Games and Learning

“We created the Possible Worlds games to be games that kids can play with.”

Assessing student learning by tracking their progress through digital games is one of the hottest topics in educational technology. Vendors are promising games that can help children learn more efficiently, along their own personalized learning paths.

Researchers are refining and elaborating on methods for designing game-based assessments that will provide ever more detailed portraits of students’ progress through a game. And teachers and administrators are being encouraged to look to back-end data from games as a key source of assessment data – as a way to track student progress toward learning goals.

In contrast, the four games we created for Possible Worlds do not collect any kind of back end data other than overall time played and the number of levels students progressed through. We have used these basic benchmarks to validate that students are, in fact, playing enough that we can infer some level of familiarity with the game-as-designed, which students are expected to play as homework. 

We made this choice for both practical reasons, given the instructional model we are seeking to support, and for more philosophical reasons having to do with our understanding of what makes a game a good game.

First, the practical.

In Possible Worlds, our games do not provide students access to new information or ideas explicitly related to what they are intended to learn in their science class. Rather, each game gives students a shared experience of a specific interaction – a core game mechanic that all students will have enacted repeatedly when they play the game as homework.

The “work” of the game – its contribution to a learning process – is to give students a novel, relevant, shared touchstone – something that can then be discussed and made sense of in class. We did this because we wanted the game to provide a common reference point that would help students grapple with new scientific ideas in the classroom. Specifically, the game mechanic is intended to function as one half of an analogy – something that teachers can refer to, and students can reflect on, to help them make sense of a new, difficult idea in the classroom.

Second, the philosophical.

Play is critical to human development, and to learning. But in order for play to “work,” to fulfill its role in development, we need to always attend to the distinctions between play and learning. Do we learn through play? Roughly speaking, yes. But only in the sense of acquiring experience, of becoming familiar with sequences of cause-and-effect, with patterns, and with the experience of random, complex, and unpredictable events. But in the more formal sense, we do not learn from play alone.

Play is the raw material that supports formal learning – that we tap into as we discover and master the structures, rules, names, and practices that allow us to make sense and use of those raw experiences. Learning is the process of becoming able to engage with the larger world around your experience. But play is, most critically, the domain of the player. Players are constantly choosing whether and how to engage with the rules of play, and are at every moment free to remake, reframe, or reimagine what they are doing and why they are doing it.

So, in our view, to require learning during play is to fundamentally contaminate playfulness.

No matter how complex the underlying assessment algorithm, a play experience that has a predetermined goal – that the player is under some stated or unstated obligation to achieve – is no longer really play. This doesn’t mean that truly playful games can’t have win states, clear pathways, or coherent sequences of levels. They can – but the player is under no obligation to follow them or attend to them at all. But if the players are acting as students – if they are expected (again, explicitly or implicitly) to demonstrate learning while they play – then their freedom to subvert, ignore or break the game is lost. And, critically, we believe that our players – children – know this. 

We created the Possible Worlds games to be games that kids can play with. They use familiar genres, present no “educational” content, use very little text, and engage kids with mechanics that are fun to repeat over and over.

If you want to win any of the games, you can – you can defeat the other robots, capture the vampire, or create a harmonious choir of monsters. But if you don’t want to – if you want to throw sugar cubes over the wall, or collide monsters into one another so they explode over and over, or collect a complete set of cute but useless Icebots, you’re free to do so – we can talk about that, too.

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