Elisabeth Hahn and Geoff Marietta

Disruptive students can be a big challenge for teachers in charge of a room full of 30 students. There isn’t always time to get to the bottom of student behavior and in a large class those students can derail learning for everyone. But what if there was a way to help kids stop acting out and show more empathy for classmates and teachers?

A group of Harvard education researchers have developed a virtual simulation for “walking in another person’s shoes” to help students relate to one another better. It’s part of a project called Social Aspects of Immersive Learning (SAIL) funded by the National Science Foundation. “The ability to accurately read people is really important to make compromises,” said Elisabeth Hahn, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Education in a recent edWeb webinar.

The technical term is “social perspective taking” and it means understanding another person by taking in their thoughts, feelings and motivations. Accurately reading another person requires both motivation and ability, qualities that Hahn and other researchers are discovering can be taught.

The benefits of reading others are well documented, Hahn said. Taking in social perspective helps people become less ego-centric, decreases use of stereotypes, increases perspectives of similarity, and diminishes social aggression. These effects could make a big impact on many classrooms where the success of the lesson can hinge on how well a teacher is able to interact with the students. “It becomes much easier to empathize and leads to benefits in relationships and ultimately educational outcomes for kids,” Hahn said.

In an effort to create an experience that will help build these types of positive relationships through nuanced social perspective, Hahn’s team used a video game simulation to give participants the experience of “walking in another’s shoes.”

[RELATED READING: Empathy: the Key to Social and Emotional Learning]

The scenario involves a confrontation between a park ranger and a golf course owner who share land, but disagree over how to use it. The simulation allows a participant to play the role of the golf course owner, walking around in his world, talking to his colleagues and getting a sense for his perspective and opinions about the world. The player then has the same experience walking in the shoes of the park ranger. Finally, the player is asked to negotiate from the perspective of the golf course owner with the park ranger over various differences of opinion related to how the land should be treated. Each of the points of negotiation had a money value attached, giving the player a stake in the outcome of the negotiations.

“There was a pretty large positive effect from walking in the shoes of the ranger and we seemed to get down to what caused this to happen,” said Geoff Marietta, another doctoral candidate on the research team. Participants were more likely to compromise in the negotiations resulting in positive relationship building between the golf course owner and the park ranger. “What caused the effect on the relationship was really enhanced social perspective taking and people perceiving greater behavioral similarity,” Marietta said.

The researchers also experimented with giving participants written information about the park ranger’s perspective, but that didn’t improve willingness to compromise or negotiate. When they gave participants a detailed transcript, however, they were able to achieve negotiation results and positive relationship building similar to those of participants who walked in the virtual shoes of the park ranger.

“This has great potential to use virtual environments to improve interpersonal relationships that are not possible in the real world, to actually walk in the shoes of another party,” said Marietta. So far researchers have tested the game on adults and a few middle school students, but they are looking for more test subjects.

The researchers used a virtual world created in Unity, a web-based application that could be easily used in schools. They’d like to build out a virtual school so that students could interact with peers and teachers in different ways, helping them gain skills in social perspective taking that would allow them to build positive relationships within a school context, hopefully leading to greater academic and social success.

The research team sees the technique as widely applicable since communication and negotiation can so easily break down in any context. Teacher training, language development and management training could all benefit from the ability to understand the perspective of another. Researchers also hypothesize the technique could work well with bullies.

SimCity

As game-based learning gains momentum in education circles, teachers increasingly want substantive proof that games are helpful for learning. The game-makers at the non-profit GlassLab are hoping to do this with the popular video game SimCity.

GlassLab is working with commercial game companies, assessment experts, and those versed in digital classrooms to build SimCityEDU, a downloadable game designed for sixth graders. Scheduled to be be released in the fall of 2013, it builds on SimCity’s city management theme, but provides specific challenges to players in the subject of STEM.

“The big pain point we’ve heard from teachers is that they cannot entertain their kids to the level that they are being entertained outside of the classroom,” said Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab. “They want to be able to create meaningful learning experiences and they just can’t compete with the digital tools their kids are accessing all the time.”

Teachers have been using the commercial version of SimCity as a classroom tool for a long time, but with the newest version recently released and the EDU version soon to follow, GlassLab is trying to convene an online community of educators already working in the space, asking them to think creatively about what the game could do, offering lesson plans, and helping teachers to collaborate and share ideas.

SimCityEDU grew out of research conducted by the MacArthur foundation on how gaming can mirror formative assessments [PDF] – measuring understanding regularly along the learning path, rather than occasionally or at the end of a unit, as is most common. Their research found that games gather data about the player as he or she makes choices within the game, affecting the outcome. In games, players “level-up,” moving on to higher levels when they’ve mastered the necessary skills; similarly teachers scaffold lessons to deepen understanding as a student grasps the easier concepts.

[RELATED READING: Money, Time and Tactics: Can Games Be Effective in School?]

SimCityEDU, funded by the Gates and Macarthur foundations, will provide assessments that are aligned with Common Core State Standards. The EDU version uses the same code as the commercial game, but with the addition of using students’ choices during challenges as a method of assessment. GlassLab is still working to develop all the challenges based on focus-group feedback on student interests, but the one challenge they know they’ll include focuses on the environment, based on positive feedback from the focus groups.

“These kids are fascinated by the environment,” Lindl said.

Students will be asked to conduct interviews and look at research to determine what kind of power plant to build in the town. As they play, taking photo documentation, interpreting the information they’ve gathered, drawing conclusions, graphing the data and finally making a decision, the game assesses each choice. Teachers will have a tool to see how each child’s play matches up against Common Core standards.

And game developers hope that the incremental data will help teachers know when to step in and offer more help. For example, if an interview contradicts scientific evidence, the student will have to discern bias, figure out how to weight the various pieces of evidence differently, and back up conclusions with data and text.

SimCityEDU will not go to market until third-party assessor, SRI International, has validated by testing students who’ve played the game using a completely different assessment tool to ensure the game works.

FOCUSED LEARNING VS. EXPLORATION

GlassLab plans to offer the downloadable game at little to no cost for schools and teachers, Lindl said. However, the clear narrative and objectives within SimCityEDU depart from other commercial games that have been appropriated by teachers — like Minecraft. That game offers a free-form experience that teachers can easily manipulate to serve their lessons, a quality many teachers like.

[RELATED READING: Teachers Transform Commercial Game for Class Use]

“We want teachers to be able to choose between a free exploration or something more focused,” Lindl said. But there’s a catch. If educators want to use the broader SimCity world for free-form exploration they’ll have to buy the commercial license – a cost of about $60. Getting both the focused and free-form experience could cost more than many educators are willing to pay.

Not all education experts agree that assessment should be built into games. “The game should be a place of play and experimentation,” said Henry Jenkins, a USC professor on the forefront of game-based learning. “Meta-gaming is where the learning could be without disrupting the ecology of the game.” The “meta-game” is the world outside the game often composed of fans who discuss what they are making in the game with one another, write fan fiction and in other ways continue to create material even when not playing.

World of Warcraft

Students’ passions can be a powerful driver for deeper and more creative learning. With this knowledge, some educators are using popular commercial games like World of Warcraft (WoW) to create curriculum around the game. And they say they’re seeing success, especially with learners who have had trouble in traditional classrooms.

World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay (MMOR) game, where players take on the identity of characters in a narrative-rich plot, working together to overcome challenges.

“In my estimation, a well-designed video game is pure, scaffolded, constructivist learning at its best,” said Peggy Sheehy, one of the designers of WoW in Schools, an elective English Language Arts curriculum built around the game. “Mastery of content opens up new content and offers unlimited opportunity for success.” And that’s what learning should be like, she says: interesting, engaging and collaborative. Research on gaming in an educational context corroborates Sheehy’s viewpoint that games demonstrate mastery learning because a player cannot move on until he or she has completed a set of tasks.

Sheehy designs “quests” with particular learning objectives in mind that the students or — “heroes” as they’re called in class — must complete. Quests might include components of comparative writing or characterization exercises. For example, Sheehy had her students read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as they progressed through the course, and for one assignment, they had to pick a character from the book and categorize that character within World of Warcraft. They were asked to defend their choices in writing, supporting their argument with the text.

“When I bring these to their other teachers, I am consistently told, ‘I don’t get anything like this from them,’” Sheehy said in reference to the writing her students produce. They write complex arguments because they are passionate about the game, the storyline, and the class. “When there is no passion you get dutiful, for the grade work,” she said.

One of the benefits of using a multiplayer, collaborative game is that students also work together to accomplish quests. They post their writing in “guilds” within the game and are asked to critique one another’s writing, creating a constructive peer review.

Perhaps one of the most prominent ways that game-based classes are different from traditional ones is how failure fits into the daily experience of learning. “Failure in a game typically means that you tried the challenge in a new way,” Sheehy said. It’s not bad; it’s creative problem-solving, risk-taking, and a natural outcropping of trying something new. But in most classrooms, kids are programmed to understand failure as shameful at early ages. “Game designers get that failure is anticipated and celebrated. It’s a learning opportunity,” Sheehy said.

[RELATED READING: Money, Time and Tactics: Can Games Be Effective in Schools?]

Those accustomed to having assessments be part of the learning model may wonder how to measure things like reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary.

“Assessment and gaming are so contradictory,” Sheehy said. “Gaming is almost like the scientific method. You get your quest, you form a hypothesis, you try it out, you encounter challenges and you draw conclusions.” She thinks that’s assessment enough and is wary that formally assessing students will take the fun and the passion out of what she considers to be a very effective education tool.

Getty

Games are increasingly recognized by educators as a way to get kids excited about learning. While the stereotype of a “gamer” may evoke the image of a high school boy holed up in a dark room playing on a console, in reality 62 percent of gamers play with other people either in person or online, and 47 percent of all gamers are girls.

Game developers and academics who have been studying the elements that go into making games more attractive to girls found that those very same qualities are also important components of learning. For instance, girls are more drawn to games that require problem solving in context, that are collaborative (played through social media) and that produce what’s perceived to be a social good. They also like games that simulate the real word and are particularly drawn to “transmedia” content that draws on characters from books, movies, or toys.

“Something we’ve seen as a tremendous motivator for girls to learn about math and science is that they need to see the connection from the classroom out into the real world,” said Victoria Van Voorhis, the founder of Second Avenue Learning in a recent webinar. Her company has received funding from the National Science Foundation to study how to reach girls through gaming with the help of the Rochester Institute of Technology. They tested a physical science game called “Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines” with middle school girls in urban, suburban, and rural environments to gauge whether playing the game would increase their interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), whether it appealed to them and if it could improve their understanding of fundamental mechanical devices.

[RELATED READING: What's the Secret Sauce to a Great Educational Game?]

“When we asked them about springs and levers, they had no understanding of why they were important in the real world,” Van Voorhis said. “But when we were able to situate those kinds of tools in a real-world context, where they were solving a problem that was directed towards social good, we saw the engagement numbers pop.”  girls were talking about physics or game play 76 percent of the time and were only off topic 5 percent of the time.

One of the biggest draws for girls to gaming are the passionate communities that spring up around the games. Affinity groups, or what’s sometimes referred to as the meta-game, often involve users creating their own story lines, interacting with each other and sharing. Jayne Lammers, a professor at the University of Rochester, spent extensive time studying affinity groups of girls that play SIMs, the game that allows users to simulate real life through the game, and watched girls go from consumers to creators in the space. They wrote stories, solicited feedback from peers, demonstrated self-awareness, and even learned elements of programming and design through their creations.

“As we think about how girls are developing these skills outside of the classroom such as affinity spaces, I think it’s important that we think about how to bring it back into the classroom,” Lammers said. But it can be hard to convince parents and administrators that a video game is helping students learn, especially when game-producers have upended some foundational thinking about how to educate – like allowing a student to interpret and analyze a subject on their own before giving them explicit content instruction.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” Van Voorhis said. She advocates for thinking of learning as a non-linear path, where steps are taken forward, but also backwards and sideways.

“The critical thinking and the problem solving that students experience in games create spontaneous innovation,” Van Voorhis said. “It can be the catalyst and the spark to get a kid to that ‘ah ha moment’ that inspire a kid to get deeper into that content area.” And games allow kids to experiment, try new methods and fail without consequences.

Van Voorhis constructed a different version of Bloom’s Taxonomy based on game play, in which students first explore a theme informally, and that process helps them understand written text afterwards.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” she said.

Second Avenue

A flipped version of Bloom's Taxonomy, informed by game-play.

Flickr:Flickingrbrad

Increasingly, digital games are cropping up everywhere in education. And that’s stimulated a flurry of activity leading to the expectation that no longer are learning games only likely to come from traditional education companies, but a wide variety of sources.

The expectation-setting stats and statements, at least, are straightforward. Both the New Media Consortium’s 2012 Horizon Report on higher education and its 2011 Horizon Report for K-12 put game-based learning in the mainstream (defined as adopted by about 20% of institutions) in the next two-to-three years. “The greatest potential of games for learning lie in their ability to foster collaboration and engage students deeply in the process of learning,” noted the 2012 higher ed collaborative effort of NMC educators and research centers.

Then there’s the expectation of the “demand” side: students. An Educause survey last October found 37% of college students use educational games or simulations – and 15% wished their instructors used them more often. Project Tomorrow’s national Speak Up report released in April found that 52% of middle school students wanted their “ultimate” school to have games and simulations.

Now, it appears, the “supply” side is responding, building on a base of learning game research from this century – or simply taking advantage of heightened expectations. No matter what the motivation, it provides evidence a perceived K-20 trend toward games may actually be real and is spurring activity from places not always thought as hotbeds of hard-core learning game development.

CONSUMER

Consumer and learning game worlds have long been separate, with some notable crossovers (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and SimCity are two early standouts). But motivated companies are trying to make consumer crossovers more common and even more structured.

Take the original Angry Birds, which has been used to teach physics. Developer Rovio subsequently worked with NASA on the micro-gravity used in Angry Birds Space to improve its educational value (if you can ignore the exploding pigs in vacuum). That collaboration reached a new orbit with the landing of the Mars Curiosity rover and the release the same month of an Angry Birds Space: Red Planet update with explicit links to NASA educational content about Mars.

Another example: Valve, the maker of hit video games such as Half-Life, promoted its Learn With Portals initiative last year and went on to release education-specific tools and lessons plans for its Portal and Portal 2 games to help middle-school students learn physics and encourage STEM education.

It’s as if educators and companies are taking advantage of improved consumer game engines that allow for more realistic simulations – and the more life-like the fantasy scenarios become, the more applicable they may be for education in the real world.

NON-PROFITS

Non-profits, including foundations and research labs, are also creating games and simulations for use in education – and some commercial firms are even taking notice.

Digital citizenship game house iCivics was founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In two years, it created 16 digital educational games such as Argument Wars (arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court) and People’s Pie (controlling the federal government budget), along with teaching materials for each. Several of the iCivics games have made their way into BrainPOP’s year-old GameUp site for K-12 classrooms. BrainPOP Chief Operating Officer and General Manager Din Heiman notes many of the 50 or so games on its free GameUp site, “are grant funded, published by universities or by entities strongly affiliated with universities and research centers.”

Another non-profit offspring is Gamestar Mechanic, created by the Institute of Play and released in late 2010. It’s a kind of meta-“learning game” game, designed to teach 7- to 14-year olds systems thinking and game design. Games created by students can be played by other students.

Other examples include games from organizations as varied as the Nobel Prize to Generation Cures, based at Children’s Hospital Boston. Not to mention a number of government agencies, and museums such as those of the Smithsonian.

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Schools, colleges and universities are creating their own games and sims. And rather than just use them for their own students, they’re sharing.

A relatively well-known example is the video game company management simulator Platform Wars, originally created by the MIT Sloan School of Management for its own use but made available – for free – to other institutions, and anyone with a web browser, early this year.

But there are more game-like – and even quirkier – examples. Take Septris. The brainchild of the Stanford University School of Medicine, it tackles education about the deadly complications of sepsis by channeling the classic video game Tetris.

In Septris, two “hospital patients” sink fast with alarming vital signs, and players have to race to apply tests and treatments to make a diagnosis and keep them alive. (Sepsis, in real life, can kill a patient only a few hours; in the game, it can happen in as little as two minutes.) While the game is free and can be played on the web or mobile devices, nurses and doctors can level up $20 for a post-game test to get Continuing Medical Education credits. If they succeed.

In addition, initiatives like the National STEM Video Game Challenge encourage students and teachers to create games that can be shared outside their schools’ walls.

Cool startups (such as Kuato) and established educational companies (such as McGraw-Hill) are also sources of good learning games, but as the digital games for learning market accelerates, educators may be increasingly looking to – and companies looking over their shoulders at – the playful activities of their counterparts in the consumer, non-profit and academic worlds.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes the regular Practical Nerd column for GeekWire. He failed miserably at Septris, dashing any lingering hopes of his parents that he might someday be a doctor.