Commentary

Possible Worlds Creator: Developers Should Focus on Function Over Aesthetics

Monster Music Screen shot

Monster Music is one of the games developed by the Center for Children and Technology to teach concepts connected to electricity.

How should developers looking to create science games pick the topics they choose to address? What topics might be a good fit to the game genres and mechanics developers have access to, or can dream up to entertain and engage a learner?

There are many ways to answer this question, of course. We approach it from a developmental and educational perspective. Here are some things that drove our process and that we have seen in others’ work as well.

Specific ages, not just “kids.”

Kids are different at different ages. Their attention span, the amount of cognitive load they can bear, the prior knowledge they bring to the game, their tolerance for fantasy and whimsy, and their beliefs about what makes for a fun, fair, or worthwhile game all change dramatically across different age groups. A game that really addresses the learning needs of one age group is unlikely to work equally well for another age group.

It’s what you do, not what you see.

While a beautiful game is a lovely thing, the joy of gaming is in what you do – and they key to learning is also in what we are able to do. The opportunity to help kids build new ideas and explore new relationships is in the nature of the doing that’s available to them within a game.

Think of the recent overwhelming popularity of Minecraft with young people – its transparent, rich, mechanics allow kids to do an enormous amount – the sketchy, low-fi graphics are not a concern. Without getting into more complicated discussions about representation in video games, it’s important to stress that no matter what we show in a game, there is no guarantee that it will be seen or attended to by the player. And even if it is, the chances that the player will interpret that visual in the way that the designers intended are slim. Mechanics are critical – visuals are not.

What is it that they don’t yet know?

This is the piece that is hardest for developers to gain access to unless they partner with educators. Learning – that is, building complex ideas that go beyond memorization of statements or procedures – is not a matter of being informed of something you don’t yet understand. If that were the case, I would happily learn what my microbiologist father-in-law does by reading some of his journal articles.

Rather, moving from not knowing to knowing requires gaining access to a series of insights – a type of relationship, a new pattern, a new possibility in the world – that was not previously available to you. A truly good educational game gives kids the change to encounter and engage directly with some new insight.

The greatest leap of imagination that educators need to make every day is to try to understand what it feels like to not know something. What does a page of text look like to an eight year old who can’t read? What does a molecular model of a process of chemical change look like to a kid who doesn’t have the slightest idea what a molecule really is?

A good teacher knows which properties of those mysterious systems a child needs to discover in order to begin to understand them. Games, paired with collaboration, guidance and teaching from peers and adults, can give us great opportunities to help kids acquire these kinds of insights.

Editor’s Note: You can learn more about the Possible Worlds project and find the games and teaching materials at http://possibleworlds.edc.org/.

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Katherine Culp

Katherine McMillan Culp Katherine McMillan Culp is a developmental psychologist who has been studying innovative programs to improve the quality of technology use in K–12 classrooms and informal educational settings since 1991. Dr. Culp is the principal investigator of Possible Worlds—a Department of Education-funded project that aims to support middle-grades science learning, and has conducted a series of research studies to better understand how games can be structured to support conceptual learning and engagement with complex scientific concepts.