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.

Flickr:Blakespot

By Jennie Rose

An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that’s not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold’s book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of “supercollaborators,” as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who’s interviewed in the book.

Rheingold connects the dots on collaboration literacy and what he calls “Social-Digital-Know-How.” Multi-player games in particular, and virtual communities in general, are technologies that require cooperation. And when you consider the cumulative amount of technical knowledge, these gamers could be the first wave of people who possess what scientists have started calling “collective IQ.” Already, gamers who play the online game Foldit have cracked the code of the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, which has eluded scientists for years, and could lead to a new drug.

This idea of collective intelligence and digital culture came from French media scholar Pierre Lévy, who argues that a networked culture gives rise to new structures of power, stemming from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations. Together, these groups refine their understanding of the world.

Wikipedia is one of the best-known byproducts of this process of refinement and social production. Though the website is still dismissed as a research tool in some education circles because it does not represent a traditionally vetted information source, danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a former student of Rheingold’s, counters that students must exercise their investigative skills when they use Wikipedia as a source.

“If educators would shift their thinking about Wikipedia, so much critical thinking could take place,” she says in an interview with Rheingold in the book.

The key value of Wikipedia is transparency. It’s not just for information consumers, it’s an invitation to participate and leverage new skills. To successfully “wiki” is to leverage these useful skills, like analyzing contradictions in facts, contributing to a large body of collective knowledge, and vetting sources.

School-aged children — whether they’re in or out of school — are faced with the ubiquity of networked and collaborative culture. Rheingold says that it’s hard to think of a realm of human behavior that has not been influenced, in some way, by a form of mass collaboration.

Rheingold has dedicated years to studying human potential and the species’ capacity for cooperation. The outlines of his perspective, breaking the old school “every man for himself” narrative, stem from a distinctly utopian lens. Rheingold’s findings and admonitions serve as a tonic for some of the dystopian views in the mix that predict digital communication will spell doom for humanity.

“Trying something, failing, trying something again, that’s something we aspire to see in kids,” he says.

So he created a class around the premise of a video game — without a video game. Anderson honestly talks about what worked and what didn’t. Check out how it turned out.

MinecraftEDU

By Katrina Schwartz

Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now — to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.

So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as “How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity.” Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

Teachers like to use Minecraft because it’s a “sandbox” game — it provides players nearly limitless freedom to build within it. As a player’s skill develops, the game’s complexity increases ad infinitum. In multi-player levels, players collaborate on building complex structures, use programming features to build contraptions, games, or compose music. Meanwhile, beginning players use their problem solving skills to scavenge for materials. They learn to mine stone for building, and coal for making fire.

Koivisto and Levin decided to pursue a classroom application after observing students solve complicated problems with their collaboration in the game. When Koivisto tested Minecraft at a Finnish school, one-third of the 20 teachers in the study later chose to incorporate the game into their teaching.

Koivisto and Levin, who uses the game with his second-grade students, are part of the growing movement of teachers who see video games as more than entertainment and educational games as more than a means to an end. They flip the usual query of educational games, “What should we teach?” for a different question altogether: “Is it fun?”

“Many educational games start with the question ‘What should we teach with the game?’ and they forget the most important part, that it should be a great game too,” says Koivisto, who lives in Finland.

They also steer clear of specific educational agenda for the game. Instead, they encourage teachers to first watch how their students behave in the Minecraft world, then proceed with lesson plans that incorporate the game and the student’s reaction to it.

New York public school science teacher Matt Coia says the MinecraftEdu version provides a deeper level of administrative control than the commercial version, and dovetails neatly with his general teaching goals. “As a teacher, I can select how much freedom the students are allowed to have within the game and also the level at which the game reacts with them,” he says. Coia also likes that MinecraftEdu allows him to build customized maps to elaborate on a specific concept.

Currently, 300 schools around the world, half in the U.S., have purchased game licenses. As with most games, the pricing structure is complicated. For schools and educators, the price is $18 per license (per computer). Schools can buy bundles of licenses that make the cost of each about half that price.

Though Coia’s school was willing to pay for the game, he says he would have gone for it anyway. “Looking back, I would have paid it out of pocket if I needed to,” he said. “It’s that good.”

Globaloria

By Jennifer Roland

Identifying bones in a skeleton, learning how chemical elements react, understanding alternative energy uses. These lessons have jumped out of the textbook and into the hands of students who created video games that teach the concepts to their peers.

It’s part of Globaloria, a national program that allows middle school and high school students to design educational video games on topics related to math, science, engineering and social issues. In the process of creating the games, they learn about the topics, as well as how to program a video game.

In Mission Impossib-Oil, for example, players guide a crew tasked with cleaning up an oil spill. They’ll have to make decisions about biological resources and human resources based on Environmental Sensitivity Index mapping guidelines, as well as how to spend their budget.

William Dorsey, who teaches biology at Capital High School in Kanawha County, writes that his students are not only learning about the topics they create the games around, but also “soft skills” like self-directed learning and teamwork. His students “taught themselves the guiding principles of biological classification, a topic that I often had to rush or ignore,” he writes. Though Dorsey has felt crunched for time to cover subjects, he believes adding the game design curriculum is worth it. “My students have more than met the challenge of keeping up with a fast-paced curriculum, and they have often been slightly ahead of other classes covering the same material.”

With all the work to be done in labs, Dorsey said creating the games gives his students a creative outlet to look forward to.

Globaloria is not exactly a new program. — it’s been around since 2006, but with the recent push to focus on STEM-related education, it’s now being used in schools across California, Florida, West Virginia, Texas and New York. The program was featured widely during Digital Learning Day, the first annual nationwide event held on Feb. 1.

Flickr: Loren Kahle

By Aran Levasseur

Imagine you’re a senior manager at a leading videogame company. Your job is to devise the company’s competitive strategy in a rapidly growing and dynamic industry. What prices will you set for the consoles? How many games will be available for your platform?

This is the premise of Platform Wars, an epistemic game, or management simulator, developed by MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The game’s learning objectives are to allow students to interactively experience the challenges of strategic competition in complex and dynamic markets.

Epistemic games are computer games that are essentially about learning to think in innovative ways. They’re designed to be pedagogical tools for the digital age where the player learns to think like professionals by playing a simulated game of such professions as management, engineering, journalism or urban planning.

As schools aim to prepare students for life outside of school, they need to realize that the world now values knowledge and skills that can be applied in creative ways. Epistemic games fit the learning requirements of today’s world because they allow students to role-play professions while learning skills that they apply in the game.

One of the nation’s leading scholars on epistemic games is David Williamson Shaffer, whose landmark book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, demonstrates how particular kinds of video and computer games can cultivate innovative thinking. Shaffer outlines how modern schools developed in a particular time and place to meet the specific economic and social needs of industrialism and now, he contends, education needs to change to fit the needs of our current world. The traditional educational paradigm prepared students for a world of standardization, whereas today’s world puts a premium on independent thinking and creativity. As a result of the social and economic sea change, schools need to foster innovative thinking.

Shaffer believes one of the best ways to do this is through what he calls epistemic games: video or computer games that are essentially about learning to think in innovative ways in a post-industrial, global economy and society.

Epistemologies of the Digital Age

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and, according to Shaffer, every age has its own epistemology, i.e., what it means to know something. Computers — which are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in work and school — provide the means to think in new ways, which will fundamentally reconfigure our thinking and theories of knowledge. Computers in general, and epistemic games in particular, are structuring new epistemologies for our digital age.

“The epistemology of School,” in Shaffer’s words, “is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution — of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology or right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not.”

While this kind of epistemology may have been appropriate and even innovative for the Industrial Revolution, it is outdated for our informational economy and digital age. Being literate in the digital age uses reading and writing as a foundation to build upon, but they are no longer solely sufficient. Students must learn to produce various kinds of media and learn how to solve problems using simulations.

Epistemic Frames

Epistemic games are organized around epistemic frames. Any profession is structured around a culture that is composed of skills, values, knowledge, identities and an epistemology that anchor how creative professionals operate. Shaffer calls this configuration an epistemic frame: an integral theory of learning that sees how the collection of a profession’s knowledge and skills synergistically work together to create a learning community.

Professionals learn to acquire their epistemic frames, i.e., their knowledge and skills, in ways that are very different from traditional classrooms because the creative thinking today’s jobs demand require more than knowing a standardized answer. In addition, their thinking, problem solving and communication need to be integrated into the real world of work.

Epistemic Games

One epistemic game Shaffer writes about is SodaConstructor, which uses the epistemic frames of engineering and physics. SodaConstructor lets players construct a virtual creature of their own design and then simulate how that creature would operate once gravity, friction and muscles enter the equation. In order to get their creatures to successfully walk in this virtual world they need to understand a couple fundamental physics and engineering concepts: center of mass and cross bracing. Once key concepts are understood, players then begin to frame their project in a way real engineers creatively think: creating designs, building them, and then testing alternatives as well.

While epistemic games can be fun, their real value lies in allowing individuals to experience worlds they’re interested in. “In playing games,” according to Shaffer, “[students] are doing explicitly, openly and socially what as adults they will do tacitly, privately and personally. They are running simulations of worlds they want to learn about in order to understand the rules, roles and consequences of those worlds.”

Aran Levasseur has an eclectic background that ranges from outdoor education to life coaching, and from habitat restoration to video production. He taught middle school history and science for five years, where he integrated technology into his classes to enhance his teaching and student learning.

The article was originally published by PBS MediaShift, covering the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.