Update

Could Universal Design Help More Students Learn from Games?

iGet Math was developed to be accessible to more students using Universal Design for Learning concepts.

iGet Math was developed to be accessible to more students using Universal Design for Learning concepts.

Student learning styles are varied and diverse – so why do so many games try to teach concepts the same way? Rote memorization doesn’t do the trick, educators say, and “games” that mirror worksheets don’t address the broad spectrum of student abilities, strengths and challenges.

The answer, says a growing group of game designers, is to try and change the way the game itself is designed.

“There are a lot of games out there that reward you for being able to answer five questions in five seconds, but you don’t actually gauge whether the kid understands what they’re doing,” said Annie Graham.

Graham, a software developer-turned-educator at the Learning with Meaning homeschool co-op, is one teacher who uses a technique called Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to reach the most students possible with the same curriculum structure.

Teachers using UDL develop curricula and find tools that work for the full range of students – taking into account any learning or physical disabilities and considering their social and economic backgrounds. The idea is rather than to retrofit one curriculum to these individual students, the teaching should incorporate these differences into the design itself. UDL proponents argue this makes the games, tools and classes more elegant and inexpensive than spending time retooling the one class structure.

The process, created in the 1990s by David H. Rose, a Harvard professor with the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), accommodates the vast array of student learning styles and individual strengths and challenges that might co-occur in a given classroom.

In describing the concept, Rose said UDL “is particularly focused on making sure that we get those students who have been marginalized, for whom that designing for the average student has never worked well. And that certainly means student who have been struggling, students for whom English is not their first language, students with disabilities. They’ve been typically marginalized by this illusory average curriculum.”

Rose introduces the concept more in this video from CAST:

Advocates argue what makes it especially effective is its built-in flexibility – a quality that makes UDL and learning games a match made in educational game developer heaven.

Teachers who work with UDL principles start by asking: What barriers in this teaching tool might stand between our students and learning? Student diversity can include any variety of different physical challenges such as blindness or motor impairments, to challenges with communication or emotional behaviors.

Games can provide an important tool for these teachers, but only if they are also aware of the different needs of students. Games that provide barriers to learning, such as a text-only interface, or controls that require minute muscle control, are immediately incompatible with a classroom that prioritizes UDL.

To help plan lessons and select materials – such as games – that will work with as many students as possible, teachers who work with the UDL framework look at three key ideas: representation, action and expression, and engagement. A universally designed game will address all three.

The representation component of UDL looks at the ways information and skills are presented to the student – the “what” of a lesson or learning tool. According to the National Center on Universal Design for Learning, this involves providing multiple options for comprehension, for language, mathematical expressions, and symbols, and for perception – essentially, using as many different avenues to communicate with the student as possible. In a game, this can mean providing text, video and audio elements for every learning component of a game as well as using interactivity to demonstrate the “big ideas” in the educational material.

Action and expression moves that flexibility into the student’s world. When a student has had the opportunity to access information represented in a variety of ways, UDL holds that they should then have the opportunity to express their learning in whatever way works best for them, depending on the learning goal. If, in the classroom, a teacher wants to evaluate a students’ learning in a unit on pyramids they should be able to present that information in a video, a paper, a speech, or any other means that is comfortable for them and sets them up for the most successful demonstration of what they’ve learned.

In the tech world, this can mean using games as one potential means of student expression and interaction with their learning – Graham’s students, for example, had the opportunity to create a Minecraft map for a unit on Jamaica. Games can be an ideal tool for students of all abilities to express their learning with teachers and with one another. Immediate feedback – such as that built in to many learning games – also helps students guide their learning and avoid the dangers of take-home, unguided practice.

“That’s one of the beautiful things about technology, is that you can give kids that instant feedback,” Graham said. In a typical “homework” scenario, Graham said, “they’ve lost something – they’ve already decided that three plus four equals nine because they wrote it down twelve times on their homework.”

Finally, UDL focuses on engagement, building lessons and tools that help develop excited, enthusiastic, self-motivated learners. Every pro-game piece of literature always touched on this as the core strength to teach.

In Graham’s words, “the reality is, a game requires self-motivation – it has to start with that internal motivation to play and play and play. And then, you can take that game and use it as a platform for learning.” Intrinsically, games hold the key to learner engagement as a natural part of their day-to-day lives.

The key for any developer who wants to incorporate UDL in a game is simply to learn about what both teachers and diverse learners need – resources that are available free online through CAST, the National Center on Universal Design for Learning, the IRIS Center at Vanderbilt Peabody College with Claremont University, and many more.

And it’s a market that many say is currently under-served by the learning game industry.

Graham couldn’t find a game that did what she needed it to so, as a former software developer, she created her own. Her basic addition and multiplication apps are called iGet Math. Populated with creative and colorful characters, these game applications demonstrate mathematical concepts in diverse ways, allowing students of all abilities to demonstrate their understanding of concepts. Images and sounds combine to provide multiple means of representing mathematical ideas, and students receive instantaneous feedback on their learning.

The team at CAST has also developed several games and applications that fully embrace the principles of UDL, such as iSolveIt Math Puzzles, CAST Science Writer and UDL editions of classic works of literature. These free learning tools serve as an excellent model for gaming (and other) technology that incorporates and/or serves all of the principles of UDL.

Of games that are currently on the market, Graham says, sandbox games such as MineCraft and Besieged most closely fit the UDL bill, allowing multiple highly engaging ways for students to receive information and skills and then share their knowledge with their teacher and peers.

“Gaming takes away the standard that there’s only one way to present things. Not everyone is amazing at pubic speaking; not everyone is amazing at writing a paper… [Gaming] gives them this additional avenue for self-expression, and that’s incredible,” Graham said.

Tags: , , ,

Heather Jurva Heather Jurva is a contributing writer for gamesandlearning.org. She graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Montana and is now pursuing master's degrees in nonfiction writing and English teaching at UM.