Epistemic games and school

I recently had an experience talking with one young player of an epistemic game that captured the distinction between epistemic games and school as most of us experienced it.

In How Computer Games Help Children Learn, David Williamson Shaffer describes how epistemic games are designed to do something very different than schools today. Today’s schools were designed, he points out, at the turn of the century to avert social strife in rapidly expanding cities by socializing young people to a new industrial order: essentially, they were designed to prepare factory workers. But we don’t need to train children to work in an industrial society anymore. Instead, we need children to be able to think in creative and innovative ways. And epistemic games are designed to do just that.

Maria was one of twelve students who played the game Urban Science this summer. As part of our study, I interviewed all of the players last month, after they had finished the game and were back in school for a few months.

In her interview, I asked Maria if she had thought about Urban Science during the last three months. She told me a really interesting story about an assignment she completed in school’ how she had thought like a planner, and what happened (or didn’t happen) as a result.

Maria said:

‘In history we had to do like a city planning thing. Everyone else drew little houses and grocery stores, and I did my zoning thing. I did it on grid paper and then had little roads and stuff and had different boxes and they represented different things. There wasn’t enough housing for people, so then I put higher density housing in. And then I put a variety of market rate and affordable [housing]. And then it was funny because I looked at other people’s and they drew houses with chimneys and smoke coming out.’

I was delighted, of course, that Maria’s creative response to this social studies project suggested that Urban Science had helped Maria think about complex urban issues the way planners do. She was considering the needs of the stakeholders and representing changes the way a real planner would.

I couldn’t help but imagine (and hope) that her project might have caused a rich discussion in her class about cities and how they work. So I asked Maria what her teacher said about her project.

Maria replied:

‘Um. She gave me an ‘A’. I don’t know. I just turned it in.’

There were no comments. No reflection. No discussion.

And then the heartbreaker: Hoping to give Maria the feedback she didn’t get from her teacher, I asked her if I could see her project. She told me she had thrown it away.

Maria’s experience made me think again about how different epistemic games are from school. It was a stark reminder that too often the message we are sending our children in school is that their work is little more than a means to a grade.