Games to Teach

Dates

June 2001 — August 2003

Principal Investigators

Professor Henry Jenkins (Literature: Comparative Multimedia Studies)
Randy Hinrichs (Microsoft Research Learning Science and Technology)

Problem

Move beyond the current state of edutainment products which combine the entertainment value of a bad lecture with the educational value of a bad game.

Goal

Demonstrate the potential of interactive, immersive digital games as an educational medium by combining MIT-caliber science and engineering content with state-of-the-art game design.

Overview

The Games To Teach project, an interdisciplinary collaboration of faculty, staff, and students across the humanities, sciences, and engineering disciplines, has developed a series of conceptual prototypes for "games-to-teach" science and engineering subjects at the advanced high school and introductory college level.

The goals of the project are to:

• Explore and define best practices in gaming and apply those toward educational games;
• Articulate a theoretically and empirically grounded rational for using games to support learning in math, science, and education;
• Forge next-generation educational gaming pedagogical models grounded in contemporary educational theory;
• Design 10 conceptual prototypes of games to support learning in advanced math, science, and engineering;
• Initiate an international dialogue among leading media scholars, game industry leaders, and educators about the role of next-generation gaming technologies in learning;
• Use educational games as a context for exploring new game genres and expanding gaming beyond its historical core audiences;
• Create a network of media scholars and educators at MIT pursuing educational gaming; and
• Articulate potential business models for bringing next-generation educational games to market.

During the first year the project team explored new pedagogical models using games and developed a series of 10 conceptual prototypes designed to support advanced high school and first-year college science and engineering curricula. The conceptual prototypes consisted of game design information, original creative artwork, sets of pitch materials, accompanying pedagogical rationale, and storyboards of user experiences and gameplay. The goal for these prototypes was to provide grounded examples of next-generation educational gaming, and to communicate core game ideas that spark interest and dialogue among the game developer communities, interactive entertainment industry, leaders in higher education, and government and consortium funders. Thus, we aimed to illustrate a range of gameplay, platform possibilities, aesthetic choices and user experiences.

More Project Details from the Principal Investigator

Background by Henry Jenkins

Throughout history, artists and educators have been enchanted with the opportunity of using new media to support learning. Seminal cartoonist Max Fleischer developed documentaries on evolution and on Einstein, as well as training films for the U.S. Navy during World War II. The Bell Labs film series, which were produced by Jack Warner, directed by Frank Capra, and animated by Chuck Jones, brought together top Hollywood talent to develop educational media.

Over the past 25 years, computer and video games have evolved from black-and-white blips made by hobbyists into a complex multi-billion dollar industry. Indeed, interactive digital entertainment has made significant strides in creating immersive worlds, "telling" interactive stories, connecting massive multiplayer online communities, and tackling a broader range of themes and human experience.

Yet few, if any, examples exist of how this medium might be used to support learning. Traditional "edutainment" is based on limited pedagogical models, and does not take advantage of the games' potential to simulate phenomena, engage the player through story, express ideas creatively, or collaborate with other players. Some existing games such as Civilization III could be used to support learning, but few researchers have examined their impact on players' understandings.

In our first year, our goal was been to explore the potential of using games to support learning, and develop new gaming models that (1) appeal to a broad audience of gamers; (2) combine math/science/engineering content with the gameplay; and (3) chart ways for teachers to actually use games in classroom contexts as readily as students would want to play them at home.

Growing out of these efforts, our research has addressed:

• What is state-of-the-art game design?
• Where is this medium going?
• How can we develop new gaming forms to attract a broader audience of gamers?
• How do researchers and developers create compelling gamespaces where players engage in meaningful math, science, and engineering practices?
• Do players think with the information learned in these games in other offline situations?
• How might we design games so that teachers can actually use them within classroom environments?
• In the past, educational innovations such as these have struggled in schools. What can investigators learn from past innovations to help ensure their success?
• What might a sustainable, scalable model of next-generation educational media look like?

Our conceptual prototypes have provided tentative answers to these design issues — and point the way for more in depth formative research. As such, we also believe that these issues point toward broader issues more fundamental to the humanities and social sciences, such as:

• What is the role of the viewer/participant in consuming media?
• How do the cultural and social contexts of media consumption affect the experience of interacting with media?
• How does (or doesn't) knowledge transfer from one context to the next?
• How do technologies and media (i.e., games) affect classroom microcultures?

Conclusions from the Principal Investigator

Our research and initial game designs have led to the following conclusions:

• Games with educational value that are marketed as entertainment rather than educational games (e.g. Sim City, Civilization, The Sims) have succeeded in the marketplace;
• Most educational games have failed because they use generic game templates (e.g. Pac Man) rather than original game rules designed to illustrate the rules of a system;
• Games where players role play as scientists, engineers, or doctors in dramatic situations (e.g. Environmental Detectives, Biohazard, Daedalus' End, DreamHaus) offer opportunities for dramatic, compelling game play based on authentic scenarios;
• Many physical systems can be represented by simple rules and relationships. Games are also systems based on simple rules and relationships. Compelling science games can be made where players infer these rules and relationships through the game space, developing important intuitive understandings of scientific phenomena in the process (e.g. Hephaestus, Cuckoo Time!, Replicate, Supercharged, Extreme Sports);
• As fabricated spaces, games have the capability to drastically change scale, or take the player to environments they normally could not enter, potentially leveraging the beautiful and surrealistic nature of science and allowing players to visualize abstract scientific phenomena (e.g. Supercharged, Replicate);
• Games are only an instructional resource in an environment. Designers of instructional games need to design games that are usable in instructional contexts, meet teachers' administrative needs, and can be adapted to meet situational constraints; and
• A common complaint of educational games is that they encourage thoughtless trial and error rather than critical thinking. Games can use social interactions as opportunities for players to share and critique strategies, critically reflecting on their actions and articulating their experiences into usable knowledge.

Games to Teach educational games are designed to exist in relation to a broader array of classroom activities. We don't think that games can make you a scientist or engineer, and we don't think they are an adequate substitute to real-world experiments. We see games as enhancing the capabilities of gifted teachers, not displacing them with impersonal machines. Yet, games do offer teachers enormous resources they can use to make their subject matter come alive for their students, motivating learning, offering rich and compelling problems, modeling the scientific process and the engineering context, and enabling a more sophisticated assessment mechanisms.

"What happens when you combine MIT-quality science, math, and engineering content with cutting edge game play? Confronting this challenge forces us to not only expand the creative and technical possibilities of an emerging medium but also to better understand its cultural, social, and intellectual contexts. The Games To Teach project has allowed us to blow the lids off those dusty boxes of educational games we've come to regard as ineffective, uninteresting, and tedious. Our research has already attracted enormous interest from leaders in both industry and education." — Henry Jenkins

Project Output

Publications

Holland, W., Jenkins, H. & Squire, K. Theory by Design (in press). In Perron, B., and Wolf, M. (Eds). Video Game Theory. Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2002). Game Theory: Digital Renaissance, Technology Review. MIT. March 29, 2002.

Jenkins, H. & Squire, K.D. (2002). The Art of Contested Space. In L. King, (Ed.) Game On!. London: Barbican Press.

Squire, K.D. (2002) Rethinking the role of games in Education. Game Studies, 2(1). View

Squire, K.D. (2002, March). Videogames and Instructional Design. Submitted to The Journal of Interactive Learning Research.

Squire, K.D. (2002, March). Video Computer gaming and Science Education. Submitted to Journal of Research on Science Education and Technology.

Squire, K., Jenkins, H. & Games to Teach Team. "Computer and Video Games in Instructional Technologies." Association of Educational Communication Technology. Dallas, TX, November, 2002. Academic To Instructional Technologists.

Squire, K., Jenkins, H. & Games to Teach Team. "Designing the next generation of digital educational media." Association of Educational Communication Technology. Dallas, TX, November, 2002.

Reframing the Cultural Space of Computer and Video Games by Kurt Squire, MIT. View

Presentations

Jenkins, H. & Hinrichs, R. 2002. Invited speakers at the 2002 Game Developer's Conference. Jenkins and Hinrichs each spoke on panels March 19, 2002 at the Game Developer's Conference, San Jose California. The audience consisted of academicians and game developers interested in intersections between the fields.

Jenkins, H. & Squire, K. Designing Games that Teach: An MIT Workshop. Electronic Entertainment Exposition. Panel presented Tuesday, May 21, 2002. (Panel consisted of approximately 200 game designers, developers, academicians, journalists and publishers, many of whom are interested in producing educational games.)

Klopfer, E. & Squire, K. Games-to-Teach: An MIT Workshop. 2002 International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Seattle, WA

Klopfer, E. Squire, K. & Jenkins, H. "Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a Window into a Virtual Simulated World." First IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE 2002) in Sweden August 29-30.

Squire, K. The Games-to-Teach Project. Game On: Exploring the Potential of Computer Games in Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, November 21,2002.

Links

Games to Teach