The first of those ideas is understanding the long-term effects of play and learning. At DIGITEL, Mike Eisenberg spoke about toys and play as central to intellectual development. For instance, years into his architecture career, Frank Lloyd Wright continued to talk about how his play with blocks and toys – as far back as kindergarten – helped to shape his desire to become an architect. Even very simple toys can help kids project themselves into different worlds, with different constraints – blocks-as-cities, large refrigerator-boxes-as-caves, origami-as-zoo – and the worlds that kids create influence their interests years down the line. Ana Paiva spoke similarly about the projective quality of games and virtual worlds. Right now, her daughter creates imaginative stories about a glittery pink pencil which has been transformed into a magic wand that can cast spells and bring people luck. But as virtual worlds become more ubiquitous, kids will have more opportunities to create – and even realistically build out – similar kinds of fantastic stories and imaginative places through technologies like computer games, digitally-enhanced movies, and machinima.

The second big idea involves the importance of building models for learning. At AERA, I heard a group of math educators present a series of qualitative studies describing the processes of learning in several successful classrooms. In one setting, the question was what approaches helped students to better understand algebra? In another, how did a specific sort of classroom ecology help to foster productive learning? To me, though, the most interesting part of the session was the discussion, given by Ann Renninger. She pointed out that we, as education researchers, have many useful methods of thickly describing what happens in educational environments, but relatively few ways of understanding and theorizing about those happenings beyond the immediate context of that environment, this teacher’s approach, or those students’ work.

Both of these ideas got me thinking about my own work in epistemic games. When our middle-school kids come to play an epistemic game, they take on a projective identity as a journalist, or a biomechanical engineer, or an urban planner. While these identities are not fantastical, they are imaginative in that they let kids role play and act in ways that they never would have access in the real world. For example, very few kids ever get the chance to plan a city or interview a scientist about a topic of their interest in the course of their normal lives. Epistemic games give kids opportunities to create stories about themselves, their interests, and their possible future aspirations – and identities from which they can see the world in a different way.

Part of the interesting thing about all of this, though, is that letting kids step into an unfamiliar identity gives us as researchers an opportunity to build a better model of thinking and learning. We can begin to see what parts of the practices of engineers or journalists kids need to know about in order to successfully play that role – and how those things, epistemic frames, come together in at least a mostly consistent way across contexts and practices.

“[He] has lasted longer than he would have at school, even with hands-on activities.”

“I’m AMAZED that this activity engaged her for 2.5 hours.”

“[One Design Advisor] has a couple of boys who can easily get distracted and goof around but also really don’t like each other (and one has been accused recently of teasing the other) but you’d never know it from their group behavior.”

This teacher’s observations, which sound like pretty strong endorsements, will be helpful as we investigate new ways to introduce epistemic games to schools. These observations indicate that the children participating in the game were able to focus in ways that they typically don’t in school. But the reason this teacher was surprised that the children were so engaged was not only that they were behaving differently from how they usually would in school, but also because of the nature of the tasks in the game. Digital Zoo is fun, but it is also hard and frustrating!

The children were willing to focus and work hard for long periods of time because they were invested in the premise. Once they accepted the fiction that they were engineers, they were willing to struggle to fulfill the expectation of being an engineer. They were willing to play the game, even when it wasn’t “fun.” This phenomenon is clearly something missing in schools, where all too often students are motivated by grades, if they are motivated at all.

In an earlier post on the Macarthur blog, Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the Alliance for Childhood, was quoted as saying: ‘There is no evidence that video games are good at teaching problem-solving or ‘higher-order skills.’

Sadly–or perhaps I should say, happily–that’s simply not true.

In the game Digital Zoo, players become biomechanical engineers and design creatures of the kind you might see in an animated movie. And it turns out that, yes, by playing as engineers they learn to think about problems the way engineers do.

In one test, for example, we ask players before and after the game to draw a flowchart of how they would solve an engineering design problem. Their design process, as reflected in the flowcharts, becomes significantly more complex–and more like the real engineering design process–after playing the game than it was before. In other words, they learn to think more like engineers.

This was a carefully-designed study as part of my dissertation research. The design problems we asked them to solve before and after the game had nothing to do with the content of the game itself. The players of Digital Zoo don’t use flowcharts of this kind in the game, so they weren’t merely getting better at drawing flowcharts. We created problem isomorphs (meaning problems with the same structure but different details) so players would not be getting better at solving the problem because they had seen it before. And it was a month between the tests before and after the game.

To make sure this was not just an artifact of the test or the statistics, we conducted a controlled study. Just as we presented the design problems to players of Digital Zoo before and after the game, we gave the same problem to players of another game of the same duration–but that game was about being a journalist rather than being an engineer.

The results held up. In fact, before the games, players of the engineering game did significantly worse than players of the journalism game at thinking like an engineer. Afterwards, the players of the engineering game did better.

In other words, playing a well-designed game CAN help you learn creative, higher-order thinking.

The article, entitled Too Cool for School, describes an approach to design education that is wedded to the realities of the real world and marketplace; for example, “a follow-up set of designs riffing on statues of historic Savannah figures was scrapped when… retail contacts… thought the concept was too local.” Introducing students to their future lives seems like a no-brainer, but most traditional college experiences seem to do the exact opposite.

While Epistemic Games are simulations for younger children, they operate under the some of the same design principles as the Working Class Studio. SCAD’s program operates the same way a junior-designer job at any real-world design startup would. Similarly, Epistemic Games environments are modeled on the training regimens that are the launchpads for innovative professions. Although the young participants of the upcoming Digital Zoo game will not really be providing designs for the next Pixar movie, the play environment has been set up in all ways as if they will be.

Of course, the purpose of elementary school differs from that of design school: we are providing our players with some useful lenses, not advanced career training. The premise of epistemic games is that advanced career training is a wonderful model of education for younger learners. The promise of epistemic games is that this same model will prepare tomorrow’s adults with a toolkit of skills that are relevant and authentic, as opposed to the current and outdated model, which focuses on drilling basic skills that have few (if any) applications in the real world.

Murray offers that options such as vocational school and two-year colleges are better for some students in that they “provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly.”

Epistemic games might be another solution to the problems with 4-year colleges that Murray highlights.  These games are in fact explicitly not vocational, but they are based on ways that professionals in the world think about problems.  They provide learners with ways of thinking and problem solving that people use.  For example, in the Digital Zoo game that I am working on, the idea is not for players to become engineers, but rather for them to learn to think like engineers. Modeling education on professional practices yields an approach to teaching and learning that prompts students to think deeply about complicated, significant problems.

In his article, Murray suggests a dichotomy: 4-year colleges that try to do too much vs. more practical options like vocational schools.  Epistemic games offer a third option that uses the best elements of both, because epistemic games offer deep analytical thinking about complex problems, but they do it in a way that feels authentic and practical to the player.

Having designed an epistemic game around an exisiting – and free – internet tool (SodaConstructor), I am interested and excited by Google’s ever-expanding toolset. Several of these programs have the potential to be used as components of an epistemic game engine – an idea that my colleague Elizabeth Bagley is already developing in her game engine for Urban Science. Another possibility might be to have upcoming versions of Digital Zoo implement Google SketchUp to make 3D models from the 2D character prototypes. Or perhaps players in the Pandora project can use Google Blogger or Google Page Creator to present their stakeholder’s perspective online. And so on, and so forth…

Of course, using an existing tool or program as part of an epistemic game engine comes with some significant tradeoffs. Depending on the malleability of the tool, it may be next to impossible to modify and customize it in order to make it more authentic to the professional practices being modeled in the epistemic game. However, on the upside, hundreds of hours can be saved by not having to develop an engine from scratch. This can be particularly appealing to educators who have solid pedagogical ideas about developing epistemic games, but may not have the programming chops to develop an engine themselves.

In other words, tools like those being developed by Google might just play a key role in the propagation of epistemic games into the broader K-12 context. Keep on churning ‘em out, Google!

As we performed the activity, we realized that it will be important to use terms of engineering to explain and contextualize the task, so that “build something with marshmallows and straws” becomes less of an excuse to get gooey and more of an authentic design problem.  If we use the rhetoric that actual engineers would use, the students will have a sense that the purpose of their structure is to build alternative designs, the best of which will satisfy a client.

Making sure advanced technological tools are available to classrooms is a necessary step toward ensuring that we have a generation of students interested in becoming engineers and capable of interacting with the rapidly-developing technology of engineering professions.

In running epistemic games, we have seen that students’ interest in a field is heightened when they develop a sense of identity related to that field, as a professional scientist does. This is why in Digital Zoo, as students use the computer based software Sodaconstructor to design their structures, they also role-play as professional engineers, and that role is reinforced by other adult players in the game: design advisors, clients, and project managers.

Why we’re curious

What value is there in introducing elementary school children to the world of professions? Why encourage children so young to role-play as professional engineers? We think that elementary school will be a great point at which to take advantage of kids’ creativity and ability to take on a role. Have you ever watched a preadolescent kid playing a game?

It is interesting to observe the extent to which they are able to forget themselves as part of any other context, and fully inhabit the world of the game they are playing. As we introduce elementary schoolers to engineering and physics content in the Digital Zoo epistemic game, we are eager to see what the flexibility of their frame of mind will lend to their game practice.

Can Digital Tots play with SodaConstructor?

We wonder whether Sodaconstructor, the web-based software we use in Digital Zoo, is managable for younger kids? So far, we have run this epistemic game with middle schoolers, who adapt quickly to the new software. Now we are curious to see whether elementary schoolers can build structures in Sodaconstructor’s virtual spring-mass system.