Games and Learning

The Radix MMO was developed at MIT with the feedback of dozens of teachers and players.

As Anna Jordan-Douglass noted in her piece a few months ago, the key to making a game great for kids is to spend time with kids playing your game throughout the development process.  We’d add that to make sure you have a great educational game that teachers can use in the classroom, a key is keeping those teachers at the center of your design and development efforts.

This connection with teachers was a critical part throughout the creation of The Radix Endeavor, a new MMO to support secondary math and science instruction.  

It is our hope that games can support teachers in the instruction of complex subjects.  We believe an immersive virtual world can provide an engaging way for students to interact with content as they strengthen skills in problem solving, analysis, and reasoning. The game also provides a unique shared experience that teachers can use and reference during their instruction.

Teacher-centric design

We see the teacher not only as a stakeholder in the design process but as a key component in the success of the game.  If the game doesn’t support the needs of the secondary math or science teacher, we don’t have a product.  

This idea shaped the way we approached the entire design of Radix. Rather than bring a near-ready product to teachers for review and testing with their students, we decided to form a partnership.  From day one, well, really from day 0 (it was part of the proposal to our funder), we formed an advisory board of teachers that were a critical part of our design team.   

The team was comprised of our target audience – public school teachers from diverse school districts with varying levels of technical infrastructure.  Each of the teachers represented a different content discipline. Most importantly, these teachers were not necessarily early adopters or tech savvy. The one thing they all had in common is that they were all willing to try new things in the instructional setting.

And so it began.

From the earliest days of development our teachers were with us.  We met every four to six weeks and we got feedback on everything.  No, really EVERYTHING.  They were part of early conversations about what to include in the game providing insight into where students struggled and where they wish they had more tools to help their students.  

They saw paper prototypes; and sketches of biomes and species, long before they were wrapped in the game’s narrative or sporting fancy graphics. They were an intimate part of the iterative game design process and saw it all come to life as we did.  

Not Just Feedback, But Conversation

A key element of the partnership was that it was very much a conversation. It was not simply a case of agreeing to every request that was made. At times we felt that it was necessary to push them out of their comfort zones. Our teachers had very specific feedback on the progression of quests in the game and pointed out that things didn’t make sense sequentially. They trained us to think more explicitly about the scaffolding.

However, as they asked for more easy tasks, we pushed back, hoping that the teachers would see the value in presenting the students with challenging situations, opportunities to make mistakes, and problems without one particular correct answer. At all times, though, it was important to listen and to understand the roots of their concerns. Many of the game tools came from talking over plates of Thai food into the early evening, long after the regular school day had finished.

Teacher feedback often fundamentally shaped Radix’s design and functionality.

They told us they needed tools to support concepts in biology. The breeding tool and trait cross stations were developed in direct response to teachers’ need for tools that allow students to experiment with dominant and recessive genes.  Our Evo Globe Tool is the result of a conversation with our team of teachers discussing how difficult it is to demonstrate how species adapt to changing conditions over the course of time and many generations.  And the Cartogram Tool emerged from a conversation with our math teachers lamenting about the fact that scale is such a frustrating concept for students to translate to specific math skills.

As the game developed, they asked about critical classroom management tools like creating class lists, resetting student passwords, and monitoring student chat permissions as tracking student progress in the game.  

What is often difficult as a teacher is helping students to make the transfer between game play and classroom content. As we created bridge curriculum to accompany game play, the teachers helped shape all of the pieces that went into these additional resources. They were honest about worries concerning standards alignment (connecting standards are now the first piece of information about a quest line) as well as admitting that while they would love to play through the game, there likely wouldn’t be time (there are now video walkthroughs of all quests and tools available to teacher).  

Each step along the development process, the teachers were there as our advisers, not only in name but in practice as well. We gained valuable insight into making a tool that was classroom ready.  We continue to take their insights with us as we work with teachers during our large-scale research pilot ongoing through the 2014-2015 academic year.  

As our time with our teacher advisory board wrapped up, we also got to see that they had learned a bit from us – they were looking forward to pushing the boundaries in their own classrooms and were excited to challenge and engage their students in new ways. It was an incredibly productive partnership for both groups and we encourage others developing educational games to add teachers to your design process.