Part 8 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Keith Devlin is a well-known mathematician and the author of many popular math books. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute and is well known as the “NPR Math Guy.” He’s also a big fan of using video games as a teaching tool and the founder of an education technology company called BrainQuake.

Devlin believes the future demands a substantial change in the way we think about math education. “So many people in the U.S. have never experienced good mathematics teaching. They have a totally false impression of what mathematics is,” he says.

In this conversation, he explains why we now need different mathematical skills than we once did, and points out that the math curriculum of the 20th century did not equip today’s adults to mentor children in the math skills of the 21st century.

Devlin argues that video games are the perfect tool for teaching math. He also sheds some light on those Common Core math problems that are so controversial.

Jordan Shapiro: In 2011, you published a book entitled Mathematics Education For A New Era: Video Games As A Medium For Learning. What inspired you to write that book? Do you play video games?

Keith Devlin: I not only play video games, I actually wrote one, way back in the early 1980s when personal home computers were just starting to appear. I wrote a math game where you use trigonometry to find buried pirates’ treasure on a desert island. I did it for use in the math class at the local elementary school my daughters attended. When I saw how my daughters were totally engaged by video games (professional ones, much better than mine!), I recognized at once their potential in mathematics education.

I wrote the book to try to give teachers some sense of what it would take to build a good video game for mathematics learning and to explain to game designers what it would take to embed good mathematics learning into a game. I was not thinking about building a video game myself (back then).

JS: In the book, you argue that video games are the best way to teach math to middle school kids. We’ve spoken about this before and you’ve talked about the importance of learning through doing. Why is context so important? And how can thinking of video games as math simulations help to move the typical math class from an product based pedagogy to a process based pedagogy?

KD: Video games are an ideal medium for developing mathematical thinking. It’s a classic case where a technology that renders old skills less relevant actually provides their replacement. Many people outside of the worlds of mathematics (particularly math as used in the world) and mathematics education are simply not aware of the dramatic shift that both disciplines have undergone as a result of digital technologies.

When today’s parents were going through schools, the main focus in mathematics was on mastery of a collection of standard procedures for solving well-defined problems that have unique right answers. If you did well at that, you were pretty well guaranteed a good job. Learning mathematics had been that way for several thousand years. Math textbooks were essentially recipe books.

But now all those math recipes have been coded into devices, some of which we carry round in our pockets. Suddenly, in a single generation, mastery of the procedural math skills that had ruled supreme for three thousand years has become largely irrelevant. In my book, I used the term “mathematical thinking” to distinguish the kind of math that is relevant today from the (procedural) “mathematics” most people are familiar with.

The skill that is in great demand today, and will continue to grow, is the ability to take a novel problem, possibly not well-defined, and likely not having a single “right” answer, and make progress on it, in some cases (but not all!) “solving” it (whatever that turns out to mean). The problems we need mathematics for today come in a messy, real-world context, and part of making progress is to figure out just what you need from that context.

Books and lectures (in a room or on a screen) are useful resources for mathematical thinking, but they are no longer at the heart of math learning. The only way to acquire mathematical thinking ability is by a process of exploration – lots of trial-and-error and reflection. This is exactly what video games can deliver. They can provide small scale simulations of the kinds of open-ended, context-influenced, project-based, problem solving that is at such a premium in today’s world.

JS: I wrote about your game Wuzzit Trouble earlier in this series. I also sometimes show it when I’m doing workshops or public speaking. I’ve used your metaphor often: learning games should work like musical instruments. What does it mean to create a mathematical instrument? Can we do the equivalent for other subjects?

KD: Yes, it’s fortunate that the word “play” applies both to musical instruments and video games. Everyone knows that the best way to learn an instrument is to start to play it. We don’t ask someone to learn to read music before they sit at a piano or pick up a guitar. But that’s exactly what we do in mathematics! The reason we do is that through most of its history, mathematics did not have any instruments. Video games can provide math instruments you can use to learn mathematics. Take a look at the twenty-minute video of the talk I gave recently. In it, I use Wuzzit Trouble to explain how this can be done.

We can do the same kind of thing in other subjects, but many of them already have instruments (e.g. laboratory equipment in the natural sciences). Before video game technologies, however, all we had for math were paper and pencil, augmented with ruler and compass for geometry.

JS: So, are you saying that kids don’t need to learn how to scribble numbers and equations on paper? Does that mean the symbolic Hindu-Arabic representation of mathematics is obsolete?

Keith: No, kids need to master Hindu-Arithmetic representation of numbers far more today than in the past. What they don’t need to do – and I think this is what you’re getting at with your question – is train themselves to do long computations, as was necessary when I was a child. No one calculates that way any more! What they (we) need in today’s world is a deeper understanding of how and why Hindu-Arabic arithmetic works.

In all four offerings of my mathematical thinking MOOC to date, I have had as students, engineers with years of experience who suddenly found themselves out of a job when their employers replaced them with software systems (or sometimes overseas outsource services). Those engineers are now having to retool to learn this other skill of creative problem solving – mathematical thinking.

Incidentally, the Common Core State Standards that are so much in the news were designed to guide the shift to this new kind of mathematics, as I’ve tried to explain before. Many of the parents who object to the basic goal of Common Core appear do so because they too have not realized how much the world has changed in its demands for mathematical skills. (There is a lot to argue about when it comes to the implementation of the Core, but that’s a separate issue.)

JS: In the past, you and I have discussed the “Symbol Barrier.” Now I think I misunderstood the concept. I always thought you meant that Hindu-Arabic representation was an obstacle to mathematical thinking. But clearly that’s not what you meant. Explain the “Symbol Barrier” and how video games can help to circumvent it.

Keith: The Symbol Barrier is the name I gave to a phenomenon first noticed in the early 1990s. If people need to use basic computational mathematics in their everyday lives or careers, they quickly pick it up and are able to perform at a 98 percent accuracy level. That’s not just some people, it’s ALL people (apart from around 3 percent who have a brain condition called dyscalculia). But if you ask those same people to solve the same math problems presented in a traditional, school, paper-and-pencil test format, their performance levels drops from 98 percent accuracy to a mere 37 percent correct. Those people (all of us) don’t have an inherent math problem, they (we) have a language problem! That’s the Symbol Barrier.

The Symbol Barrier is a problem – i.e. a barrier to entry into mathematical thinking – because at the moment, learning mathematics and being tested in mathematics is all done by way of the symbolic representation! It’s as if we taught and tested people’s musical ability by instructing them in musical notation and testing how well they could write music using that notation. We don’t do that. We ask them to sit down and play an instrument!

Same with driving. Would you prefer to be driven by someone who had just passed the written part of the driving test, or would you want to know they had passed the road test?

Or an airline pilot. Which gives you more confidence, someone who has flown successfully in a simulator or a trainee pilot who has just passed a written test on how to fly a plane?

Likewise for mathematics. I would feel much more confident in the arithmetical ability of someone who had scored highly on my own game Wuzzit Trouble than someone who had simply learned how to line up numbers in columns and apply the standard algorithms of arithmetic. The latter just requires rule following, the former makes you think.

JS: What other types of learning products are you working on at your company, BrainQuake? Which mathematical concepts are you trying to tackle?

KD: Our basic platform is mobile games, though we intend to bring out Web-based PC versions for classroom use. The user data we obtained from the release of Wuzzit Trouble, last fall was as good, if not better, than we had hoped. We were ranked highly in many general game categories, not just educational games, and we were appealing to people of all ages.

Once we knew Wuzzit Trouble was succeeding as a general category video game, it made sense to develop that side more, so as to appeal to the widest possible audience. So we have been focusing on embedding that basic gears mechanic into a richer video game.

However, to be honest, Wuzzit Trouble is barely classified as a game. I would (and did) call it an entertaining and engaging math-based mobile app. To reach a much wider audience, we need to incorporate more of the elements of the highly successful video games that attract tens of millions of players. Teaming up with John Romero (the legendary creator of Doom and Quake) as our chief Game designer provided us an exciting opportunity to go after that elusive big audience.

We are also developing the assessment side. Students, parents, and teachers – and adult player-learners – want to know how well they are progressing in terms of math learning. Video-game learning provides extremely powerful mechanisms to track learning – potentially far better than the existing methods used in standardized tests. Doing that requires the development of powerful algorithms that take the raw player data (which goes right down to individual finger actions on the screen) and use it to infer the player’s thought processes behind those actions, so we can see how a player is trying to solve the problem. This will take the old idea of “show your working” to a whole different level.

JS: This sounds great. Should we be trying to do this for every part of the mathematics curriculum?

KD: BrainQuake is absolutely not obsessed with trying to achieve “full curriculum coverage,” whatever that might mean. To my mind it makes no sense to try to use video games to provide learning for parts of mathematics where an alternative, interactive representation does not add anything significantly new.

Also, I think it will always be largely up to a good teacher to help learners master the symbolic approach necessary for more advanced mathematics. I think that people who see technology as a way to eliminate the need for good classroom teachers fundamentally misunderstand what it takes to help someone learn how to think a different way – in my case the mathematical way. Technology can help. It can help in significant ways. But it cannot replace a good teacher.

JS: What do teachers and parents need to know about the future of game-based learning, the future of pedagogy, and the future of education in general?

KD: Game-based learning is the future. Games are just simulators with an internal incentive structure (often dopamine based). That means they tap into the way humans, and all living creatures, are hard-wired to learn: by doing.

But people are not machines. We are social creatures. If you want a child to develop into a useful citizen who can have a good life and contribute to society, you need to develop that child fully as a human being. That requires good parenting and great teaching. Doing it right requires close integration of the technologies with the human interactions.

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.

The pediatrician’s office is becoming a new player in helping children learn foundational skills for communication, language development, and eventually reading.

But a project in New York is taking this concept a step further, by bringing digital technology—specifically, video cameras and video players—into the doctor’s office.

The Video Interaction Project (VIP) is underway at the Langone Medical Center at New York University. Specialists meet with parents and caregivers during regular well-check visits and record them playing with or reading to their young children.

These meetings occur 15 times, usually on the same day of primary care visits between a child’s birth and 5-year-old birthday, either before or after the child and parent have their regular appointment with the pediatrician.

Photo: Flickr/Jessica Lucia

The specialists spend about 30 to 45 minutes with families, helping parents to see how they can interact with children in pretend play, guided reading or other learning activities. They create a 5 to 7 minute video of the parent (or other caregiver) playing with her child during that time.  And then to provide better understanding and guidance, the specialists watch the video with parents to highlight achievements and to discuss areas for improvement. Parents get a copy of the video to take home and share.

The goal, said Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician who started the project in 1999 and is studying its effects, is to encourage critical interactions between parents and children through playing or reading together and to make parents more self-reflective. “They themselves can begin to say ‘wow this is really cool what I did.’ Or ‘that would have been an opportunity to engage with my child,’” he said.

With nine years of funding from the National Institutes of Health, researchers have been following participants since 2005, and so far they’ve been pleased by the results. They’ve conducted a half-dozen or more studies with participating families, including at least three randomized control studies, the “gold standard” of research.

The participating mothers were low-income Latina immigrants with a tenth-grade education, on average—in other words, parents whose children are often at risk for struggles in school. The researchers used various assessment tools to measure children’s cognitive skills and other effects, and parents also kept a reading-recall diary of their interactions.

In one study, 410 parents were divided into three groups: one took part in the VIP program, another received a newsletter with information on child development, and the third was a control group with no intervention.

The results showed that children in the VIP group had higher scores on cognitive tests at six months and parents and children did more reading activities compared with the control group. The greatest effects were for mothers with a ninth-grade or higher reading level. Kids were exposed to less television watching as well, in part because of the enhanced parent-child interactions.

In a second randomized control study with 99 Latino children and their mothers, the program modestly boosted cognitive development for toddlers at 33 months, and the children were less likely to have developmental delays. The cognitive boost had been apparent at 21 months as well.

Mendelsohn said these findings are important as evidence that the doctor’s office is an underused resource in the fight to catch low-income children up to their more advantaged peers. He’s been studying poverty related disparities and school readiness for many years, and recognizes that babies begin learning as soon as they’re born, most crucially through their interactions with the adults in their lives.

“We need to intervene earlier,” he told News 12 Brooklyn last year, “if we are going to reduce the gaps in school performance that happen for low-income families.”

Outside of VIP, other examples are also emerging of doctors getting involved.  A large-scale example is Reach Out and Read, a literacy program started in the early 1990s trains doctors and nurses to talk with parents about the importance of reading and provides new books to patients at regular well-check appointments.

It is a “a rich and engaging opportunity to provide similar guidance around literacy,”  said Mendelsohn, who was also involved in Reach Out and Read studies.

And it works, according to several research studies done in the early 2000’s. Families who take part in Reach Out and Read are more likely to have books in the home and to read to their children. The program is also associated with strides in vocabulary among older toddlers. It now operates at 5,000 medical sites throughout the United States, including at Bellevue Hospital where Mendelsohn works, and touches almost four million children, most of whom are from low-income families.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has traditionally cautioned against technology use with young children—they recommend no screen time for kids under age two. But Mendelsohn, who’s a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Early Childhood, sees promise in ways to use technology to help enhance interaction between parents and their children instead of distracting from it.

The project has expanded beyond the research setting to Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn. We’ll be taking a closer look at this work as as part of the research for Seeding Reading, a series of blog posts at EdCentral.org and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s blog, on of the role technology plays in early literacy. Stay tuned.

The Video Interaction Project has expanded beyond the research setting to Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn. We’ll be taking a closer look at this work as as part of the research for Seeding Reading, a series of blog posts at EdCentral.org and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s blog, on the role technology plays in early literacy. Stay tuned.

Today’s children are surrounded by digital media of all kinds. How will they ever learn to read?

That question is at the heart of Seeding Reading: Investing in Children’s Literacy in a Digital Age, a new series of articles and analysis brought to you by New America’s Education Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.  Over the next six months, we will be exploring early education and parenting initiatives that are harnessing new technologies; scrutinizing the marketplace of digital “reading” products; and highlighting new research that may illuminate how communications technologies and digital media are affecting the learning of reading, the act of reading, and the reading brain, in both good ways and bad.

The intersection of technology and reading is already populated with intriguing writing about teen and adult readers, whether it is by Clive Thompson in his new book Smarter Than You Think or Nicholas Carr in The Shallows. Common Sense Media, a non-profit advocacy and media-curation site, released a report this spring showing that, by their teenage years, students are not so interested in reading for pleasure, and that the amount of time children spend reading  each day for pleasure “drops off significantly as they get older.”

Photo: Flickr/ThomasLife

This project will zoom in on the years when children are babies, toddlers, preschoolers and elementary school students. In those formative years for learning language and literacy skills, the digital age brings a paradox: Good reading skills are more important than ever for success in life, and yet children and their families are increasingly surrounded by new tools and digital distractions that affect the act of reading and communication.  The Common Sense Media report, for example, showed a dip between 2006 and 2013 in the amount of time parents spent reading to their children.

Reading scientist Maryanne Wolfe, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, describes the challenge this way:

Will the present generation become so accustomed to immediate access to on-screen information that the range of attentional, inferential, and reflective capacities in the present reading brain will become less developed?

We started to grapple with these questions in 2012 with the release of Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators, a paper that scanned the early literacy landscape to help us better understand how technology was being used and what role it should play.  A sense of urgency runs through that paper and our new work: Reading comprehension skills among American students are, for the most part, distressingly weak. More than two-thirds of fourth-graders are not reading at grade level (known in research circles as “reading proficiently.”) Among disadvantaged children, the percentage is more than 80 percent.

And yet with challenge comes opportunity. With “always on” media around children and parents every day, what are some new ways to help turn children on to words, language and text, ideas?  Could they feel even more agency and excitement about learning to read than the generations behind them? Could new technologies offer chances to children with reading difficulties that didn’t exist before?  We won’t shy from the warning signs but throughout this project we will aim to uncover innovative ideas and spotlight new ways to seed reading for children of the digital age.

As Wolfe writes the end of her book:

The children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next.

The first article of Seeding Reading is by guest blogger Sarah Jackson: Pediatricians Use Video Tools to Promote Early Literacy.The Seeding Reading project is conducted in partnership with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and was made possible by a grant from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative.

This spring, I was given an extremely exciting opportunity when the Fred Rogers Center named me an Early Career Fellow. The mission of the Fred Rogers Center is to advance the fields of early learning and children’s media by acting as a catalyst for communication, collaboration, and creative change. This mission complements the work I’ve been doing at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which also focuses on advancing children’s learning through digital media. Here at the Cooney Center, I’ve done research, design, business development and strategy, and partnership building. Now, through the Fred Rogers Center, I will be creating a technological application that takes into account all of my learning and educational experience and puts it into action.

As part of the year-long fellowship, the Fred Rogers Center requires each of the fellows to create a media-based application or some sort of technology that will teach young, pre-school age children socio-emotional skills, a task that Mister Rogers himself so eloquently instilled in children and families all over the world through his work in the fields of music, TV production, ministry and child development. My project will focus on exploring how innovative and new technologies can provide fun, socially-driven play experiences that spur socio-emotional development while inspiring mindfulness and reflection. Professor Katherine Isbister at the NYU Game Innovation Lab, an expert on the social and emotional qualities of Human Computer Interaction in games, will be one of my advisers.

As part of this work, I will be eagerly sharing updates and progress reports with the goal of allowing other designers, developers, and researchers a behind-the-scenes view of educational application development. The game will be developed using research-based, human-centered design methods, which include interviews, brainstorming, prototyping, user testing, and observations as well as application of existing academic research to appropriately address age and developmental levels. I also plan to bring together a cohort of advisers who are experts in socio-emotional development, game design, and joint media engagement to consult with during this iterative development process. Given that this is a Fred Rogers Center project, I will have the great advantage of direct access to this valuable information.

Anna Ly, Makeda May-Greens, and Erica Branch-Ridley hanging out with Levar Burton.

I first got a glimpse of this advantage when I was invited to attend Fred Forward: Connections by Design: Creating Media, Children, and Family Partnerships through Research, Collaboration, and Advocacy. The conference reflects the mission of the Fred Rogers Center and with Fred Rogers’ belief in the positive benefits that television and new media have in supporting young children’s healthy social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development. The exciting three day meeting was filled with fantastic talks from children’s media and early learning experts on the role of technology in children’s lives. For the first evening, we got a strong grasp of the importance of nurturing, teaching, and inspiring young generations by hearing young scholars and professionals share their stories of how they got to where they are today with the help of Fred Rogers, and how they themselves have used what they learn to give back to young children. The evening was capped by a keynote from Levar Burton, the beloved host of Reading Rainbow who further highlighted Fred Rogers’ contributions to children’s lives everywhere. Levar also discussed the importance of reading and how Reading Rainbow was created to combat the summer loss phenomenon, which is the loss in academic skills and knowledge during summer vacation. He concluded his talk by discussing his Reading Rainbow app, which has recently taken off (or shall I say blasted off?) on Kickstarter and in the social-media space.

The next two days were just as compelling, with panels like:

• Research-Based Design in Children’s Media and Technology
• Technology and Digital Media for Engaging and Supporting Families and
• Professional Development: Early Childhood-Media Partnerships
• What Do We Know and What Do We Need to Know? A New Research Agenda

During the Research-Based Design panel, Kathy Hirsch-Pasek from Temple University shared a slide on the four pillars to “cut through the noise and create something fun”: Active, Engage, Meaningful, Socially Interactive. She then discussed how apps can be rated on these four pillars; then the sum of the ratings places them into one of the following four categories: a playful application, an educational application with guided exploration, an educational application but with potential for shallow learning, and a poor application. In the same talk, Barbara Chamberlin from New Mexico State University discussed the importance of starting with a conversation of how parents and kids can select good applications. The members of the panel all expressed the challenges of ensuring that an early childhood expert has a voice on the development team. Other pieces of advice for best doing research-based design were:

• Have everyone on the team talking to each other – for example, the game design team should feel just as free to send the educational group information on educational research and methods.
• User test! Though the set up is time consuming, it is well worth it.
• Worry less about the development and more about the process.
• Work with creatives who respect research and vice versa.
• You’re not 3 years old! Know where kids are and meet them where they are.
• Start with the character and story. Kids like to see characters that they want to be.
• Test appeal and comprehension!
• Value the space between the screen and the audience. Observe what happens and build towards supporting that space.
• Wonder, humor, and weirdness are key for high attention and appeal amongst children.
• Build an advisory panel to fill in what’s missing in the room.
• Build applications that get children to notice their own thinking and strategies.

In the Technology and Digital Media for Engaging and Supporting Families panel, the discussants talked about effective collaborations and partnerships for family engagement and support, and how digital media and technology can help provide that support. Lisa Guernsey from New America Foundation presented Seeding Reading, which will be launching through EdCentral.org in June 2014 with literacy resources, blog posts, and new research on parental engagement. Michael Robbins from Span Learning talked about the importance of relationship building and how to keep families engaged and informed when collecting data. He gave the example of Amazon.com, to which he is personally willing to provide data to because it gives him valuable information that he can use on his own time. Panelists also chatted about different interactions that should be leveraged such as asynchronous connections so parents could possibly see and interact with their children at camps when they aren’t even there by checking out pre-recorded messages, pictures, and videos during their free time.

In a much more app-focused presentation, Warren Buckleitner from Children’s Technology Review presented Ten Affordances of Multi-touch Every Educator Must Know. He showcased different exemplars that gave children the opportunity to:

• Be curious (e.g. The Human Body)
• Hear a story (e.g. Where’s My Monster?)
• Tell the story (e.g. Doodlecast)
• Be in the screen (e.g. Toca Hair Salon)
• Scaffold (e.g. Wonderful World of Ants)
• Make friends (e.g. Drawnimal)
• Get a skill (e.g. Slice Fractions)
• Move (e.g. Geocaching)
• Create (e.g. Scratch)
• Make a mess (e.g. Bubl Draw)

There were also extremely informative talks from Allison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, who provided two takeaways in her fascinating example-rich talk:

• Early childhood education is important and crucial
• Early childhood education should be exploratory

Patti Miller from Too Small to Fail presented a number of ways that the Too Small to Fail initiative is aiming to close the word gap through forming strategic partnerships with NGOs and media companies to magnify attention and motivate action. She described their recent partnership with Univision to do cross platform campaigns and local news content both online and mobile.

On the last day, Michael Levine from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a group of researchers including Heather Kirkorian from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Shelley Pasnik from the Center for Children and Technology, and Michael Robb from the Fred Rogers Center, to discuss a new research agenda. Heather Kirkorian presented her research on learning from video vs. personal interactions. One piece of advice she provided to the audience was that interactive applications for those under 3 years old are better than just watching videos. Some research questions she threw out to the audience were:

• How and why does the experience of watching video differ for children under 30 months old?
• Can interactive media inform learning?

Research questions that Michael Robb proposed were:

• How can media become an important part of families’ co-learning experience?
• How should we think about e-books in that capacity?

Shelley Pasnik threw out the following:

• How can digital platforms help with non-cognitive skills?
• What does tenacity look like?
• What’s joyful tenacity?

These are just some sneak peeks into the Fred Forward conference. You can find more information on their Youtube site here: https://www.youtube.com/user/RogersCenter, where they will be posting up videos from the conference!

I am extremely honored to be given this opportunity, and to be working for two centers named after, essentially, the creators of educational children’s media. It’s like having two super heroes guiding me the whole way, which is a very rare opportunity indeed. Won’t you be my neighbor and keep a lookout for how I go about this wonderful fellowship?

Part 7 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Games and learning advocates often come up against the video game stigma. Despite the fact that we’ve now seen decades of game play, and that a generation of gamers has grown up without a civilization collapsing, the bad reputation persists — and it’s mostly based around fear.

image credit: Doug Kline

News stories abound: games make kids hyper, violent, stupid, anti-social. It’s not only that people are generally wary of the unfamiliar, we also live in a culture of heroism and progress that casts every innovation as a revolution. Rather than celebrating modification and iteration, we divide the world into what’s cutting-edge and what’s obsolete. We’re always afraid that the new school will completely displace an old school that we’re not quite ready to abandon.

But the introduction of video games in the classroom does not need to mean the end of books. Blended learning will not necessarily replace the lecture. Games, however, can supplement time-tested pedagogical practices with new technological solutions to long-term problems. We can have the best of both the new and the old. Other posts in this series have already discussed the way games can help educators answer the ongoing assessment question, the way games can help develop kid’s metacognitive skills and empathy, and the way they can help to break down the boundaries between academic subjects. Still, not everyone’s convinced.

Recently, researchers have begun to look at the positive impact of games both in a general way and for learning in particular. The data is still sparse, but there are already some important takeaways. Here, I’ll summarize some of the general research on the positive impact of gameplay. In a future post, I’ll look at the research specific to games in school, education, and learning.

The recent APA (American Psychological Association) article entitled, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games” by authors Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels surveyed the landscape of video games. They identified four types of positive impact that video games have on the kids who play them: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social.

Gameplay has cognitive benefit because games have been shown to improve attention, focus, and reaction time. Games have motivational benefit because they encourage an incremental, rather than an entity theory of intelligence. Games have emotional benefit because they induce positive mood states; in addition, there is speculative evidence that games may help kids develop adaptive emotion regulation. Games have social benefit because gamers are able to translate the prosocial skills that they learn from co-playing or multiplayer gameplay to “peer and family relations outside the gaming environment.”

Thinking about cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social skills reminds us that educators are not just responsible for the transmission of content and facts. Of course, this is one of the reasons that there is so much controversy over testing. Standardized tests measure only quantifiable outcomes. Educators, however, are also responsible for the non-quantifiable well-being of our students. Some of these skills are taken into account in some schools when folks talk about “character education.” But mostly, there is little curricular systematization in these areas. Still, teachers are accountable for conflict resolution and other interpersonal skills. Video games can help.

A survey done in Ireland, Online Gaming and Youth Cultural Perceptions by Killian Forde and Catherine Kenny, suggests that kids who play multi-player games online are more likely to have a positive attitude toward people from another country: 62 percent of online gamers hold a favorable view of people from different cultures compared to 50 percent of non-gamers. Unlike school, where the diversity of the institution is rarely reflected by individuals’ peer groups, interactive online gaming correlates with a more diverse group of friends. Might the same principle be applied to the classroom? Could multi-player learning games help eliminate bullying and build camaraderie among classmates?

Studies like these are generally held at face value, but critics of games are quick to point out that the violent ones are morally reprehensible. Though I’m not a fan of violent video games, studies have shown that there are even positive benefits from playing these types of games. One study, published in Nature, showed that playing fast-paced “action based” video games improves “attentional processing” and also “induces long-lasting improvements in contrast sensitivity, a basic visual function that commonly deteriorates with age.” Of course, the violent narrative content is not likely responsible for these benefits. It seems more likely that it has something to do with the fast pace which demands quick reflexes.

The most convincing neurological research shows that video games contribute to neural plasticity because games provide “a multitude of complex motor and cognitive demands.” In this study, players played platformers such as Super Mario Brothers for at least 30 minutes a day for 2 months. They showed “significant gray matter (GM) increase in right hippocampal formation (HC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and bilateral cerebellum.” These are the areas of the brain “crucial for spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory and motor performance.”

DIFFERENT GAMES FOR DIFFERENT GOALS

But it’s a little disingenuous to say that games are “good for kids.” Games are not like vegetables. Don’t imagine them as if they were packed with vitamins and nutrients that help kids grow into healthy adults. Like all forms of media, it depends on the particular games and how they are used.

“One can no more say what the effects of video games are, than one can say what the effects of food are. There are millions of individual games, hundreds of distinct genres and sub-genres, and they can be played on computers, consoles, hand-held devices and cell phones. Simply put, if one wants to know what the effects of video games are, the devil is in the details.” Say Daphne Bavelier & C. Shawn Green, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

The details include, among other things, the narrative content: the story of the game. Games with very similar mechanics could have drastically different stories. For example, replace PacMan and the Space-Ghosts with Theseus and the Minotaur and it is a very different game. I can imagine a game called Steve the Fracker that might look very similar to Minecraft, but the implications are altogether different. Understanding how shifting the narrative can change the game gives developers a clue about how they might build learning games and also helps teachers imagine how they might use existing commercial games to reinforce learning outcomes.

Imagine if we could build learning games that provided the same kinds of complex motor and cognitive demands as fast paced action games while featuring narrative content that was curricularly relevant. Games all feature stories laid atop interactive mechanics. One approach to learning games might be to build narratives that reinforce educational content while employing the same familiar game mechanics. Teachers could also have students imagine how existing commercial game narratives might be retold to be relevant to class content.

The studies summarized here identify some of the ways that games, considered in a general way, can have positive impact on the people that play them. To get the most out of games, however, the facilitation and mentoring that adults can provide children is absolutely essential. Teachers should design curriculum that not only uses game-based instruction, but also makes kids aware of the way games are designed. Parents should play games with their kids at home.

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.

Part 6 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Gamestar Mechanic

As game-based learning increases in popularity, it’s easy to get pigeon-holed into one particular way of thinking about it or one way of employing it. This is true regardless of how teachers feel about gaming in the classroom, whether they’re for or against it.

One common objection to game-based learning is that students will sit in front of screens being taught at. Sure, games are interactive, but on some level, don’t they still just replace the sage on the stage with the sage on the screen? Does a joystick really change the nature of pedagogy?

In previous posts in this series, I’ve argued that because games involve systems thinking, they contextualize learning. Game-based learning could bring us a step closer to John Dewey’s call for “learning by doing.”

“Games are just simulators with an internal incentive structure (often dopamine based). That means they tap into the way humans, and all living creatures, are hard-wired to learn: by doing,” says Keith Devlin, author of Mathematics Education For A New Era: Video Games As A Medium For Learning.

However, virtual simulations of hands-on experience are not the same as tangibly engaging with the world. Simulating doing is, by definition, not the real thing. Plus, some of game-based learning’s strengths can also be seen as weaknesses. Games provide sequenced instruction blended with practice, feedback, and assessment. But even adaptive games have a finite number of sequential variations. Structures, and therefore, frameworks and perspectives, all remain fixed in a game. Certainly it is part of an educator’s job to frame content, but we don’t want to do it in a way that prevents students from figuring out their own way to make meaning out of the material. In order to model a respect for diverse perspectives, we need to employ a variety of teaching methods.

Fortunately, few people are calling for games to replace school as we know it. Kids shouldn’t sit in front of screens all day. Games are just one of the many tools that teachers can use in the classroom. In addition, there is more than one way to teach using games. It’s not just about playing the games, it’s also about making them. Game making is one way to create a space where students are empowered to freely experiment with their own way of framing ideas and choosing perspectives. In this way, game making is tantamount to project-based learning.

Just as there are many apps and platforms designed to teach kids coding, there are also many apps and platforms that make it easy for kids to design their own games. Gamestar Mechanic is one of the better examples.

Created by E-Line Media and the Institute of Play, with initial funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Gamestar Mechanic is currently used in more than 7,000 schools, with over 600,000 youth-created games published and played over 20 million times in 100+ countries. It was created, the company states, “with the understanding that game design is an activity that allows learners to build technical, technological, artistic, cognitive, social, and linguistic skills suitable for our current and future world.”

Gamestar Mechanic is a web-based software platform with a drag and drop interface that makes it simple for kids to make their own games. Successfully manipulating Gamestar Mechanic requires that students learn pretty sophisticated “systems thinking,” or systems-based problem solving. “Game mechanics” learn to adjust settings and manipulate the relationship between components within a particular framework.

Brian Alspach, Executive Vice President at E-Line Media, explains that “a game is a system designed to create a fun, challenging experience for the player. Within the systems they design, kids get to set how things work, and their rules can be very different from the real world. Kids have to understand how all the pieces of the system they design will fit together. This system based thinking — which can let you create a really fun, well-designed and unique game — is also vital in understanding how systems in the real world work.”

Just fiddling with Gamestar Mechanic, or some other game design platform is a great way to get students thinking about how separate components relate to one another within a fixed system. On a general level, it might serve as a way to convey the nature of bio-systems or economic systems. By constructing their own games, students get a tangible project-based introduction to the big abstract concept of systems thinking. But there’s no reason to be so philosophical. It can also be concrete. Teachers have also created game-making exercises that “provide reinforcement and review of concepts related to ratios, proportions and percents.”

Additionally, game design is one way that the arts and humanities can benefit from game-based learning. In a world of non-linear networked communication, modes of self-expression take on new forms. The personal essay, the autobiography, and the self-portrait are no longer sufficient by themselves. Intelligent educational models need to consider how to provide meaningful creative and interpretive skills that embrace interactive social technologies. Forward thinking teachers in so-called “soft” subjects might begin to see video games as a new narrative genre. Perhaps we can reimagine some of our creative writing assignments so that students design games, exploring nonlinear narrative conventions in addition to linear ones. Both are forms of self-expression.

Scratch, from MIT media lab, is another simple platform that allows students to build their own “interactive stories, games, and animations.” Based on basic coding, or algorithmic thinking, “Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.” Scratch emphasizes the way coding can break down the boundary between STEM and ELA education.

Although coding, as a skill, is usually classified as a STEM subject, game design shows kids that it is ultimately a semiotic system. That is, it is about language. Through design-thinking, coding allows folks to put together specific metaphors, signs, and systems in ways that enable the articulation of experiences through a shared system of meaning-making. Whether they belong to STEM or ELA, metaphors are all we have. We represent the universe through analogies that make social, technological, and medical accomplishments possible.

The great thing about any kind of project based learning — whether it involves game design or not — is that when students make meaning through creative articulations, they have to make active and intentional choices. Just as students need to choose paint colors or media in a fine arts class, they need to choose components in order to make a game. While these might seems like simple aesthetic choices, the right mentoring can show students how they are constructing their framework, how constructing a system is like constructing a viewpoint. When we challenge students to consider and explain why they make each choice, a sophisticated lesson in perspective is learned in a fun, engaging, hands-on way.

I’ve written a lot about metacognition in this series, emphasizing the importance of teaching kids to think about their own thinking. With game design students take metacognition to the next level, learning that ideas are constructed. They understand that knowledge is always framed from a particular perspective, with a particular kind of intention. The benefits of this kind of reflexive consideration are intellectual, social, and emotional.

Intellectually, students learn that all information is presented in some way — a lesson in methodology and epistemology. Socially, they become cognizant of the ways in which others construct knowledge — a lesson in tolerance and empathy. Emotionally, they understand that feelings are part of a complex meaning system within which individuals are empowered to make their own decisions — they have emotions rather than emotions having them.

Imagine a classroom where you swap back and forth between books, essays, lectures, and games. Imagine if your students sometimes demonstrated understanding and retention by expressing themselves using game design platforms. Students might even begin to design their own learning games, constructing game-based curriculum for other students. Every teacher knows that the best way to learn is to teach. If an individual can create a game that delivers the content, you can be pretty sure that he or she understands it in a comprehensive way.

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.

Remarks delivered by Michael Levine at the Anytime, Anywhere Summer Learning Forum co-hosted by New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop in partnership with the National Summer Learning Association and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading on June 10, 2014.

Thanks Lisa, and thanks very much to New America, the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, and the National Summer Learning Association for convening the first of what I hope will be a series of conversations on the causes of summer learning loss, and possible, scalable community-based solutions. We are grateful also to the Pritzker Children’s Initiative for their generous support for this Forum.

Today’s Forum will focus on several practical ways in which we can support new models to help children, especially those who are under-performing their potential, to keep up with the skills, knowledge and perspectives they will need to compete and cooperate in a digital and global age. At the Cooney Center, our mission is to use research-based evidence and proven program expertise to move key sectors towards possible breakthroughs in children’s learning and healthy development. In the early reading arena, after two decades of limited progress, we certainly need to be bold and forward-thinking!

The Forum will focus on four interconnected themes that we have not recently, as a nation, confronted seriously with a modern, fresh perspective.

First, what can we do across sectors to recognize a tremendous drain on our children’s capacity to learn? The fact is that for far too many kids, summer time is part of a profoundly disturbing cycle—millions of preschoolers and elementary school children have precious few opportunities to engage in enriching activities that so many of their higher income peers experience as a matter of course. These kids suffer from limited access to academically or socially valuable experiences within communities that are often distressed with high unemployment, shortened hours of public utilities like libraries, and a paucity of safe outdoor activities that nourish children’s minds, bodies, and souls. And many of the academic “summer school” programs that do exist are often focused on remedial work with limited value.

Second, can we mobilize parents—especially those who are deeply connected to their kids, but who have limited resources and education to do more?  We need to reach more vulnerable parents to encourage them to offer their kids a daily dose of proven interactions to intentionally build oral language abilities, to connect them to reading and storytelling experiences at home as well as by to take advantage of fun activities in their libraries, museums, schools, and community centers.

Third, can we help break the summer slide with those community programs that are modernizing their approaches—finding cool ways to get kids and families focused on reading. Today you will hear from some great state-based and community efforts that may be ready to scale.

And fourth, how can we harness technology and well-designed educational media more effectively? Given the fact that the average 3rd grader is engaged with some media platform over 7 hours a day during the school year, according to the Kaiser family foundation—and presumably even longer hours during the summer—what will it take to encourage a new media “food” pyramid? Can we find a way to balance the many tech calories that teach children the skills of communicating with friends on Facebook or playing video games throughout the day, with new habits that certainly encourage two of the old R’s—reading and writing with three new essential 21st century skills—creating, communicating and coding?

One last note: For most children, summertime is a season for exciting growth and change, for relaxing fun by the pool, lake or shore, family trips, cookouts, and deepening important social relationships. Reversing the summer slide isn’t about serving up a new dose of some magical concoction that has never been rolled out before. Whatever we imagine is possible for those children who are failing to read well will likely rely on ramping up those experiences we already know work for kids who are blessed with the advantages of high expectations and highly engaged communities and parents.

Fueling the summer months with new purpose and passion for intellectually ambitious exploration—in libraries, museums, boys and girls clubs, in camps, and at local block parties or concerts is long overdue. I very much look forward to today’s conversation.

It seems that hardly a week goes by without a news story touting that digital games like Minecraft are gaining a stronger foothold in American classrooms. Publishers and game developers are eager to make headway in the educational technology marketplace, and school districts throughout the country are rolling out one-to-one computing and BYOD classroom programs. But what do the teachers themselves have to say?

In 2013, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center conducted a survey of 694 U.S. K-8th grade classroom teachers to find out if, when, and how they use digital games in the classroom. The survey focused on the following:

• Comfort level and frequency of digital game use in the classroom
• Types of digital games played
• Benefits associated with using digital games use in the classroom
• Observations since integrating digital games
• Sources of learning about digital games
• Use of built-in-assessments
• Barriers regarding use of digital games

We found that games are becoming a more regular part of a teacher’s curriculum. Of those teachers who use games in the classroom (513 respondents), a majority (55%) use games in the classroom at least once a week and another quarter have kids play games at least once a month. And while desktop computers remain the primary technology that teachers use to play games (72%), tablets are gaining ground.

gamesandlearning.org

Building on our first national survey of teachers who use games, conducted in 2011, this year’s survey surfaces recommendations for future educational game development and advocacy. The overall goal of this research, led by Lori Takeuchi, is to connect the documented experiences of teachers with other research about video games and learning.

Today, we are excited to share some highlights of our forthcoming report, which will be published this fall, about teachers’ experience using games in the classroom.

Of those teachers who use games in the classroom (74%), a majority (55%) use games in the classroom at least once a week and another quarter have kids play games at least once a month. And while desktop computers remain the primary technology that teachers use to play games (72%), followed by interactive whiteboards,  tablets are slowly but surely gaining ground.

They survey asked how teachers find the games that they use: interestingly, more than published reviews about specific games, respondents reported that they rely largely on word of mouth, between recommendations from fellow teachers (48%), their own experience with the game (41%) and feedback from students (31%).

Teachers seem to find that using games in the classroom is beneficial: in particular, low-performing students seem to be more motivated by the use of digital games, according to 55% of respondents.

These data points are just a few of the findings that are part of a comprehensive report by Lori Takeuchi and Sarah Vaala to be published this fall. For more information, please see gamesandlearning.org.

This survey was designed by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and was fielded during a three-week period in Fall 2013 by VeraQuest, who recruited respondents from the uSamp online survey panel. The panel has over 2 million members in the U.S. who have been recruited through a number of different panel enrollment campaigns, and panelists are required to double opt-in to ensure voluntary participation in the surveys they are invited to complete. Adult respondents were randomly selected from a targeted uSamp panel of k-8 classroom teachers to be generally proportional of the demographic strata of total U.S. teachers. Once selected, respondents were invited to a protected web-based survey which ensured that only the intended recipient could complete the survey, which could be completed only once. There were 694 respondents from the U.S. who reported being classroom/specialist k-8 teachers who completed the survey.

Part 5 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Flickr/ Shannon Muskoff

Nobody likes high-stakes testing. The problems are well documented. But maybe games can help to change the way we approach assessment.

At least since John Dewey, educational theorists and scholars have been clear about the inherent shortcomings of thinking about education in terms of standardized, quantifiable outcomes. In order for instructional strategies to be successful at a large scale, they need to take individual differences under consideration. Not all students are the same. They don’t learn in the same ways and it’s a fantasy to believe we can accurately assess them all using identical rubrics. Likewise, a great many of our widely accepted developmental theories are only accurate in a vacuum; they fail to take all the subjective cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic factors into account.

Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is best known for his theory of “multiple intelligences.” “Human beings have very different kinds of intellectual strengths and these strengths are very, very important in how kids learn and how people represent things in their minds, and then how people use them in order to show what it is that they’ve understood,” he says.

Even if you disagree with his theory about different learning styles, it’s hard to disagree with the notion that making learning personal to students is beneficial.

But as teachers know, bringing that personalized level of attention and assessment in a classroom of 20 or 30 students is a challenge: identifying individualized learning objectives on a daily basis, imagining measurements of incremental achievement, monitoring for mastery, and undertaking ongoing formative and substantive assessments. Consider the compounded complexity for the hundreds or thousands of students in a single school. Tens of thousands in a district. Hundreds of thousands in each state. Millions in the United States of America and globally.

Adaptive and game-based learning technologies aim to untangle the complexity that makes widespread personalized instruction and assessment seem unfathomable. Behind the shiny graphics and mechanics, many games and apps feature complex assessment algorithms that collect and analyze student data. Sometimes that data is simply there for the teacher to view (and also for the student in the best implementations). Other times, the software is collecting data about the learner and adapting accordingly.

On the simplest level, adapting might mean changing the order in which the student is presented with challenges. But it can get way more complex, even factoring in metacognitive data and analyzing the confidence with which a student solves a problem or completes a level.

Adaptive games and apps isolate skills and iterate contextualized instructional sequences, creating precise curricula tailored to the needs, strengths, and challenges of the individual learner. In addition, by cross referencing the data of all students using the system, these technologies can also continually monitor overall effectiveness in a comparative way.

In order to understand how this works, you’ll need to step out of the ordinary way of thinking about education. We tend to break the school experience into three parts: instruction, practice, and assessment. The teacher delivers content to the student. The student does homework. We test for retention.

Games allow these three processes to take place all at once–instruction and assessment simultaneously happening through practice reimagined as play. The promise of game-based learning is not only about increased student engagement and intrinsic motivation, but also about changing the way we think about assessment so that it is no longer in a category by itself.

Using games, we eliminate the negative consequences of summative assessments and replace them with engaging formative assessments. Games provide the ability to  evaluate students continuously in order to understand how to improve our teaching throughout the year.

It’s not too hard to imagine. After all, this is what teachers already do in the classroom. We constantly change our teaching style so that it best serves the particular mix of learners in the room. When the pupil doesn’t “get it,” we instantly adapt our approach. Just think about how we all communicate casually in everyday conversation. We are personalizing assessment when we say, “do you know what I mean?” We are iterating instruction when we say, “think about it this way,” or, “in other words.”

All good teachers do this regularly, but they can only do this for a few of their students some of the time. It just wouldn’t be feasible to do it for everyone all the time. Humans are fallible and subjective. We just can’t match the speed and comprehensive efficiency of a computer.

However, in the not-too-distant future, and in a few schools even now, a teacher could tap an icon on a tablet every morning and receive precise assessment data about all the students in the class — data that can be organized and optimized in whatever way is preferable, information that can help teachers design more impactful human-to-human lesson plans.

Dave McCool, President and CEO of Muzzy Lane, a game developer that specializes in 3D multiplayer games for the classroom, is passionate about designing games that can help teachers reach students more effectively. “Unlike traditional assessment,” he says, “game-based learning provides moment-to-moment opportunities for learners to apply their knowledge and demonstrate competency while solving problems in a relevant context. Assessment data reflecting player decision-making can be used to present a personalized learning experience as the game adapts to the learner’s strengths and weaknesses.”

McCool is describing a model where assessment is so fully integrated into a contextualized everyday learning experience that familiar questions about accountability are rendered irrelevant. We may not even talk about assessment anymore. Instead, we’ll simply be able to leverage the data that comes out of ongoing gameplay. Games don’t replace tests; they make tests unnecessary.

The Institute of Play’s GlassLab is working on that very objective (Glass is an abbreviation for “games and learning assessments”). Their mission is to make continuous, research driven game-based assessments available for all standards.

Jessica Lindl, GlassLab’s general manager, reiterated that the enormous amount of data that comes out of game play, contextualized appropriately, has the potential to be “just as reliable as high stakes assessments.”

The unique thing about using gameplay data for assessment purposes is that it enables teachers to assess the choices that learners make rather than content they can regurgitate. Process is prioritized over the rote learning. The game monitors the decisions that learners make, evaluating students’ incremental progress. In other words, games assess how kids are learning rather than what they are learning.

Some people worry that the very notion of using games as assessments is problematic. Most of this criticism is more about the problem with summative assessment than it is with using games themselves. James Paul Gee, a longtime proponent and researcher of games who has written many books on the subject, doesn’t want to see us replace the current “toxic mess” of standardized tests with games. Like Muzzy Lane and GlassLab, Gee understands that, “in a game, assessment and learning are completely integrated. It is hard to tell them apart.” The key point is that good game-based learning should use data that comes from continuous gameplay for the purpose of ongoing formative assessment, not just replace tests with games in a way that barely addresses the current student experience.

Not only will game-based assessment translate into a better student experience, but also the data that games and adaptive learning systems provide will enable researchers to understand, with increasing precision, how students learn best. The promise is certainly exciting. But there’s also a scary side.

If you’re creeped out by the targeted advertising that shows up in your Facebook timeline, or beside your Google search results, imagine what the world would look like if advertisers had been tracking your decision making processes since grade-school. Our concerns about the NSA are nothing compared to the big brother surveillance state that we could inadvertently let into our classrooms.

None of the developers interviewed for this series say they’re interested in these nefarious uses of data. But teachers should still be on guard. Avoid free games and apps that make your students sign up with personal info. Chances are, if they’re free, you’re paying them with data. In addition, whenever you download an app for the classroom, read the terms of service carefully. When learning resources are cloud-based, make sure you agree with the privacy policy. Be cynical and skeptical and remember that part of your job is to protect your students. There’s a Department of Education guide on privacy and student data if you need more information.

Be cautious, but don’t be alarmed. Some of the fear around big data is just a fear of the unknown. In many ways, the world is changing more quickly than we can comprehend. We cannot slow it down, but we can take the ride mindfully.

Most importantly, we can use the new game-based technologies to educate a generation of citizens with more playful personalization than has ever been possible. Game-based learning has the potential to address many of the shortcomings and challenges that our current high-stakes testing environment presents.

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.