Games and Learning

Institute of Play has championed re-imagining how games could change the school of the future.

Institute of Play has positioned itself as one of the leading innovators in the education and game industry.

With its Quest Schools in New York and Chicago, IOP created a new kind of school, using learning research to restructure the curriculum and classroom. Second with its GlassLab effort they have aimed to use existing games and develop new ones that can better assess what and how a student is learning.

Now Robert Gehorsam has taken the helm of the operation as the executive director and gamesandlearning.org wanted to see where he saw the future of the field and IOP headed.

gamesandlearning.org: It has been a long road since you were running education groups for the Prodigy Services Company back in 1985. If you were to identify the two or three key differences between now and then when it comes to the role of games in learning what would they be?

Robert Gehorsam, Institute of Play: First, the biggest thing by far has been the emergence of games as a dominant medium of both experience and expression in our society. In 1985, games were still seen as the domain of the socially maladroit, and of dubious value, kind of like the way comic books were viewed in the 1950s. Today – wow, what a change! Games have taken their place alongside other forms of media in the landscape of learning tools.

Secondly, learning games back then were really limited to one platform – the personal computer – and as such were in fixed locations. And of course, they were mostly offline. Today, there’s this amazing proliferation of online platforms that can deliver rich connected experiences on everything from a browser to a phone. Since we carry our devices with us, games are everywhere. Because of that same proliferation of connected experiences, there’s this new sense that learning, too, can take place everywhere, so there’s this beautiful confluence to explore.

But these two trends are really just context. In 1985 – with few exceptions – the type of learning that was expressed in games represented a pretty simplistic vision of the power of computing and a pretty simplistic view of what ought to be taught and learned. Over the past three decades we’ve seen amazing advances in learning science, cognitive science, and other related fields. So the potential has evolved from drill-based arithmetic games to games with sophisticated back-end data models that can help teach and assess all sorts of cognitive and even non-cognitive skills. This is, in part, a reflection of advances in the field of game design, but it’s also a reflection of a growing research base that will inform the way games are designed for learning.

gamesandlearning.org: What do you hope the role of games will be in the education of the average child born today?

Robert Gehorsam: I think our notion of what a game is and what gameplay is will be likely to expand in the coming years. And I think we are going to see that not all games take the form of just a digital application or just a board or card game; I believe we’re at the cusp of a kind of explosion of diverse expressions of gameplay that have learning value.

I think it’s inevitable that games are going to play an increasingly dominant role in the intellectual, social and emotional development of children. Games build confidence, creativity, and curiosity. What’s more, the engagement they stimulate is often aspirational.

Think about it a second: I don’t know that many kids who aspire to become textbook authors, but plenty aspire to be game designers. That aspiration can drive an interest in STEM learning, in design thinking, in systems thinking, and in collaboration. If kids who play a learning game have a desire to be the architect of a similar experience for others, the future starts to look very intriguing. I firmly believe that games and a playful approach to learning should comprise a significant majority of time and focus in K-12 education.

gamesandlearning.org: And connected to that, what do you think are the two or three biggest hurdles to that happening?

Robert Gehorsam: I think it’s relatively easy to imagine that we will solve many of the creative, technical and research challenges involved in creating compelling learning games, because there is so much energy and so much talent dedicated to these issues today.

So the hurdles I see are related to implementing learning games: professional development for teachers that enables easy deployment, school procurement processes that lag behind the pace of innovation in the market, valid concerns over equity when it comes to accessing new learning tools, lack of parental “push” and (though I have no data) perhaps anxiety among adults that the use of games will impede rather than advance a child’s chance of success on the path to college and career. I don’t see a lot of energy and talent devoted to dealing with these issues, though Institute of Play has been working hard on these problems and creating tools and resources that support implementation of learning games in the classroom.

These hurdles are largely going to take grit and persistence to overcome…two of the 21st Century skills we talk a lot about relative to games. So maybe we need more gamers tackling these problems!

gamesandlearning.org: Now let’s talk about the work of the Institute of Play. What most intrigued you about the opportunity to serve as the IOP’s executive director?

Robert Gehorsam: I’ve been a board member at Institute of Play since the summer of 2012, and a very active one. It’s impossible not to be thrilled with the Institute’s broad and bold mission to use games, game design and the principles of play to create a more engaged citizenry. And the specific projects the Institute has taken on represent precisely the issues around the societal impact of games that have pre-occupied me since I first got involved in the industry. From the moment I became a board member, I spent a large amount of time thinking about the Institute and how I could help.

gamesandlearning.org: What role do you hope the institute will play in achieving the educational system you discussed? It seems like the two big projects at IOP are the Quest Schools in New York and Chicago and GlassLab. What are you hoping to achieve with each of these projects?

Robert Gehorsam: Both of these projects – Quest Schools and GlassLab – are fundamental to creating impact at the scale and scope of our entire educational system.

At the Institute, we view the Quest Schools – Quest to Learn in NYC and CICS ChicagoQuest in Chicago – as replicable models of what game-like learning can be, as well as test labs to refine those models. The schools are an environment where we can constantly test and iterate on different practices, curricula, and products. And we have been testing and refining since Quest to Learn opened in 2009. At this point, we are starting to work on a series of initiatives to extract the best practices for teacher and leadership development, the best elements of the curriculum such as Boss Level, and some of the best products (we have created over 70 unique games within the school). Our next major achievement will be developing ways to share these best practices and other offerings with a wide audience.

GlassLab is focused on developing a series of game-based assessments, using both adaptations of commercial video games as well as original games designed from the ground up by GlassLab. Those assessments are the results of breakthrough new research in assessment as well as new paradigms of game design, which consider learning and assessment both as part of the game design process. So the first achievement will be to show that game-based assessment products, like SimCityEDU, generate valid assessments. But a second, longer-term goal, is to demonstrate the appeal of these games on such a scale that we motivate commercial game developers to orient themselves towards this new market. Via our research, we can provide enormous validation of the educational value of commercial-quality games, and there are also things that we can do to reduce the friction for developers and publishers to get into the school market. So a huge achievement in my mind is when we start receiving inquiries from other game publishers about possibly creating a GlassLab-enabled version of one of their games. In fact, that’s starting to happen.

gamesandlearning.org: There is a lot on IOP’s plate already, but are there any special initiatives or projects – or even a refined focus on one of the existing efforts – that you hope to bring as the new executive director?

Robert Gehorsam: That’s a great question. It’s extremely important that our two big flagship projects (and we do have others!) achieve the goals I’ve described above with regard to impact, scope and scale. But as I said earlier, the Institute has a big mission, and these projects have provided us with insights, talent and expertise that I enthusiastically believe could benefit more kids, more schools … and other domains. We have, over the past year or two, done work with various cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, and we’ve collaborated on initiatives with some corporations like Samsung and Target. I have a particular interest in how game design and play might be used in civic contexts – we have a collaboration underway with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and Gigantic Mechanic to develop a U.S. Senate simulation. Overall, I’d like to really explore how we take our core values and our core knowledge and share it with more of the world.