii, PC, 3DS, each with a variety of games, and I just got the new Xbox One!”

Kevin, by contrast, mostly stuck to one game he really liked. “My all-time favorite game is definitely Pokemon because it was the first video game I had ever played,” he says, adding that his favorite thing about it is that it’s nearly impossible to beat. “And even when you beat it, there is so much more to do.”

A common thread was what brought these two boys together: as interested in video games as they were, they had never thought about creating their own. “Despite all of the consoles and games I’ve played,” says Henry, “I was never really interested in designing video games.” That is until he took a tour of Ubisoft in Raleigh.

That initial visit got Henry thinking a lot about making video games, which is when he started taking classes at the Youth Digital Studios in Durham, NC. The two were placed in a class together for young game designers (Kevin had already been in classes there for about two years) and when their instructor Justin matched them up to submit a game to the STEM Competition, it seemed like fate.

Kevin and Henry’s game “Etiquette Anarchy” follows a young man named Jacob as he treads the dirty streets of Victorian London.

Not only did they speak the same language (they both agreed that the brainstorming stage was their favorite part of the process) but it just so happened that Henry had a background in computer art and Kevin knew how to code.

After six months of development, they released Etiquette Anarchy into the iTunes App Store and waited to hear back from the STEM Challenge committee. “I was in a Java class with a friend when I got the call,” says Kevin. “I put Justin on speaker phone, and when we announced it we all went crazy and celebrated.”

Their award-winning game is still available on the iTunes App Store (for only $0.99!) and they’re in discussion about creating a version for PC and joystick. But for now, let’s hope they’re signed up to take more video game classes at YDS. We can’t wait to hear what this dynamic duo comes up with next.

Part 2 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Those who still think of content as the driving force of education may not be ready for game-based learning. What do we mean by “content”? In this age of digital media, “content” is what web designers, TV producers, and media moguls talk about. Articles, TV shows, YouTube videos, photos — that’s all content. In the classroom, what we usually call content is what students have retained if teachers have met their learning objectives.

The underlying assumption of an education system that relies so heavily on test-based assessment is that content is what matters. We even call it “subject matter.” In some ways, it’s true that content matters — as long as we interpret the language so that ‘matters’ is used as a verb. Understand that “what matters” is that which is in the process of matter-ing, the process of becoming matter. What matters is what can be understood as a material, what is measurable, what is quantifiable, what is matter. Content is what matters when learning objectives are always about the measurable retention of quantifiable artifacts.

For those who prioritize learning that can be measured using only quantitative assessments, game-based learning probably just looks like a way to increase student engagement and content retention. It might seem like a complex workbook, or an entertaining quiz. Perhaps game-based learning looks like a great tool for practice and drilling, like a super sophisticated flash-card system that makes memorization more fun. But this kind of thinking doesn’t take into account the broader understanding of what matters. Game-based learning is a great classroom tool because it allows for interdisciplinary learning through contextualized critical thinking and problem solving.

Games in the classroom can encourage students to understand subject matter in context — as part of a system. In contrast to memorization, drilling, and quizzing, which is often criticized because it focuses on facts in isolation, games force players to interact with problems in ways that take relationships into account. The content becomes useful insofar as it plays a part in a larger multi-modal system.

And that’s the crux of the value: Games are all about systems thinking. Underlying every game, no matter how complex, is a relatively simple puzzle. Whether we’re talking about commercial games or learning games, at root, the player is tasked with learning a combination of actions and responses. The game does one thing. The player responds with another. In order to beat the game, the player needs to master the system.

Remember Pac-Man? The space ghosts were named Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. They were red, pink, orange, and cyan. You may have spent hours in arcades playing Pac-Man during your teenaged years, but do you know the ghosts’ names? You can’t win at Pac-Man by remembering facts; you win a game by being able to assess phenomena, recognize systems, interpret possibilities, and iterate solutions. The ghosts’ names are decontextualized facts. Playing the game involves systems literacy.

Remember Space Invaders? Players learned very quickly to hang out at the sides, shooting the approaching aliens before they advance to the next line. If the bad guys never advance, they never get faster. What starts off as a seemingly random system, turns out to be systematic. The player learns, through trial and error, which responses are most effective, most efficient, and most likely to yield the desired result. In the process, the player becomes intimately acquainted with the system, understanding it comprehensively. “What video games do — better than any other medium,” writes games researcher and author James Paul Gee, “is let people understand a world from the inside.”

SOPHISTICATED MANIPULATIVES

Game-based learning is an instructional method that allows students to experience, understand, and solve problems in the world of a particular subject, or system, from the inside. Imagine a game that works like an instrument, but teaches mathematics. That’s how Keith Devlin, the NPR Math Guy, thinks we should teach math. We should privilege experiential mathematical thinking over the ability to memorize the particulars of the symbolic language.

Devlin believes that great game-based digital manipulatives and simulations are like mathematical instruments. Consider the piano or the guitar, if you sit down and mess around with either instrument, you can’t help but learn something about music. Bang on some piano keys. Pluck some guitar strings. You hear the relationship between tones. You internalize the difference between between dissonance and resonance. You learn a lot about music. Now, think about what happens when you add a music teacher, someone who can show you how to use the instrument, how to understand it. Suddenly you’ve opened up a world of possibility: melody, counterpoint, harmony.

Good math games are like mathematical instruments. They are sophisticated digital manipulatives that are able to provide instant feedback. Just playing with a great math game will teach you something about numbers. Just fiddle with it and you’re already doing math. But add a great teacher and the possibilities are endless.  Here’s one of Devlin’s games designed to help students experience integer partitions:

With game-based learning students learn how to solve the problems in context. They understand how the equations they are solving fit into the world. The question, “Why do I need to know this?” is rendered obsolete. It is more than just subject matter, more than just content. There’s context. Students understand how integer partitions work within a system.

Creative game designers are building similar products in every discipline. Here’s one that’s meant to let students get intimately acquainted with the system of metabolism, to experience the metabolism process from the inside:

It’s a fun game, where players need to manage their resources carefully in order to win. Students need to understand how each resource plays a part in the system. In this case, it is the system of metabolism. We might call it basic biological literacy.

One promise of game-based learning is that it has the potential of building comprehension and literacy rather than retention. It does this by combining instruction, practice, and assessment. Teachers become the facilitators of a process where instruction is experiential. Practice is project based, requiring students to solve new problems and address new challenges using the new ideas to which they’ve been introduced. And assessment no longer measures a student’s ability to regurgitate information, or to choose among multiple answers, but rather, to use the content, or subject matter, in context. Even more impressive is that in order to successfully manipulate one piece within a comprehensive and complex system, the students must understand every piece of the system.

A comprehensive and experiential understanding of a closed system is important. But it’s not enough. Students also need to understand how each system plays a part in a larger world, how STEM subjects are related to the Humanities, and how multiple ways of describing the world work together to create our everyday experiences.

For far too long, learning has been separated into categories and disciplines. Next week I’ll explain how game-based learning can integrate learning, creating a multidisciplinary experience.

The MindShift Guide to Game-Based Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. This is the second in a series of 20 posts.

California high school student Sooraj Suresh was asleep when his father entered his room to tell him he had just won the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Sooraj was excited of course. But, like a typical teenager, he wasted no time in going back to sleep.

The next day at school his friends congratulated him on his award-winning game, Pixel Star One. They all wanted to try it out as soon as possible.

In person at the Games for Change festival last month (which he attended with his parents and younger brother to receive his award) Sooraj remained modest about his accomplishments. But if anyone has reason to boast, it’s Sooraj. With help from his father, he first learned how to create animated GIFs at age nine. Later, he taught himself to make his animations interactive using the GameMaker platform.

When he heard about the National STEM Video Game Challenge, Sooraj knew he had to apply. Creating the game was the easy part: he designed the prototype in 20 minutes. “I was thinking I should create something really simple,” he said, adding on features and implementing new ideas as they came. After much testing and editing, he submitted the final version not just to the STEM Challenge but also to the Google Play Store. Google accepted his game, but Sooraj took it down after deciding to make some changes to improve gameplay.

He hopes to make the new version of Pixel Star One available soon. Until then, anyone looking to learn by his example can take note of his minimalist approach to game design. Even the short marketing description of Pixel Star One offers a thoughtful lesson on the journey one can expect to go on when designing a game: “a small space craft launched into the depths of space to see how long it can survive and how far it can travel.”

Thanks to some fairly frequent conference travel over the past few years, my understanding of what makes up “the world of kids, media, and technology” is constantly expanding and changing.  I consider myself incredibly privileged to have the vantage point that comes from traversing many difference academic- and industry-focused circles (just to name one way of slicing up this universe).

Flickr / GVU Center @ Georgia Tech

This past week I attended CHI 2014 (the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), where the “academic vs. industry” binary doesn’t neatly apply.  Attendees of CHI tend to come from university departments such as computer science, informatics, and human-computer interaction, and from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Disney Research.

At CHI, I was exposed to a good deal of interesting work focused on understanding the experiences that children and families have with physical and digital objects with some sort of computational power behind them (e.g. apps, watches, televisions).  Additionally, a number of presentations provided a preview of new technologies that will likely come to market in the coming years or are just beginning to appear.

Below is a summary of children’s media and technology research presented at CHI—and an introduction to some of the researchers presenting at CHI—that I think most directly speak to the interests of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center community:

Research Projects

• Waazam is a telepresence system that intends to support social engagement through creative play.  The team behind Waazam includes Seth Hunter of the MIT Media Lab and additional collaborators from the University of Calgary, Microsoft Research, and BT Research and Innovation (full CHI paper here).  In his presentation, Hunter described Waazam as “Skype meets Kinect meets imagination.”  I was intrigued by the ways in which the system allows children to throw things up on the (virtual) wall and customize their play spaces.

• Also developed at the MIT Media Lab, StoryScape is a transmedia story-building platform developed to meet some of the unique needs of individuals diagnosed with autism and the broader autism community.  Led by doctoral student Micah Eckhardt and Professor Rosalind Picard, StoryScape is currently available as an app for Android on Google Play.

• Researchers, developers, and producers interested in intergenerational play and communication will be interested in the work presented by Azadeh Forghani and Carman Neustaedter of Simon Fraser University entitled, “The Routines and Needs of Grandparents and Parents for Grandparent-Grandchild Conversations Over Distance” (Draft of paper here).  Their findings show the value of conversational systems that focus on engaging children in sharing more details about their daily activities with grandparents.

• Today’s 3D printers have the capacity to produce hard plastic or metal objects.  Scott Hudson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, presented on a new technique for 3D printing soft “huggable” objects (like teddy bears) using needle-felted yarn.  This technological development has implications for the computational crafting, DIY, and maker communities, within which scholars such as Leah Buechley, Kylie Peppler, and Yasmin Kafai have been conducting important work with young people and families.  Hudson’s research was completed with support from Disney Research.  His full CHI paper on the project can be found here.

Researchers

• I had the immense pleasure of spending time at CHI with Morgan Ames, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine.  Ames studies the ways that people—particularly parents and children—make sense of the technologies in their everyday lives.  Her dissertation work focused on the social meanings of the One Laptop Per Child project.  Ames’s growing body of work has significant implications for understanding the intersections of social class, family values, and technology use.

• Also at UC Irvine is Kate Ringland, a Ph.D. student in Informatics who is doing a digital ethnography of child and parent participation on Autcraft, a Minecraft server for autistic children and adults as well as their families (more information on Ringland’s study here).  While Ringland’s work is in its early stages, it has major implications for understanding joint media engagement among autistic youth.  While autistic people are often mischaracterized as being “impaired” when it comes to social interactions, Ringland is uncovering unique ways in which sociality is expressed through co-designing objects and sharing space within the game.

Lastly, in reflecting on my time at CHI, I find it important to remind myself that “human-computer interaction” involves more than just the interplay between bodies and machines.  There are larger historical, political, and sociocultural factors at play when it comes to understanding the encounters that young people today have with media and technology.  When families incorporate new media technologies into their lives, their actions are always rooted in past behaviors and existing values.  No single technology can be understood completely separate from other technological and institutional systems.  There are also many people indirectly and directly shaping how individuals use their personal devices at any given moment.  I was heartened to hear from researchers at CHI, such as Ingrid Erickson, Melissa Mazmanian, and Sarita Yardi Schoenbeck, whose work delves deeply into such issues.  Thanks to the CHI 2014 organizers and participants for a thought-provoking conference!