Merrilea Mayo, Ph.D.
Director, Future of Learning Initiatives, Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation
Think big, really big.
Every year, the higher education system in the United States produces about
350,000 bachelor of science students. Every year, ten million people, or
twenty-eight times as many, are playing World of Warcraft. Even small games
you've never heard of, like Dofus, attract 450,000 players (see
mmogchart.com).
But, when we speak of education interventions in this country, we think of
one or ten classrooms at a time: a summer camp for students, teacher training
experiences that serve fifteen teachers a year, innovative curricular materials
that make it into five or ten or maybe forty classrooms. Nothing we do has the
scale to make a difference on the national scorecard.
Video games might.
But—Don't Video Games Rot Your Brain?
Maybe not. There is a burgeoning field that goes by various names—immersive
learning, 3D Internet-based learning, Serious Games, to name a few—that has
embraced the vision of games and virtual worlds as authentic and powerful
learning experiences. Certainly, from a theoretical point of view, games have
many features that cry out for application to learning. To wit:
- Goals: Research has shown that students persist longer in a task if working
toward a goal. Games, almost by definition, have goals.
- Self-Efficacy: Another key to learner persistence is the learner's own
perception of how well he or she is doing. Games foster self-efficacy by
rewarding the player immediately for even the tiniest successes, through
progressive accumulation of points and level.
- Feedback: In a typical classroom, a student gets to ask 0.11 questions an
hour (J.D. Fletcher, 2001). He is given feedback on performance at a rate as
slow as two exams a semester. Game feedback is continuous, immediate, and on the
scale of seconds.
- Collaboration: Collaborative learning yields, on average, a 50 percent
improvement over solo learning (D. Johnson, 1981). Many of the massive
multiplayer online games have collaborative problem solving hardwired into their
architecture.
- Inquiry: Games, particularly those set in virtual worlds, are designed
explicitly for user-directed exploration.
- Brain Chemistry: the encoding of memory is enabled by dopamine production
in the brain; the work of M. Koepp et al (1998) showed video games generate
almost double the levels of dopamine experienced by humans at rest. Performance
doubled as well.
Can We Prove It?
What proof do we have that any or all of this is true, that games can produce
superior learning outcomes? Well, the proof is precious little because the field
is so new, but at least it is positive. Witness these games:
- Supercharged! [electrostatics]—a 28 percent increase in learning outcomes
over lecture (K. Squire et al, 2004).
- Geography Explorer [geology]—a 15 to 40 percent increase in learning
outcomes over lecture (P. McClean et al, 2001).
- Virtual Cell [cell biology]—a 30 to 63 percent improvement in learning
outcomes over lecture (ibid).
- Dimenxian [algebra]—an average increase of one test grade (e.g., from B to
A) for most kids, up to three grades for underachieving kids (N. Etuk,
2006).
- River City [ecology, scientific inquiry]—a 370 percent increase in test
scores over lecture for D students; a 14 percent increase in test scores over
lecture for B students (D. Ketelhut, 2007).
- NIU Torcs [numerical methods]—twice as much time spent by game-playing kids
on their homework, much more highly detailed concept maps (B. Coller, 2006).
A key distinction between the games above and the so-called edu-tainment
games of yore is the player's direct engagement in the content, rather than a
game-like "test" of content learned elsewhere.
Why Aren't We There Yet?
Every parent's dream would be to have their kid as addictively engaged in
their own education as they are in their video games. If the technology is here,
and the content is here, and the audience is here, why aren't these products
available?
Lack of a for-profit model. Large game companies (Sony,
Nintendo, Microsoft) swore off education-related games with the edu-tainment
bust. And, let's face it, even in the pencil-and-paper world, education is not a
big moneymaker.
Lack of sustainability in the not-for-profit model. Government
agencies (NSF, NIH, DOD, NASA, NOAA) and several foundations, including ours,
MacArthur, and Hewlett, are stepping up to the plate. But, in the grant-based
model, there is no financial allowance for product marketing, distribution, or
product existence after the life of the grant. "Dissemination" usually amounts
to putting the game on the developer's obscure Web site, trafficked only by
graduate students and/or professional colleagues. Meanwhile, all the kids who
could benefit from it are over at Disney.com. That's OK. (I should
note that we collaborate with Disney.com on the Hot Shot Business online
youth entrepreneurship game at hotshotbusiness.com) Yet, in most grant-based
models, the software will be rendered obsolete by the new Windows
release, anyway. There's no provision for compatibility upgrades after the grant
is over.
Technical barriers that dramatically limit usability. Imagine an
Internet without search (no Google), without copy and paste, that only ran on
some computers and not others. How would you do anything? Not easily. The
technical prowess to solve these deficiencies in 3D worlds exists; the
leadership to coordinate the effort does not.
Uncertainty about quality and relevance. How can I tell if this
game really teaches? That it will be fun? Are the games designed to adhere to
state standards? Can they be taken apart into modules of less than forty
minutes? Is there a teacher guide? Consumer acceptance issues have not been
worked through, for the most part.
We have a ways to go. However, the combined scale and effectiveness of
game-based learning far exceeds many other educational innovations. For this
reason, the Kauffman Foundation is committed to solving the above-identified
infrastructure issues of dissemination, sustainability, usability, and adoption
through targeted projects. Within the next five to ten years, games should be
available that allow you to learn what "you" want to learn.
