The video linked to above is one of the more recent efforts to bring technology into the classroom. This particular game is aimed at teaching microbiology to 8th graders. Players try to figure out what is causing a dangerous infectious disease outbreak on an island filled with scientists.
This particular game is worth looking at more closely. It has received a lot of support (i.e., money) from the National Science Foundation ($4 million) and was created by a collaboration of the North Carolina State University College of Education, College of Design, and the Institute for Educational Innovation. The game has received high praise from teachers and the education establishment:
"Today’s class was fully engaged and I have already gotten emails from a number of students asking for the web address so that they can continue playing from home." (from a teacher blog).
Edweek also carried a glowing article about Crystal Island, quoting one of the developers of Crystal Island:
“It’s absolutely the case that kids are very engaged [while playing the game],” says Lester, who is also the head of the IntelliMedia Group. “You can see it on their faces and the way they interact with the software.”The same article quotes an 11-year-old that played the 5th grade version of Crystal Island:
“The game made me like science a little bit more, because in science sometimes you have to look through a textbook and that’s not fun,” she says. “But in a game you actually get to choose your character and pick out [choices based on] your own interests.”Engagement and fun are all well and good. They really are. I think every teacher and parent would like to see kids learn AND have fun, whenever possible. Of course, there are real risks to elevating "engagement" -- too often the content and knowledge are watered down to make the game more appealing and engaging. Projects that are fun can be given preference over the not-so-fun but really important stuff. Such as grammar and learning long division.
To get beyond whether the game is fun, I tried to find out how much Crystal Island actually improves learning. This was no easy task. Most of the comments and articles surrounding the game dwell on student engagement and give us little information on what students actually learn. There is an implicit assumption that if students are engaged, they will be learning.
I found one research paper written by the developers of Crystal Island here: http://research.csc.ncsu.edu/intellimedia/papers/wieg-09.pdf
I also found a literature review of Serious Games (which includes a review of Crystal Island) at the U Mass Computer Science Department: A Literature Review of the Field of Serious Games.
Crystal Island features a fully 3D interface and environment in which players explore, and collect important information by meeting and conversing with other agents. Players can collect other information through realistic events such as reading newspapers or examining objects in the environment. In this same way, players in general are given a large amount of freedom. The theory is that student motivation will rise when the sense of freedom within a game is increased. This is because students can quickly judge how much there is to discover within a system. When they detect a vast and interesting world, they wish to explore it, and freedom within a game allows them to do just that.
There is little mention on the trade off between providing students with freedom within a simulation and manually focusing students on chosen tasks. It can be argued that although providing freedom to users increases motivation, it may not lead to learning because students might tend to engage in unproductive tasks. Likewise, forcing student efforts may lead to desired actions within the system, but a loss of engagement may be a great detriment to learning. This trade off must be thoroughly analyzed in future serious games research, although intelligent tutoring research may do a great deal in informing the likely result of the trade off.An interesting part of the paper was the paradox of trying to make the content of a game strong, without destroying the enjoyment factor. Some feel that this paradox is impossible to overcome. The paper also makes the interesting point that:
Unfortunately, students have been shown to be particularly good at recognizing when a simulation is trying to “trick” them into learning.So now, I return to the only research paper on Crystal Island, published by the developers. 8th grade students participated in an actual test of the game. Kids were tested before they played the game on various elements of microbiology, they were allowed to play the game, and then they were tested again. Another group of students also participated in the study, but they were given traditional lecture-style instruction by a teacher with a slide show and did not play the game.
Kids that played Crystal Island correctly answered TWO additional questions after they played the game for an hour. As for the kids in the traditional classroom?
The results showed that students [that played the game] did exhibit learning gains, but that those gains were less than those produced by traditional instructional approaches.In other studies, the gains may have been better, but the data isn't clear. The developers still insist that the benefits of motivation and engagement are "substantial" (but unquantified). Also, students that took notes during the game did better and girls were more likely than boys to use the note-taking capabilities built into the game.
So I remain very skeptical of the benefits of technology and game playing in the classroom. For the amount of time the kids played the game (60 minutes) to improve their content knowledge by only two questions, it seems that this is a very inefficient way to learn. Add to that the high cost of developing the game and installing the technology into classrooms and the limited focus of the game, it just can't be justified at this time.
I see this unbalanced emphasis on engagement in our local schools. Recently I watched a science teacher give a 15-minute presentation on the benefits of SmartBoard clickers. His point boiled down to the fact their benefit was that the students liked them. As you say, it's great that students like things, but are they learning more from these outsized investments of time and money?
ReplyDeleteThere's so little data to support a lot of this stuff. And so much that supports teacher expertise -- far more bang for the buck if you focus on quality of teaching and not electronic gadgets. I was surprised by how weak the learning achievement results were for Crystal Island -- it's so narrowly focused. I'd have thought that you couldn't help but learn microbiology if you had a narrowly focused game that did nothing but teach you that one little slice of science.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's no data at all on how robust that learning was over time. To the extent there were learning gains they came immediately after the kids played the game. We have no data at all on how much the students retained one week or one month later.