Games and Learning

After four years of watching teachers use games in the classroom Katherine Culp has noticed a few critical things.

It’s important to sometimes step back and appreciate how much we expect children to learn in science classes. By the middle grades, we ask them to be able to imagine molecular processes of chemical change; to picture the flow of weather systems around the globe; and to reason systematically about the interactions of changing variables in a model.

These are hard things to do, and a critical step toward helping students achieve them successfully is helping them tap into prior experiences and prior knowledge that support accurate analogical thinking about these target concepts. Adults do this all the time, including scientists – but the trick is in ensuring that the analogy is structured in such a way that it supports, rather than confuses, the target concept.

Sometimes teachers need to introduce concepts that are truly novel, that don’t tap easily into any prior experience kids are likely to bring into the classroom. Digital games can be designed to help address this challenge. They’re good at inviting students to engage with phenomena that are brand new to them. That’s what kids expect of games – they come to them expecting to face the unexpected, and ready to decipher a new environment.

By playing the game, kids can get a secure hold on a core game mechanic that has an analogical relationship to the target concept. Teachers can harvest that experience, now shared by their students, to help them think through the dynamics of a new and unfamiliar phenomenon, by beginning from discussion of that core mechanic from the game.

Over the past four years we’ve watched teachers work with four different games, designed to support kids’ learning about photosynthesis, heredity, electricity, and heat transfer. And we’ve found two major hurdles to the process as we envisioned it.

First, the simple one: teachers don’t often play the games themselves. While of course some teachers are enthusiastic gamers, many are not, and we have found teachers who are not already comfortable with games in general to be unlikely to play these games for long enough to become fully familiar with the mechanics that are key to the analogies we intended to support.

This means the games remain a black box to them – shared by the students but inaccessible to the teachers. Consequently, we’ve found that teachers rarely have sustained discussions about the games during instructional time, leaving their value as sources for analogical reasoning largely untapped.

Second, when teachers do make explicit reference to the games during instruction, we’re finding they do not necessarily use them as analogical grounds at all. Rather, teachers often reference the games as an example of the concept they’re discussing. While this may appear to be very similar to our intended structure, it’s actually quite different, as it depends on students holding the new concept in mind (which they are unlikely to be able to do yet) and trying to map it back to the game, rather than the other way around. This is going to be difficult for them because without the new concept in mind, they have no way of knowing what features of the game their teacher might be referencing as an analogy.

We believe both of these challenges are, in part, symptomatic of the grade level at which we’re working. Drawing on analogies is common in the early grades, when teachers reference students’ material experience of the world frequently. It’s also a common practice among experts, who talk and think through analogies all the time. But in the middle grades, teachers often perceive their role to be largely about the transmission of content knowledge, and they may look to the games as being more like reading homework – when a chapter of a textbook provides students with a known amount of new information.

Teachers would mine this kind of homework differently than they would a shared experience, but these games are intended to be drawn on as a shared experience that still needs to be made sense of, discussed, and put in relation to other ideas.

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