At the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, we are constantly documenting the rapid changes in the digital media landscape, and we are now getting ready to embrace changes in our own neighborhood. This summer, Mel Ming, one of the Founders of the Cooney Center (along with former CEO Gary Knell) announced that he would retire after 15 years at the Workshop, first as COO, and since 2011, as the President and CEO. Mel serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Cooney Center. He has been a key champion of the Center and has done much to lead our emphasis on practical research that will benefit low-income and underserved communities. We are grateful for his global leadership on behalf of young children and their families and for his strong support for the growth of the Center’s reach and impact. Congratulations to Mel on his well-deserved retirement from official duties at the Workshop and Center: we know that he will always be a valuable contributor to our work.

Today, we welcome Jeffrey D. Dunn, a world class leader in children’s media and entertainment as he takes over as the fifth President and Chief Executive Officer of Sesame Workshop. Jeff’s previous posts at Nickelodeon, HiT Entertainment and as an advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University have made him an ideal choice to take over the helm of the iconic Sesame brand and to also help the Center grow. We are excited to embrace his vision for innovation and look forward to working closely with him in the months and years to come!

Part #20 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning Series

Flickr/Brad Flickinger

Even for educators who are excited about using games in the classroom, questions inevitably come up around the very real obstacles to implementation, and strategies for overcoming them.

A recent survey from the Games and Learning Publishing Council asked 700 teachers to identify and rank the major barriers to using games in the classroom. Here are the top 10 obstacles they list and ideas about how to overcome each one.

1. Insufficient Time

Forty-five percent of teachers surveyed reported that insufficient time is a barrier to implementing game-based teaching strategies. But this concern presumes that video games would take time away from instruction. It’s a matter of changing tactics and presumptions: games can be integrated into everyday curricula because they enable teachers to present academic concepts in a contextualized, experiential way. Imagine games like activities or projects that can either reinforce or introduce new concepts.

2. Cost

Forty-four percent of teachers surveyed reported that cost is prohibitive. It’s all too true that teachers lack the financial resources they need and often use their own money to purchase supplies. There’s not much that can be done to ameliorate this obstacle, though for motivated teachers, resources like Donors Choose and other crowd-sourced fundraising sites can certainly provide some options. The majority of tablet games are fairly cheap, ranging from $1 to $10. Many are also free, such as Questimate!, a game that introduces students to estimation skills. The cost of using any kind of new tool in school can be prohibitive, but for educators who want to make it happen, trying free games is a great first step.

3. Lack of Tech Resources

Thirty-five percent of teachers surveyed reported that they lack the technology resources to introduce game-based teaching strategies. This obstacle might have more to do with perception than reality. Though some tech corporations may push the notion that one-to-one device-to-student ratio is necessary, that’s not necessarily the case. Teachers can go a long way with learning games using just a few devices. Students can play the game in groups, collaborating and working together. Follow it up with a group writing project to describe how the game impacted their thinking about the subject matter. Have one group play the game while the others do non-digital activities. Rotate your students from one project to another.

4. Hard To Find Games That Fit Curriculum

Thirty-four percent of teachers surveyed reported that it’s hard to find games that fit the current curriculum. Check out Graphite, Playful Learning, and Educade for ideas. All three of these sites allow you to filter information about games by traditional subject areas and by grade level. Remember that the best way to use games is as a supplemental reinforcement for your traditional teaching. Don’t look for games that will teach your curriculum. Instead, look for games that might approach the same subject area from a different perspective.

5. Emphasis On Standardized Test Scores

Twenty-nine percent of teachers surveyed reported that an emphasis on standardized tests makes using learning games difficult. Game-design companies have been addressing this by attempting to align games with standards. Filament Games, for example, offers many learning games and each one includes a “standards map.” Check out their PLEX Life Science suite of games and how they map to various sets of science standards. These are fun, playful games that don’t “teach to the test,” but do align directly with state standards.

6. Not Sure Where To Find Quality Games

Twenty-seven percent of teachers surveyed reported that they don’t know where to find quality games. The big app stores don’t help much either; they want to sell games and apps more than they want to help students. See the sites listed above (number 4). All three of these sites offer sophisticated ways to filter search results and find specific games. Also, read How To Choose A Learning Game for more ideas.

7. Not Sure How To Integrate Games Into Instruction

Twenty-three percent of teachers surveyed reported that they’re not sure how to integrate games into instruction — thus the need for this guide! You’ll find ways to implement game-based learning, and understand the theoretical, pedagogical, and practical uses. In this guide, we show how to apply games to math and humanities education, as well as how games can facilitate interdisciplinary learning.

8. Unfamiliar With Technology

Seventeen percent of teachers surveyed reported that they’re unfamiliar with technology. That’s okay. Most of the writing about game-based learning focuses on digital media, but the truth is that you don’t necessarily need devices. At the Quest To Learn School in New York City, game design is a way of thinking, a paradigm. A great deal of their curriculum uses paper-based games rather than digital games. Check out their print and play games. There’s also the great Socratic Smackdown, which is makes it easier to add games to your classroom without technology.

9. Lack Of Administrative Support

Fourteen percent of teachers surveyed reported that lack of administrative support when it comes to games in the classroom. But with more and more data to support the use of games, teachers can use the new research to convince administrators. For example, an SRI research showed that students on the median score 12 percent better on standardized tests. This kind of research can help you make a strong case for using games for learning with your administrator.

10. Lack Of Parental Support

Nine percent of teachers surveyed reported a lack of parental support for games in the classroom. That’s clearly not the majority of parents’ perspectives as evidenced by the small percentage; what’s more, a Cooney Center report,  Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America, showed that more than half (57 percent) of parents say their children have learned “a lot” from educational media. Still, teachers may have to account for their use of games for learning, and in those cases, start slowly. Demonstrate to parents (as you may have done with administrators) why you’re using these tactics with evidence to back it up, and you’ll prove over time how well it’s working.

The word “hacker” was first associated with the ne’er-do-well swagger of the word “pirate.” Hackers disrupted systems that should not be disrupted, after all. We made movies about them—young, disenfranchised punk geniuses huddled in basements, monkeying with our belovedly predictable institutions. Hackers compromised security! Hackers made the status quo vulnerable! Hackers were unwelcome party crashers during a time when our collective had become more reliant on the integrity of our digital networks than on the integrity of wood or steel.

But like pirates, the dark implications of the hacker have more recently taken on a more gallant and aspirational air. If we could separate the intent from the skills, what might we see? Ingenuity, for certain—and a chutzpah potent enough to make disruption not only fashionable, but ordered from the top down.

We are now in the second machine age: a great leap that has brought with it a constantly-unfolding change so profound (like the steam engines and assembly lines of the first machine age) that we still can’t fully grasp its effects. What we do know, however, is that those among us with a hacker’s mindset—that curious, try-anything, question-everything affinity for turning the status quo inside-out and backwards—are ahead of everyone else. Here’s why.

1.  Chaotic growth requires leaders comfortable with chaos.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand. It is the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
— Eric Schmidt

In their brilliant book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee consider digitization as an engine of progress. They buy into Carlo’s Cipolla’s idea that economic history is a balance sheet of the power at man’s disposal. In an age where our mass computer power per dollar doubles every 18 months—and that computer power represents the pivot point of bounty and freedom—is it the non-imaginative, change-averse thinkers who will surf the wave instead of get thrashed by it? Are we equipping this generation with the swagger they need to ride it well?

Flickr / Thomas Hawk

Brynjolfsson and McAfee would say no, but they also call themselves “mindful optimists.” Which means there’s a course of action. In an interview with Smart Planet, they bring our attention to the way in which individuals, governments, and businesses responded to the steam and factories of the first machine age—with vigor. Keen to populate with those who would excel in this newly mechanized context, the American government devised compulsory universal education. When the economy switched to mechanized jobs, the ninety percent of Americans who used to work on farms (now, it’s down to two percent) were not set adrift to a fate of unemployment. They were re-skilled.

“We believe that if we take the right actions—including reinventing education, fostering entrepreneurship, and readjusting the tax code—we can harness the benefits of this second machine age…” says Brynjolfsson.

2.  The competitive landscape tilts in favour of people who have excelled *despite* being herded through the education system—not in favour of those who think and act as they were taught.

To create an organization that’s adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedents, to ‘waste’ time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.
— Gary Hamel

TED prizewinner Sugata Mitra describes the second machine age as a global computer made of people. These days, the personal skills and tools of individuals add up to the whole—and the RAM that powers positive change, he says, is creative curiosity. The educational system that exists now was devised centuries ago, with an agenda for studying and memorization. The digital age—which is fuelled by social collaboration—needs a self-directed system to flourish. Yet American researchers have discovered that over any given 4-year degree program, college students make little advancements in critical thinking, written communication, problem-solving and analytical reasoning. They’re still studying and memorizing, perhaps.

www.ted.com

“It’s quite fashionable to say that the educational system is broken. It’s not broken,” says Mitra. “It’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table—they don’t care. Why are we still teaching it?”

It’s somewhat of a paradox, but forward-thinking academics and educators such as Mitra are grappling with it—how can we, in an institutionalized system, teach our youth to break free of institutions and ‘unlearn’ to the point where they can be hackers?

Grapple on.

3.  Hackers are tapped into playfulness. Play makes solutions.

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer

The health of a society should be measured by the health of its play. So says The Altarum Institute, in The Play Deficit by Danielle Marshall—who affords unstructured play the same educational premium as math and reading.

In her Live Science article, Are Today’s Youth Less Creative & Imaginative?, Rachael Rettner peels back layers of how “the system” suppresses the innate creativity and playfulness of children—creating a massive shortfall in this creativity-driven world they will enter as adults. She cites a 2010 study by Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, who compiled 300,000 creativity tests dating back to the 1970s. She concluded that creativity has decreased among American children in recent years, with children becoming less able to produce unique and unusual ideas.

This is why hackers are pirates. Kids (and adults) with a hacker spirit push back against homogenous thought with divergent thought. But the good news? The maker movement—or a hacker-friendly, play-based education—counteracts the negative effects that school and our society have had on children’s’ playfulness, creativity, and critical thinking. We can get it back. Kim, Rettner, Miytra, and all of us at Beyond represent a groundswell of academic action.

It’s a swagger revolution of jerry-rigging, digressions from the expected, and foolish notions. Join us, won’t you?

Watch Beyond CEO Lital Marom speak at PechaKucha Vancouver about how hacking can foster children’s’ creative confidence and help them move beyond limiting narratives for a bright, re-engineered future. Follow along by subscribing to Beyond’s Facebook page. If you’re an educator or developer interested in creating new frameworks for learning creativity, join the Beyond community of co-creators. Contact us at <email>.

Part 19 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning

Screenshot from Teaching with Games: GLPC Case Study: Joel Levin

By now, you’ve probably read enough to be convinced that it’s worth trying games in your classroom. You understand that games are not meant to be robot teachers, replacing the human-to-human relationship. Games are a tool that teachers can use to do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently. Games provide a different approach to developing metacognitive skills through persistent self-reflection and iteration of particular skill sets. Games offer experiential contextualized learning through virtual simulation. Games can also offer an especially engaging interdisciplinary learning space.

There are so many great reasons to include digital games among classroom activities. But the landscape of learning games is very confusing and many teachers understandably have no idea how or where to begin.

Though every educator can find her own way, here are ideas for the first four steps to getting started with digital games in the classroom.

Step 1: Assess Your Resources

What platforms do you have available in your class? Is yours a BYOD (bring your own device) classroom, or do you have school-owned hardware to work with? Will games be a full class activity or just one station in a room full of learning activities?

Hardware is one of the biggest determining factors, and it will have a significant impact on the way you use games in the classroom. Each different platform has its pros and cons, and few teachers are actually in control of the purchasing decisions. If you’re fortunate enough to make decisions about which hardware to use, a variety is nice — students shouldn’t be siloed into one platform or another. Provide them with exposure to a variety of computing devices.

Tablets work great for lots of different reasons. Whether it’s an iPad or an Android, tablets offer a touchscreen interface and are still mostly used for entertainment, which makes them a good choice for gaming, but not necessarily for word processing. The old paradigm of one desktop PC for everything is quickly being replaced by single-use devices. Tablets have the largest selection of educational games, and at this point, the majority of developers seem to be focusing their attention there. Motion Math: Pizza!, for example, is a great tablet drill and practice app that contextualizes basic arithmetic. And Toontastic is a simple drag and drop animation and storytelling app that will get even very young kids thinking about writing their own stories.

Laptops also have their virtues. There’s no denying the convenience of a portable multi-use device with lots of processing power. There are different operating systems: Windows, Mac, Chromebook. The Windows/Mac debate has been going on for decades. It’s like arguing between a Honda and a Mercedes: both can reliably get you from point A to point B, but the Mercedes has a lot of luxury additions that make the ride smoother. If you’re willing to pay a premium for a more deluxe experience, go with a Mac. If not, the Windows laptop is sometimes a much more powerful option albeit with a bumpier ride. Chromebooks are basically web browsers; they can run any web-based software, but little else. The advantage is less technical problems and a lower price point. The sacrifice is that you can’t run a lot of popular software options. However, in the world of learning games, web-based options are more common than Windows or Mac specific options. The Chromebook, therefore, is adequate for many of the best learning games.

If you’re using Mac or Windows, Spore is a popular game that introduces students to the basics of biological adaptation. Duolingo, maker of the popular smartphone language learning app, also makes a web-based version that will work on any laptop (including Chromebooks). And Lightsail is web-based responsive literacy platform that many teachers rave about.

There are hybrid devices, too, of which the Microsoft Surface is the best example. It can function as a tablet or (with the keyboard attachment) as a full Windows laptop. Right now, most tablet game developers are not yet making Windows Tablet versions, but this will likely change in the near future. Microsoft is very dedicated to serving the education market (check out Bing for Education, a truly ad-free, completely private search engine for students).

The key point here is that before you can even begin your search, you’ll need to know how the hardware impacts your options.

Step 2: Find Games

Once you know what kind of hardware you have at your disposal, you can begin to search for games. But you probably already know from trying to find apps for your smartphone that searching the Google Play Store or the iOS App store can be overwhelming. Likewise, the Windows and Mac app stores can also be frustrating.

All of these companies have added education specific stores and/or categories, but it still feels like shopping in a department store: The big players can pay for featured placement and some of the best independent options remain buried at the bottom of pages and pages of search results. How can you get better, more even recommendations, or information about the lesser known games that are available?

One option is to read blogs that regularly review learning games. MindShift has a long list of game reviews and descriptions. You can also read my Forbes blog, as well as columns in Edutopia, EdSurge, Edudemic, TeachThought, and Gamesandlearning.org. Still, no matter how hard bloggers try to cover everything, the game developers that can afford expensive professional public relations firms are always going to get the most coverage. Where is a teacher to go for reliable information that puts students, rather than profit, first? My first choice is Graphite. (Disclosure: Graphite has a monthly app review column on MindShift that’s not related to this series, and no paid advertising.)

Graphite is a bit like Yelp — a crowd-sourced, (actually, teacher-sourced) site full of listings and ratings of educational apps and games. The site’s objective, according to Seeta Pai, Graphite’s vice president of research and digital content, is to reveal the vast amounts of games out there to educators and to “raise the bar of quality in the marketplace.” Teachers can filter Graphite ratings by platform, subject matter, and age level, looking for the right app. One of the most useful features are the editorial reviews and comments from other teachers, who comment on the practicality and effectiveness of the games and apps.

Take, for example, Slice Fractions, a short-form game that aims to teach fractions to students grades 2-5. Graphite rates it highly in all three categories: engagement, pedagogy, and support. It lists pros and cons. The review categories — What’s it like? Is it good for learning? How can teachers use it? — provide usable information written specifically for teachers. A sample teacher review includes: “visually based math app is like ‘angry birds’ for fractions,” writes one teacher from Virginia.

After you determine what kind of hardware you’ll be using, Graphite is the easiest way to search for games. The only limitation is that the site breaks down games and apps into traditional education categories. This is great, but if it’s your only source, you might miss useful but obscure ways of thinking outside the common learning paradigm. So it’s also important to keep reading the blogs for outside-the-norm ideas. Because they’re beholden to “newsworthiness,” blogs tend to cover the more innovative, or seemingly revolutionary, ed-tech.

Step 3: Play Games

After choosing a game, you have to play it. Really play it. Play it all the way through and make sure you know it intimately.

Games are not the same as textbooks or handouts. You don’t prepare in the same way. This is not about just making sure you’re familiar enough with the material that you can facilitate a discussion. Nor is it about just understanding the mechanics well enough that you can provide technical support, helping your students understand how to operate the game. Instead, preparing to assign a game is about play.

Play is exploration. It involves imagination. It means investigating the world of the game and feeling the frustration, flow, and fiero that goes along with playing it. When you engage with the game, you not only try to see the game from the perspective of your students, you also understand how the game presents the material. Before students play, teachers can introduce concepts in ways that resonate with the game. After students play, teachers can refer back to the game’s particular way of conceptualizing an idea.

The goal is not just to add games; it is to integrate learning games into existing curricula. If games are used as babysitters, simply to keep the students occupied, or superficially “engaged,” or to fill the time, the criticisms will be true: games are problematic. Nobody needs robot teachers. But when great teachers use the games to introduce and/or reinforce material, they become another extremely effective classroom project or activity. In order to do this, teachers need to play the games themselves. Or even better, when time permits, play alongside students.

Step 4: See How Others Do It

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has a great video series about how teachers are using games in the classroom.

In this video, Joel Levin talks about the way he uses MinecraftEDU in his second grade classroom. He’s clear that it involves creating a structure with boundaries, designing activities, that provide meaningful learning experiences for the students.

See how Ginger Stevens uses games for sixth grade special education at Quest to Learn School. The immersive environment that she spotlights in this video is especially interesting, it’s a reminder that game-based learning doesn’t always mean kids glued to a computer screen.

Lisa Parisi describes how she uses games freely available from BrainPop in her fourth grade classroom. Note how she ties it together with project-based learning. Plus, she describes the transitions from board games to digital games.

Seventh and eighth graders learn computer science and coding in Steve Isaacs’ classroom. He uses Gamestar mechanic to teach game design. But it goes beyond the computer, his students write up game plans first and workshop the games together after they’re built.

Check out the entire series, Teaching With Games: Video Case Studies to get an idea of what other teachers are doing with games in the classroom.

Step 5: Find Support

Game-based learning is getting very popular, but finding support remains difficult. Most education conferences are adding games and learning tracks, or at least adding games to their ed-tech tracks. In addition, most game developers recognize that professional development is one of the biggest obstacles to adoption, and often provide video tutorials and other materials for teachers on their websites.

For more general support and resources, there are a number of websites cropping up specifically for the purpose of providing teachers with resources around ed-tech. Two sites that are specifically focused on games in the classroom are Playful Learning and Educade. Both are full of articles, videos, and other resources that can help you think of creative ways to integrate games into your teaching. For example, learn how to use the game Quandary to teach ethics. Find lesson plans for using Angry Birds as an intro to Physics. (They also have reviews that can help you choose a game).

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop and the Institute of Play are also good places to look for information and support. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center focuses on research and evidence around digital media and learning. The Institute of Play is focused on helping to bring a game-based mindset into our common education practices. Check out TeacherQuest for game design inspired professional development, or the MobileQuest CoLab for a two week summer camp like introduction to game-based curriculum design and ed-tech integration.

It can feel overwhelming to consider adding learning games to the classroom. But once you get started you’ll be amazed at the results. But don’t be afraid to jump right in — it’s worth the effort!

Related

The debate on net neutrality is old news by now, and perhaps even John Oliver has accepted that Federal Communications Commissioner Tom Wheeler seems unlikely to change his mind. But supporters of net neutrality have shown comparable iron will: The protest today staged by Netflix, Reddit, and Vimeo (among others) could be an important step towards ensuring a free and open Internet. But beyond that, we all might look to the development of public education for a preview of coming attractions.

Like the Internet, public education in America has never been taken for granted. It may surprise you to know, for instance, that the Department of Education (as an office of the executive branch) is only 34 years old. There did exist an Office of Education, established in  spent the first half of the 20th century as a refugee: rejected by the Department of the Interior, adopted by the Federal Security Agency, then (in 1953) poorly redefined as the Department of Health, Welfare, and Education. Thus, with America’s 19th century population boom (it more than tripled from 1840-1900), those who traveled far and fought hard for American citizenship found no education at the other side of the border.

(Wikipedia)

They may not have been surprised, though. If any immigrant, freed slave, or Native American had read either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, she would have found no promise of education, no mention of “education” even once. Thomas Jefferson supported the idea in later writings as a tenet of “the preservation of freedom and happiness,” but even so, was suspicious of compulsory education for all citizens. This view stalled the debate for at least another century.

Edmund Dwight, a Springfield businessman

After all, something offered for free isn’t necessarily accepted as a public good, and as any serious debate unfolds, the two sides will invariably sprout new branches and thorny knots. Even the term “public education” was hard to accept at face value. At its outset, the Massachusetts Board of Education was subsidized by a wealthy Springfield businessman and in 1884, one man wrote to a North Carolina newspaper complaining that “Under the free school system this year it will cost me besides my 2 mill tax, $95 to send my boy 13 years old to school 10 months. Had to put $70 in a school house and subscribe $25 to get a good teacher. That is free education, isn’t it?”

Dogged by debates and bureaucratic inertia, public education finally went national in 1918 when Mississippi became the last state to make it mandatory for all children. A free and open Internet may take just as long to win. Additionally, if we agree that public education in America hasn’t been a perfect success for all these 97 years, we can also agree that no matter what the FCC decides, net neutrality will continue to demand our attention for as long as we have a net.

Part 18 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning

Getty

To make sense of the broad and complex world of games and learning, we’re inclined to create neatly organized lists and categories. The truth is that there are so many different kinds of learning games, it’s difficult to break them down into clear-cut categories. Especially in an atmosphere of ed-tech entrepreneurship that aims to disrupt our habitual way of thinking about education, familiar classification structures can sometimes hold us back more than they move us forward.

It feels contradictory to divide up the learning games landscape after arguing, earlier in this series, that games can help address the educational need to break down the boundaries between traditional academic content areas. Taxonomy is always tricky and useful only to the degree in which it simultaneously acknowledges ambiguity and fuzziness. But to make it easier to digest, let’s explore some classifications.

What criteria matter when considering learning games? First, ask the broad questions: How and when a game can be used? Then, be more specific: What kind of game is best suited to particular learning objectives?

Short-form, Long-form and Crossover Games

When teachers plan activities for the classroom, we’re usually constrained by the school schedule. Time is set aside for class and we need to work within this framework. Teachers, therefore, think in blocks of time; video game developers don’t. Most video games are played over a longer period of time, often broken down into smaller individual sessions.

Think about the earliest iterations of “Super Mario Brothers.” Although you may play only for 30-40 minutes at a time, the game remembers your progress and you can come back to start again from just where you left off last time. Gamers remain on a long continuum toward mastery. How does such a journey translate into the classroom?

In their report, Games for a Digital Age: K-12 Market Map and Investment Analysis, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center makes the distinction between short-form and long-form games. They point out that in a day that’s divided into 40-minute class periods, “transition time and time for instruction or discussion connected to curricular material frequently leaves only 20 to 30 minutes for actually using a learning game.” Short-form games can easily fit within that time frame, but long-form games require a multi-period commitment.

Short-form games tend to resemble the kinds of casual smartphone games that even adults tend to fiddle with during idle time. The majority of games recommended in this series have been short form. “Wuzzit Trouble,” for example, the game Keith Devlin created in order to allow students to actively experience number partitions, can occupy a player for hours, or it can be played for 10-15 minutes.

Played in small doses, short-form games can serve as great interactive examples, reinforcing and supplementing a teacher-driven curriculum. Short-form games tend to work best for learning when they’re focused on a specific skill set or concept. Think of them like brief simulations. For argumentation and rhetoric, check out GlassLab’s “Mars Generation One: Argubot Academy.” For environmental science, try Filament Games’ “Reach For The Sun.”

Long-form games tend to be more open-ended and intricate. These games often start simply and expand over time, so they can easily form the backbone of an entire curriculum. Games like Muzzy Lane’s “Government In Action” can replace a textbook.

The Cooney Center reports that recent research “points to the significant engagement factor produced by long-form learning games.” The coherent unification around both short-term and long-term goals leads increased motivation and ongoing commitment to class projects. In addition, long-form games tend to foster skills like “critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, creativity, and communication.”

Long-form games, such as Amplify Learning’s “Lexica,” are great for teachers who are really comfortable with video games and have dependable access to newer hardware. Or, try a game-based curriculum, like the Mind Research Institute’s “ST Math.”

Crossover Creative Game-based Platforms can fit into either one of these categories. They are flexible in the way they can be implemented. “Minecraft” is a great example of a game that can be used as either short form or long form. Teachers can create short one-time simulation-based assignments, or longer multi-period projects. Game design and coding platforms, such as Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, or ScratchJr, also cross over and can be used in either short-form or long-form applications. Teachers could introduce these platforms early in the year so that kids become familiar with the interfaces; then they can be used throughout the year for a variety of projects that don’t even have to be related to one another.

GAME GENRES

There are also different genres of games. Puzzlers are probably the most familiar kind of game. They involve identifying a pattern or system and arranging objects according to a certain set of rules. “Tetris” is not only the best-selling video game of all time, but also a fairly simple puzzle game. Many games that began in non-digital versions — solitaire, mahjong, Sudoku — are also puzzlers. In fact, almost all games have an underlying puzzle structure. Otherwise, they’d be completely random, with no patterns whatsoever, and not much fun.

All video games, like puzzlers, are about pattern recognition. And once the player understands the pattern, the challenge comes from either more intricate puzzles (more complicated levels), or from changing the speed or circumstances in which the player needs to solve the puzzle.

When this happens, the game becomes a Drill and Practice game. Great games like “DragonBox Algebra” and “DragonBox Elements” combine drill and practice with increasingly difficult puzzles. Both of these types of games are especially well suited to mathematics. Traditional manipulatives and non-digital games are plentiful in math because those skills are easily translated into simple patterns. Video game technologies allow developers to design interactive versions of classic math problems.

When developers add compounding puzzles to be solved through a series of moves, it becomes a Strategy Game. Strategy games are also often multiplayer. And when it comes to learning games, it’s common for them to be focused on history. Games like “Historia” or “Making History” can offer experiential simulations of historical events. When students control the armies, key moments in geopolitics suddenly feel substantially more dynamic than just a chronological account of battles. Games like these work well when implemented alongside traditional lecture and research strategies. The long-form strategy games offer an engaging motivation for students to understand and internalize the material.

Some strategy games ask players to embody individual characters. These become Role-Playing Games. Think of “Dungeons and Dragons.” Digital role-playing games are very similar to dice-based role-playing games. Digital platforms, however, make the logistics easy and efficient. No need for tons of cards, binders of scenarios, and little pieces; these things can be employed virtually.

“Mission US: Cheyenne Odyssey” is a great example of an educational role-playing game. As the game is described, players become Little Fox, a Northern Cheyenne boy whose life is changed by the encroachment of white settlers, railroads, and U.S. military expeditions. Think of it like a historically accurate digital choose-your-own-adventure book that takes place between 1866 and 1876. Students imagine themselves in the role of a Cheyenne youth. It makes something that seems initially foreign immediately relatable. All of the “Mission US” games are free and come with exhaustive teacher guides.

Some games offer a world of experience without clear objectives. These are called Sandbox Games. Minecraft is the most well-known example of a sandbox game. Just like its life-world namesake, Minecraft is an open-ended creative space but with virtual shovels. Certainly the block world has unique properties (physics engine), but players can do whatever they want within those parameters. MinecraftEdu is a version of the game modified for education that allows teachers to create even more specific parameters that correlate to lesson plans. You can read a lot more about how teachers use Minecraft here.

This list is certainly not exhaustive. There are other kinds of game genres and even subcategories within each genre. But the learning game space is still in its infancy. So many possibilities have not yet been explored. Platformers, fighters and first-person shooters, for example, are among the most popular commercial genres, though I’ve yet to see a good educational implementation of these genres’ conventions. One thing is for sure: creative educators will continue surprising us with ingenious game-based tools that can help teachers and students achieve success together.

Let this list be a starting point to help you to choose appropriate games for your classroom.

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.

Flickr/ David Goehring

This summer, the School Library Journal stoked a debate long simmering in libraryland. Print books or ebooks: Which are better for helping children learn to read? Children’s librarians have strong opinions on the subject, as shown in essays published last week with battling headlines. In one corner of the ring: “The book is far superior to the ebook for literacy.” In the other: “Ebooks enhance the development of the whole child.” The essays came on the heels of two articles for SLJ written by Annie Murphy Paul, a recent New America fellow, that replay the controversies surrounding technology and give eight reasons why “print trumps digital” for reading.

Given the emotions stirred on both sides, it would be easy miss the point on which all writers agreed: Children’s librarians and school librarians can play — and should play — a huge role in  modeling what it looks like to read with children and to help build discriminating tastes in quality books, e- or otherwise. We need twenty-first-century librarians to become what I and others have come to call “media mentors” for children and families.

This post is part of Seeding Reading, series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

We often get stuck on the pros and cons of e-books, especially when it comes to early literacy. Print books offer beautiful illustrations and enable children to touch and feel the weight of the paper as they turn the pages. Devoid of backlit screens, they are easier on the eyes. Plus, they come with no distractions.  “It is the book, not the e-book, that invites and sustains parent-child interaction and the personal and intimate experience of sharing and talking through reading,” argues Kathy Kleckner of the Children’s Library of Minnesota. “Books need us.“

E-books have the benefit of interactive features, audio read-alouds and narrative questions built into their very pages, not to mention the ability to be stored en mass and clicked open anywhere at anytime. “Such tools can support and enhance adults’ role in supporting development of the whole child,” write Maryanne Martens and Dorothy Stoltz, librarians on the board of LittleELit, a website run by librarians who examine children’s apps and e-books.  Just because a book is in print, doesn’t mean that it’s of higher quality. Print books, the authors argue, can just as easily feature “poor writing and mediocre illustrations that often function as promotional material for other branded merchandise.”

In an article for SLJ a few years ago, I reported on Julie Hume, a reading teacher in Missouri who was testing whether the read-along features in e-books would help one group of her students learn to read compared to another “control group” who didn’t have access.  The article was simplistically titled “Are E-Books Any Good?,” but the aim was to help readers see the complexity of the issue. For struggling readers, Hume was amazed and pleased to find that the narration and animation in the e-books helped her students with reading fluency.  And yet she was worried that they could also become a crutch. She wanted to help them read a book with text alone, whether digitized or printed, without “handholding.”

The answer to “e-books or print books?” clearly depends on which books, read in which way, for which children.  It requires the intervention of thoughtful human beings — caring adults, discerning librarians, media mentors — who know the children they are trying to help and know the books with the features or qualities that match the children’s needs. It means equipping educators and librarians with the skills to be choosy and the ability to communicate those ideas to parents, as outlined in our March report, Envisioning a Digital Age Architecture for Early Education.  Just as with print books, we should not assume that the simple presence of media will magically lead children to learn. Nor, as with print books, should we assume that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have easy access to ebooks, let alone access to adults who read to them or with them each day.

In a recent post on the Fred Rogers Center blog, LittleELit founder Cen Campbell reminds us that  “evaluation and curation of children’s media have always been essential elements in the children’s librarian’s job description.” Martens and Stoltz, who already describe themselves as media mentors, wrote in their SLJ essay that they would steer children away from media “that focus on clever tech tricks at the expense of high quality text and art.” Among the questions they would ask:  “Does the app or media experience reduce a child to a mere spectator?”

One of the most important tasks for these mentors will be to re-orient parents and caregivers who are accustomed to seeing digital media as a babysitter.  Early research shows that e-books and other media can be used to help children learn words and recall information from stories if adults are using dialogic questioning and other read-aloud techniques with their children while they watch and read together. Studies on “joint media engagement,” as it is known in the field, are building on the “co-viewing” research of the early days of Sesame Street and showing potential for helping children learn.

But the bells and whistles of e-media can be powerful.  As a parent myself, I am no stranger to the days when it’s easier to hand over the device, put children on autopilot, and never think to ask about what they are watching, playing, or reading.  We need media mentors to encourage a different mindset and help all of us become more thoughtful about the media that children use, ebooks or otherwise.

For more: See my TEDx talk on apps, ebooks and media mentorship and Print Books vs. E-Books by Cynthia Chiong, Jinny Ree, Lori Takeuchi, and Ingrid Erickson.

The author, taking a much-needed break from teaching video game design. (Photo by MOUSE)

He called himself MechaStayPuft. That was the username and avatar he would use across all of the game design platforms we used. It struck me as an odd choice for a teenager, a compound reference to Ghostbusters, which turned 30 this past June, and Gozilla vs. MechaGodzilla, which predates Ghostbusters by a decade. How did a student who couldn’t have been born before the Clinton administration be acquainted with two relics of 70s and 80s counterculture?

Regrettably, I never found out. MSP wouldn’t make it past class 5. And he wasn’t the only deserter, either. By the seventh and last class one week ago, only two students had stuck it out all the way. This seemed unreasonable for a free course on custom designing video games. What did I (the instructor) do wrong?

The truth is, these disappointing attendance figures weren’t directly my fault. Teenagers today may watch more television and consume more media than ever, but they also go to summer camp and join their families for extended vacations. And since the class was hosted by the New York Public Library (and co-sponsored by MOUSE), no commitment was required and students could come and go as they pleased.

My hope was that the subject matter would be interesting enough to capture their attention, making them want to come back every week. But here’s what I learned, that proved the contrary:

• Making games is hard. Despite the ample tools that make it possible (we were using two fantastic ones, E-Line Media’s Gamestar Mechanic and MIT’s Scratch), the individual virtues of patience and curiosity are rare and harder to teach. And not every student enjoys activities that are self-directed, which much of the curriculum was designed to be.
• While most students play games, only a few of them have ever given thought to what makes games tick. And assuming that they would find this interesting from the outset was a trap. The craft of designing games requires an academic toolbox that not all students are likely to have. It might have been better for me to spend less time inculcating these aspects and instead playing around with the games themselves.
• Social interaction supports curiosity. Scratch’s kid-friendly language is a massive boon to computer literacy, but even more important is the fact that Scratch has been built around an online community, encouraging social interaction and idea sharing, and rewarding curiosity with positive reception. The most successful students, I noticed, were ones who had someone they cared about in the room, either a parent or a sibling. If I had the class to do over again, I would have revisited the social aspect of game design, perhaps even asked the students to work in teams from the outset. That is, after all, how professional game designers tend to work.
• Games incorporate multiple disciplines, and not every student comes to class on the same page. During one lesson, I asked the students to change the color of a sprite within a Scratch game. Fortunately, Scratch’s online software includes a native image editor for editing sprites. It looks a lot like MS Paint, actually, and most students had no trouble heading straight to the paint bucket tool to change Mario’s overalls from blue to turquoise. By the end of the lesson, though, I noticed one student who had made no changes. The reason: he didn’t know what a paint bucket was.

Luckily, the same student was more than enthusiastic to learn how to put devil’s horns on Mario’s head.

Photo by MOUSE

In the end, it’s likely that seven class sessions are not enough to build a game; and the patience it takes to finish a game is hard to expect in that time. Most of the students were delighted to discover how easy it is to remix an already designed game within Scratch, replacing a pancake with a pizza for example, but to build something truly original that came from their own imaginations and lived up to their standards was highly improbable in the time we had. The final dispatch from MechaStayPuft came during the fourth class. It said:

I delayed reading the blog post until the last class, and by then Mecha had already gone.

MechaStayPuft, if you’re reading this, I only hope you’re on Scratch designing a game where Prof. Venkman has to face off against a giant metal lizard.