How Zoombini games help Children Learn

One of the best-known educational games among educational gaming professionals is The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis–an early entrant into the field of educational games, and an extremely thoughtful and challenging puzzle game for kids.

I bought a copy recently, and last week brought it in to my daughter’s kindergarten class. Watching the kids play (and then later playing it at home) made a beautiful vignette of what it takes to make a game a good educational experience–and why that always involves more than just choosing a good game.

When I started up the program in the kindergarten class, the kids loved it, and they played as kids so often do–in a throng around the computer screen, with much jostling and commentary and discussion and debate. Hence:

Zoombini point #1: When given a chance, kids play Zoombinis as a social activity, not a solitary one.

As they played, the kids advanced all kinds of theories about how the puzzles worked, and why some Zoombinis got through and others didn’t with different strategies of play. Occasionally they got stuck, but usually they turned to each other for help when the problem was conceptual. They turned to me when they just didn’t know how to work the interface.

As I listened, though, I realized that while they were able to solve the puzzles, they were actually having more trouble with the game then it first appeared–and more than they even realized, I think.

For one thing, there were some kids who had played already, and while they were surely local experts, their “help” consisted mostly in just telling the others what to do next. Not much “coaching” going on there.

More problematic, none of the kids–neither the more experienced players nor the novices–really had any way of thinking about problems systematically. There was a lot of guessing and testing going on–and surely this is a strategy that games make possible. But even guessing and testing ideally gives way to more systematic hypothesis-based testing, and I didn’t see much of that happening.

Which brings us to:

Zoombini point #2: Reflection doesn’t always happen spontaneously.

When I brought the game back home, my daughter and I played for a while, and one of the things we worked on while we played was stopping and thinking before and after we tried things in the game. We talked about what we would guess next and why, and it was clear that this kind of systematic thinking was something that needed modeling for kids this age. So:

Zoombini point #3: Adults have a role to play in making games educational.

Now, to be fair, the game is rated for slightly older kids. And also to be fair, I should admit that this process was INCREDIBLY BORING for me as an adult at times. The game moves excruciatingly slowly when in the hands of a kindergartener, and even with my interest in learning (and, of course, my interest in my daughter), it was sometimes a real trial for me to work through the puzzles collaboratively.

Part of that is the structure of the game, which is pretty slow-moving in places. But part of it was simply that as adults we do all kinds of things with kids not because we enjoy them ourselves, but because they are good for our kids: things like violin recitals and soccer games and a host of fairs, movies, and other events that we wouldn’t otherwise choose for ourselves. Thus:

Zoombini point #4: Making a game a good learning experience is a team effort.

These Zoombini points are, of course, some of the key points I make about all educational games in How Computer Games Help Children Learn. One of the strengths of epistemic games is that this kind of mentoring is built into the game itself.

But the larger point is that parents and teachers have a role to play in making any game educational.

And doing that is work. Good work, to be sure, but work nonetheless.