I never got what educational games were supposed to teach me. I remember playing Oregon Trail’s pseudo sequel Amazon Trail 3rd Edition in my middle school computer lab. I don’t know anything about the Amazon. The “Playing with Science” panel hosted by Chris Russell, Dr. Catherine Croft, and Ashlyn Sparrow showed me my time with Amazon Trail was aimless. My teachers didn’t guide my play—they may not have had the resources to—so I didn’t learn anything. With creative design and proper preparation, a board game can teach kids about genetics, and with enough resources a game can teach college students about complex social issues like climate change.
Chris Russell began by outlining the three basic pedagogies: direct instruction, active learning, and skills practice. Games fall into active learning, which is when a student is engaged with the material “in a hands-on sense.” Science labs are a good example because they replicate a simplified version of the practice of science.
“So, games…take rules and they use those rules to bring a bunch of discrete objects into relation…they use these rules to model systems or to make a suggestion of how these systems work,” Russell said. “Games always give folks a chance to interact with the systems…by making an active choice.”
Games also valorize outcomes in a way that other active learning methods don’t. Getting a key in a Zelda game freezes the frame, tells you you’ve got a key, and plays a triumphant tune. Now you know keys are good. And as representational art, games can abstract scientific concepts that are too difficult to bring into the classroom.
If that sounds a little too vague, Chris Russell agreed. His next goal was to have the audience design a game to teach the water cycle. He gave us an overview of the process before we started. Identify the concept you want to teach. Abstract key systems from your learning goals, picking things you can represent through a rule structure. Valorize the outcome that aligns with your learning goal.
“When someone plays your game, you want the best strategies in that game to align with what you want players to take home from it,” Russell said.
We identified the learning goals—show how energy from the sun creates a cycle that takes water from evaporation through precipitation—and we identified a way to valorize the concept—students could earn points for completing a cycle. Somebody suggested the players could use energy as a currency to drive the cycle forward. Another person suggested allowing players to change the ambient radiation of the sun. The shape of a board game started to form.
“A lot of the structures in the normative science curriculum lend themselves towards games because they set in relation a bunch of different things, and it’s really hard to get it until you see it in action yourself,” Russell said.
According to Russell, games are as effective as other active learning methods, but barriers exist to using games in every classroom—limited funding keeps teachers from accessing educational board games, and a lack of infrastructure or technical support prevents teachers from using computer games.
And Dr. Catherine Croft, a game designer and high-school teacher, is well aware of the difficulties. “We don’t have computers that I can actually use on a daily basis. I have to reserve them, and they usually don’t work. And a lot of the digital games are made for single users, and we don’t have enough for everybody in the classrooms,” Dr. Croft said. My teachers also had to reserve a slot in a computer lab, and there was always a broken computer. Dr. Croft’s company Catlilli Games tries to address access issues by producing free print-and-play board games, which are available on their site. One of those games, Bear Island, includes research and discussion questions. A key takeaway from Dr. Croft’s portion of the presentation was the need to introduce games with a lesson about the concept they teach before students play.
“When I use a board game in my classroom, I’ll spend the first fifteen minutes kind of talking about concepts…prepping them for the game. And then they’ll play the game…afterwards we’ll say okay, well, ‘what did you learn from this?’” she said.
Catlilli Games partnered with Dr. Tracie Addy and Dr. Derek Dube to test the effectiveness their digital game Ebola Wars to enhance a lesson. They published a paper in Simulation & Gaming, and the results showed that students who played the game after an introduction to the material had improved understanding. The company’s goal is to take what they learned from that study and apply it to their board games, which are easier to access.
Playing Amazon Trail never involved any kind of preparation. The desks in the computer lab were lined up along the perimeter, so everyone was facing away from one another. If a teacher wanted to do a presentation on the Amazon, they would have to rearrange the chairs, then send everyone back to their own screen. What if our class wasn’t doing a unit on the Amazon yet? What if our class wasn’t going to do one at all, but Amazon Trail was the only game we had access to?
The final panelist, Ashlyn Sparrow, worked on the incredibly ambitious Terrarium, an alternate reality game (ARG) created for students at University of Chicago. If Chris Russell’s presentation showed how games can use basic mechanics to engage and teach, Sparrow’s showed how those mechanics can be scaled up to convey narratives on complex subjects. If Dr. Croft’s presentation showed how teachers can overcome institutional limitations on a small scale, Sparrow’s showed that with institutional support, games can educate students on a large scale.
Terrarium was meant to encourage incoming freshman to think critically about climate change, and the months-long game acted as the basis for an orientation event during the first week of school. As Dr. Croft mentioned, accessibility can be an issue in the classroom. For Terrarium, it would be huge. They needed over 1,700 off-campus students from all over the world to participate in a “transmedia experience,” to use Sparrow’s own words. Having students travel to the University of Chicago campus to play a game about climate change would be hypocritical. The fact that the team wasn’t limited to one medium actually ended up presenting a solution to them.
“So, we’re playing around with this form and trying to think through, what do people already have, right?” she said. Since almost every student had access to the Internet, they could do the entire thing online using Twitch, which was free and accessible. They would just need to publicize it.
“We managed to talk to the dean of the college and say, ‘Hey, in your letter that you send out to all the incoming first years…can you just put a link…and like, send them on this little journey? If they find it great,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, okay.’”
That link led students to sites where they learned about the game. In the months before school started, players helped livestreaming performers solve puzzles and escape a room they were trapped in, all while learning about the performer’s version of the future. The streams portrayed four dystopic versions of the year 2049. One focused on the effects of climate change on the environment, the other portrayed a totalitarian regime, the third took place after a nuclear apocalypse, and the fourth dealt with overpopulation. The designers worked with over thirty University of Chicago faculty members to bring these worlds to life. After all the broadcasts, students formed teams to think of solutions for the problems they were confronted with.
“Some people created cookbooks. They said, ‘Well if plants are going to kind of die off, well, what would food look like in 2049?’ Like, that’s a great idea. That is an intervention in some way,” Sparrow said. “Some students created a machine learning AI, and it…took all this data from like, government sites, and then asked philosophical questions about ‘how do you feel that the world is going to change in twenty, thirty years?’”
Terrarium may not have been a AAA console game experience, but it created an accessible and thought-provoking experience for a community. It also shows what can be done with interdepartmental cooperation and institutional support at a university. Because the ARG was played using livestreams, Terrarium is ephemeral by nature. But interested readers can see the archived videos at Fourcast Lab’s site.
In A Brief History of Video Games, Richard Stanton says Oregon Trail is “often considered the pioneer of edutainment.” Stanton calls it “the ultimate Trojan Horse,” sneaking games where they shouldn’t be—the classroom. But the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium (MECC) provided lesson plans to go along with the game. Oregon Trail was made for the classroom. I goofed off playing Amazon Trail because my teachers didn’t—or couldn’t—plan a lesson around the game. However, when used correctly, games can teach us the basics of genetics, introduce us to wave behavior, or force us to imagine solutions to an imminent threat like climate change. If designed with intentionality and care—and the teachers and designers receive institutional support—games are capable of teaching us almost anything.
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David Bowman writes about games, music , and literature at dwbowman.com. his work has appeared in DomiCile and Thrice Fiction. He's @DavidWBowman on Twitter.