Games and Learning

“We deliver 200 million video streams per month… That number is dwarfed by the amount of time kids spend on games. “

The Public Broadcasting System is the granddaddy of educational media, creating Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. For all the credit it gets for television, it has also been quietly innovating in the kids learning game space for more than a decade.

Sara DeWitt, vice president for PBS Kids Digital, has been there for all of it, watching programs and their accompanying digital games evolve and she is getting to know what will work and what won’t.

“[T]o the question of what makes a really good game, we’ve been thinking a lot about is what is the natural play pattern that a kid wants to engage in based on this property? And if you can find those, if you can hit on those pieces, then that is what is going to make the most interesting game,” she said recently.

Listen to the full conversation:

The following is an edited version of the full interview:

gamesandlearning.org: You are coming up on your fifteenth anniversary of working in the digital space with PBS Kids. What has that transition been like for a broadcast entity like PBS to enter into the digital and gaming space?

Sara DeWitt: If you think about that space in 1999, what broadcast entities were trying to do was just get a digital presence and the software industry, especially around CD-ROMs, were picking up for kids, but there still wasn’t that much gaming happening yet for young children on the Internet…

Then we saw huge technology shifts. It was HTML and then it was javascript and then it became Shockwave and then suddenly everything was Flash and we lived in a Flash world for quite a few years.

Through that time, I think, is when PBS started to recognize what a lot of other major broadcast entities recognized that in the kids’ space you no longer could be just TV. You had to be TV and games.

If we fast forward to right now, we deliver 200 million video streams per month… That number is dwarfed by the amount of time kids spend on games still. Games are why kids come to PBSKids.org…

You cannot pitch a kids’ TV show to PBS now without including the digital plan. It has to be a cohesive pitch from the beginning…

Some of the most successful things to come out of it are those producers who have been able to embrace the potential of transmedia. Of being able to think about, if I am writing this linear narrative script, what are the opportunities in that script to immediately to jump to some interactive gaming experience? What are the pieces from the show kids watching are going to play?

gamesandlearning.org: That seems like a whole different skill set…. Did you find that there were some producers who struggled with that?

Sara DeWitt: It is almost different producer to producer now. There are some people who really who got it, who could kind of make that transition pretty seamlessly and understood how to get there. Now they didn’t necessarily have the technological skills to achieve their vision and we needed to help them find the right partner – the same way we often help a producer find the right animation partner for their video work.

And for others it was a bit rougher and so what we’ve done is help do some matchmaking from the very beginning, connect them with someone who really is immersed in the digital development and kids gaming space, who can sit with them at those creative meetings from the very beginning and help riff with them, find someone who really matches their sensibility well.

But I think having that executive producer in the room when all of that digital work is at least being discussed and developed has made a real difference in how organic the entire property feels where ever it exists. So kids who come into a Curious George game feel that they are truly in the same world that they see on television…

gamesandlearning.org: So, what makes an effective game and is it different than what makes an effective program?

Sara DeWitt: There are some things that work so well in a linear experience that it is harder to translate to a game experience. But I think that even if you have experiences like that … you still are always when you are creating something for kids, in the kids media space, you are still going to have members of your audience who watch that and then are going to want to play with those characters.

So if you just think about kids natural play patterns, you know, long before we had the Internet kids would watch a show and then go into the backyard and play it or start playing it with the stuffed animals in their bedroom. An so if there isn’t a natural point, if you can’t do an appisode type or interactive video thing, if a property does not lend itself to that kind of gaming experience… there are still lots of natural jump-off points that you can still explore.

So to the question of what makes a really good game, we’ve been thinking a lot about is what is the natural play pattern that a kid wants to engage in based on this property? And if you can find those, if you can hit on those pieces, then that is what is going to make the most interesting game. And it varies pretty dramatically depending on the property…

gamesandlearning.org: So it seems like you all put a lot of thought into… you mentioned the natural pattern of play… How much does research fit into your guys’ development cycle?

Sara DeWitt: It’s a huge piece of it for us and there are lots of different kinds of research. Just about everything we develop now goes through some level of play testing with kids where we are really watching kids with the UI. Are they engaging with this in the way we expected them to? Are they clicking on the right things? All the normal usability things, but also engagement. I think that is more important than ever now that we create games that could be used on a desktop or a tablet and could be pocket-sized or could be full-screen-sized. We don’t have control over how kids are accessing it any more, so we need to see all the different permutations of that play.

Then there is also what we are trying to do from the educational perspective. So we do some small studies throughout the year on groups of games that seem to be around similar skills where we do some pre- and post-testing… sometimes paper testing with games to get at is this game mechanic actually helping move the needle on this skill?…

So some of the other testing we are doing right now is, do all games need to be created equally when it comes to actual transfer of knowledge or are some games and game mechanics better at introducing a skill and others better at practicing a skill? And how do you group those games together appropriately to help build a better learning experience over time?…

gamesandlearning.org: How important is that for games to … almost a whole curriculum they plug in to?

Sara DeWitt: We think the games themselves need to be pretty terrific and need to introduce and develop the skills well, but if you can put that game into an experience then you are going to have even greater gains.

So then for every game we are creating, we’re also then trying to come up with the related offline away from screen activity that a kid with a parent, teacher, caregiver, sibling that also builds on those skills – and builds on them in slightly different ways… And then also giving some information to the teacher or parent that says, “Here are the best questions to ask after a child plays this game” or “Here are two things you can connect this game to that you will probably be doing later in your classroom experience or at home.” If you can start building that environment that is where I think you will have the biggest success.

gamesandlearning.org: Where do you guys fall on the questions of monetization when you are looking at kids of that age?

Sara DeWitt: It is something that we have to approach in a very different way than many of our commercial competitors can. And really it is a lot of experimentation and a lot of back and forth with our audience about what makes sense to them, to have any sort of fee associated or not.

Obviously, because of who we are, we want to offer as much for free as we possibly can, or at very low cost as we possibly can. But, you know, we still have pretty flat funding for being a TV company that have all these additional things that we now want to do and can do in a kids space. And so I think we are in the same boat as a lot of other folks are, trying to figure out what’s that balance while also recognizing that, you know, we are number one in parent trust when it comes to educational media and that is something we hold very near and dear to who we are and we are not willing to compromise that.

I would be happy to touch base with you in six months because every six months the answer will likely be a little bit different, but right now I think it is a lot of experiments for us.