Creating Games-That-Teach

Fifty to 60% of the project inquiries we’ve received over the past year have included questions about Games-That-Teach. There exists both a curiosity about what’s possible and angst over their perceived complexity and application.

What are Games-That-Teach? Part of what creates angst is the broad definition of what a GTT is. Also known as Game-Based Learning, the simple definition, “a learning-based activity that challenges a participant to a contest or task with an outcome that is both measurable and comparable,” is broad enough to encompass many content delivery formats. These games are often used to help audiences better understand information, improve performance, manage situations, think critically, problem solve and make decisions.

GTTs generally fall into one of three categories – Edutainment, Training Simulators, and Serious Games. They may be as sophisticated as a virtual reality environment like World of Warcraft (over 11.5 million unique players worldwide) and the popular FarmVille (over 82.4 million unique players worldwide), or as basic as Tic-Tac-Toe or Scrabble. It is the element of challenge that differentiates games from other content delivery tools.

Do Games Work? Here’s where you can relax a bit. Despite being around since 1962, there’s little empirical evidence that digital games as a whole are better at teaching than other, more conventional content delivery formats. Again, the variety and complexity of game types combined with the huge differences in the goals and objectives they seek to achieve and a limited ability to collect meaningful performance metrics conspires to keep the value of game’s contributions to learning enveloped in a haze. We think we see a form but the edges are fuzzy. The reason we think games are effective in the learning environment is that they clearly support three dominant learning theories:

• Activity Theory: GTTs engage learners in non-threatening virtual environments, allowing them to participate in and experiment with the content.
• Situated Learning: GTTs can safely immerse learners in a variety of virtual environments
• Experiential Learning: during gameplay, learners gain knowledge, experience or practice through direct experience.

The quick answer to the question “Do Games Work?” is, on an epistemic level (games that help players learn to solve problems that don’t have standardized answers) an emphatic… probably, but on a training level the answer is, almost certainly.  In fact, Europe is well ahead of North America in the productive use of digital game-based learning in the corporate training environment.

Our most successful game-based learning programs have been those that incorporate game components as part of the pedagogy, using them to reinforce concepts and create deeper learning.

Creating the Right Game for The Situation – now is an appropriate time to get into the game pool by starting at the shallow end. Here are 10 heuristics that will help keep you afloat while you learn to swim:
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Good Learning is Great Marketing

You saw this paradigm shift coming – now it’s here! 6 steps to catching up.

In my hands is a tube of Crest and a tube of Colgate toothpaste. Chances are better than 50/50 (Colgate 32 share; Crest 27 share) that you’re using one or the other, but do you know why?

Toothpaste is a relatively low-involvement decision and you probably made your choice years ago based on criteria like brand recognition, price, taste, efficacy, the fact that your significant other likes the smell of your breath in the morning… it’s a growing reality of the marketplace however, that as products become increasingly similar to one another in features, quality and price (commoditization), the more important it becomes for marketers to differentiate through education. The speed, impact and efficiency with which product knowledge can be delivered to a target audience will increasingly identify leaders and followers.

Here are six suggestions that should help move the process in the right direction:

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Games-That-Teach – Simple Works!

We’re well beyond the debate as to whether games-that-teach enhance the delivery of learning content (they do), so why aren’t we seeing more of them? The two biggest challenges we encounter are:

1. The perception that they take a long time to design and build and are, subsequently, very expensive.
2. A perceived need to be the next incarnation of World of Warcraft in order to capture the learner’s attention.

We were at an educational gaming conference a couple years back, where a grant was awarded for the design and production of a game prototype in support of a specific curriculum. Twenty-seven months and tens of thousands of dollars later the project is still in development. The developers are the only beneficiaries of learning in that scenario.

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Analytics is Hard!

It’s an interesting conundrum. Never has our economy been more competitive. Never have companies been under more pressure to make every aspect of their operations ultimately efficient. Never has there been a more tangible link between learning and productivity . . . and yet, the number of organizations that can effectively measure and assess the performance of their learning programs or can accurately analyze visitor interaction with their web-based learning initiatives is less than 12%.

The reasons are easy to explain, but difficult to change.

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Higher Education turns to Interactive

Purdue University continually explores the future of interactive learning in an effort to find effective and engaging content delivery methods for it’s faculty and students. On August 28th Purdue’s Vet School invited Illumen Group along with Dr. James “Butch” Rosser of The Stealth Learning Company to present the topic of Experiential Learning and how it’s shaping both academic and corporate learning environments. Over three sessions, the trio provided insight on Experiential Learning’s past, present, and future. Audience members consisted of faculty from Purdue’s Vet Sciences, Nursing, Engineering and Agriculture Departments.

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The New Illumen - Illumen Group

All of our business analysts and consultants said “focus on one thing and do it better than anyone else.” Normally we would have taken their advice, but the reality was that Illumen Studios often found itself part of a three-legged stool with at least one of the other two legs weak and frequently missing.

The problem? We were designing and producing tactical learning programs (leg 2) that had limited strategic foundations (leg 1) and almost never an effective measurement and analysis component (leg 3).

The solution? Become a really good stool maker, not just a really good stool leg maker. We added some of the sharpest strategic minds in learning, to help develop sound, successful learning strategies; and, some of the most analytic minds in Web analytics to help measure program and participant performance.

Under our new name, Illumen Group, we partner with corporate and academic entities involved in knowledge transfer through learning, training and marketing initiatives, by providing services along three core and contiguous channels:

Illumen Consulting - provides CPLP certified and experienced, strategic planning, instructional design and creative system design to help client’s optimize their use of technology in learning and information transfer.

Illumen Studios - brings award winning and comprehensive content, design and production talent to the creation and implementation of interactive digital and print platforms.

Illumen Analytics - provides the means and the metrics required to accurately assess the performance of a Program and/or a Program’s Participants and to visualize the analysis.

It’s a complete approach to learning that helps clients find stability while building a solid foundation from which ultimately efficient learning systems can grow.

Can we still provide just one leg if that’s all that’s needed? Sure, and with our custom approach to projects, that leg should look and feel just like the other two. In the end though, we think our clients’ lives will be simpler and their businesses stronger if they can find a really good stool, not just a really good leg, to stand on.