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:
- Identify goals and objectives – treat the game like you would any creative process, know your audience and create goals/objectives, strategies and tactics that accommodate your needs and theirs.
- Start small – until more empirical evidence is in, keep games in the realm of a side dish, not the whole meal.
- Keep it simple – look around you, the way you train now through simulations, role-playing, and group activities may be adaptable to games-that-teach. The point is a game doesn’t have to be complex or revolutionary to be effective. Which leads to the next general rule…
- Make it quick – a good embedded challenge will take 8 to 10 minutes to complete. Those are rough numbers, we’ve seen some good ones that just take a minute or two and some that take an hour, but those are exceptions.
- Learning is a narcissistic activity as, by extension, are games-that-teach – it’s not a bad thing, just a reality. The more you can put the user at the center of the game’s universe the more engaged and motivated they’ll be to play it.
- Include feedback (and competition) – at the very least provide the opportunity for the user to measure and view their own performance results and be able to improve on them. Even better is to let them compare their performance to their peers.
- Stay in their wheelhouse – each learner has a Zone of Proximal Development – the level of learning above their current competency that they can get to from their current level of knowledge and understanding. It’s important to have a feel for where the target group’s aggregate ZPD is and to stay within it (this also applies to core learning content).
- Include women in the development and testing process – digitally based games have long been a male dominated bastion both in terms of players and developers. If women are part of the target audience (and when are they not) they need to be included in both development and testing.
- Test early and often – most games can be effectively tried off-line to determine whether they’ll also work online. Incorporate pre-programming assessment into your plans and have a pool of (appropriate) testers available to provide feedback during the development process.
- Know the realities of measurement – if it’s a small, one-time use game you can probably assess its effectiveness through an overall learning assessment (does the user know and understand the content they were supposed to learn?). If, however, the game is a platform on which additional learning is to be built, performance metrics need to be designed into the game to help guide future development.
Illumen bottom line – while the jury is still out on how much games can impact teaching, the influence of digital game-based learning (in one form or another) on the overall learning environment is likely to be profound. The convergence of technology, infrastructure, need and attitude are all hitting a synchronous rhythm. If you haven’t yet, start small… but start now.
