Decisions per minute
Winston Wolff
My concern is that we want serious games to be "better ways to learn." But one aspect of "better" is almost certainly to waste less time. The learning in games is supposed to come from "learning by doing", i.e. you are practicing what you've learned. Each action is preceded by a decision. So it seems to me that serious games should aim for lots of action. And a game that is too slow is ineffective in teaching compared to a traditional classroom.
Thoughts?
Winston Wolff
Stratolab - Games for Learning
tel: (646) 827-2242
web: www.stratolab.com
Kam Star
happiness, transferable skills and career choices.
Please forgive the rather youthful graphics, this is because its aimed
at pre-teens. For something a little more grown up check out
http://playgen.com/floodsim
Have a super weekend.
Kam
Kam Star BA(Hons) MA (Arch) APM
Managing Director
PlayGen Ltd
35 Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, London, E2 8AA
Serious Games Institute, Cheetah Road, Coventry, CV1 2TL
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Allan Shore
| Bring up a wheel-barrel: I have shovels full of suggestions! But I won't bore everyone. The essence is that, as a society, we don't understand all that social justice, advocacy, service and even educational agencies and projects really do. Thus we see no representations of how to convert their work into recognizable actions. Which means we can't program them into games. This is EXACTLY why I'm stumbling through creating an Entertainment Justice initiative that would integrate empower ideas into the media we are all willing to spend too much money on watching people confront evil. So yes, your observations, Winston, are correct. I just hope others take this problem as an incentive to help do a bit more than make nice games. The government and philanthropists have invested billions on learning how to help and advance people and causes; unfortunately, mostly we don't understand what they discovered and thus we don't know how to cloak our Avatars accordingly. Allan --- On Fri, 10/29/10, Winston Wolff <wins...@stratolab.com> wrote: |
|
|
David Langendoen
I think this is a great question and an issue that doesn't get talked about much. The angle I'm taking on your question, particularly for classroom usage, is the issue of implementation and available teaching time. And how different teachers with different time constraints, technology issues and teaching styles can all (or mostly) find a way to use your product.
My company has done a lot of work with Scholastic, among others, so spent a fair bit of time observing the lessons around making a piece of educational software broadly accessible.
We are also the developers of the Mission US history adventure game(s)... www.mission-us.org ... which launched nationally last month.
Rather than writing an epic post on this, I'll just highlight a couple of key things we've observed:
1) If you're lucky a teacher may be able to allocate 20-25 minutes of a 45 minute class to some kind of technology experience. The rest of the time usually takes the form of some pre-teaching, the logistics of getting kids on the computers and ready to go, and then some kind of whole class wrap-up. It's easy as a game designer to say "On the XBox 360 kids customize an avatar and wander around a virtual environment in 3D...we better do something similar or else they won't like it." Big mistake. Kids tend to compare their in-school experiences with textbooks, not AAA titles.
To your point about Dimension-M... we don't think it's advisable to have lots of walking around that doesn't tie to the learning objectives. Fine on your own time, but deadly on the tight clock of the classroom. We got a lot of questions from the funder of Mission US (CPB) about why didn't we make this 3D? How come the player navigates from place to place on a map and not at a street-level view? And the answer is simple: get the player to the juiciest decisions as quickly as possible. You're not trying to put "With over 40 hours of gameplay" on your marketing touts...so don't pad.
2) Related to the above, although slightly off-topic from the question, we avoid plug-ins like the plague (with the exception of Flash, which has sufficient ubiquity). Asking a teacher to figure out the byzantine technical restrictions of his or her school network to install Unity is trouble 95% of the time. Further the game should load in seconds, not minutes... and you can't count on something being cached already.
And with all that in mind, how can a teacher interpret your experience if they only have 10 minutes today? What if they have an hour? And what are the lesson plans and supporting materials that help them quickly structure the experience in a way that meets their needs and assures them that this will meet their state standards, etc.
Best,
--David
-- ** David Langendoen, Partner ** Electric Funstuff ** www.electricfunstuff.com ** 212-463-7559
Allan Shore
| Sad commentary on our educational systems, no? If technology takes more than 10 minutes we lose the interest. Amazing but totally true. Allan --- On Fri, 10/29/10, David Langendoen <da...@electricfunstuff.com> wrote: |
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|
|
Moses Wolfenstein
of the design, I'm a little thrown by your use of the phrase "waste
less time" in characterizing better learning. While it can certainly
vary depending on your learning objectives, efficiency is often a
problematic way to frame effectiveness in the design of both game
based and non-game based learning activities. Granted, this is
problematic in the face of classroom learning (especially in American
schools) where we have coverage issues and a curriculum that favors
breadth over depth. If there's one thing we've seen from that
curriculum though, it's that focusing on efficiency in order to meet
goals of coverage doesn't guarantee high quality learning.
All of this is to say, I think you're touching on an interesting
question around the design of learning experiences in games, but I'd
be cautious with the assertion that better learning is necessarily
tied to faster interaction or more frequent decision making. What
types of decisions are you asking players to make? What's the nature
of the challenges they're confronted with during game play, and how do
those challenges tie into the learning objectives? Most importantly,
what are the learning objectives? These are essential questions to
answer if your primary aim is designing the best possible game based
learning experience.
That said, no one designs in a vacuum. If you're designing for the
classroom context you obviously need to contend with questions of
efficiency. Once you've started down that road though, it's worth
recognizing that (as Jim Gee, Kurt Squire, and others have pointed
out) some of the best features of great (commercial) games as learning
tools are tied to the extensive time commitments players make to them.
If efficiency is a non-negotiable condition of the learning experience
you're designing, there's a distinct possibility that game based
learning isn't the ideal solution to your design problem. Of course
since there is no universal formula for designing learning
experiences, all of this depends on your learning objectives.
my 2¢
-Moses
--
Moses Wolfenstein
Associate Director of Research
Academic ADL Co-Lab
www.moseswolfenstein.com
Twitter: @mosesoperandi
Winston Wolff
Excellent points. I'm forwarding them to the list.
-ww
Skip
I don't think that 'time on task' should be forgotten. Spending 10 minutes
focused on 3 things might actually be good.
Copied below is an article from the economist that indicates making
something 'more tedious' can actually help the students retain it.
----------------------------------------------
Making something hard to read means it is more likely to be remembered
The Economist Oct 14th 2010
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks
easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have
demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are
shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be
done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel
Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues,
suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to
read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them
to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of
extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was
meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It
used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants
could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in
difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point
Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black
font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists.
They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or
so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as "What is the diet
of the Pangerish?" and "What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?" The
upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of
the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered
correctly 86.5% of the time.
The question was, would this result translate from the controlled
circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom?
It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in
high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got
similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not
easier.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Best,
Skip
http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=162549447105518
-----Original Message-----
From: gamesfo...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:gamesfo...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Winston Wolff
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 12:44 PM
To: Games for Change
Subject: [G4C] Decisions per minute
Thoughts?
--
Diamond, James
Rather than drilling students on the color of the Norgletti’s eyes and the elements of the Pangerish diet, I think it would be much more effective to have them take the time to explore exactly what makes a Norgletti a Norgletti and think about what makes it different from the Pangerish, or a Smurf for that matter.
The connection between these posts about “retention” and “more action” is interesting: both suggest that “more” of something is necessarily more educative. Winston wrote, “it seems to me that serious games should aim for lots of action,” as the effectiveness of serious games is supposed to be predicated on the idea of learning by doing. But it’s the QUALITY of the doing that’s most important, and I would add “that serious games should aim for lots of MEANINGFUL action” given the learning objectives, the content domain, and the learner’s ability to engage content and skills in the game. Meaningfulness is a relational dynamic between the learner and the “problem space”—the problems should matter in some way and the game should scaffold you in learning to approach them. That is, the play should be connected to the problem solving. Just as lots of time on task in a classroom doesn’t guarantee richer understanding or skill development, nor does lots of time engaging in action in a game.
One of the more interesting design and conceptual challenges for educational games, I think, is how to design for “reflection upon dissonance,” given the medium is defined by action and that many (but by no means all) of the more popular genres don’t pull for slowing down and stopping to frame and solve ill-defined problems. Teachers, especially the good ones, do that stuff all the time, but if educational games are supposed to be about “application,” then we have to think up engaging problems and ways of helping player/learners attend to the features of those problems in the game space. There might not be a whole lot of visible action, though there could be, but it would probably be a qualitatively different experience.
Easy, right! :-)
Cheers and thanks for the interesting posts!
Jim
_______________________________
Jim Diamond
Research Associate
Center for Children and Technology
Education Development Center, Inc.
96 Morton St., 7th Floor
New York, NY 10014
voice: 212.807.4256
email: jdia...@edc.org
web: http://cct.edc.org/
P Save a tree! Please don't print this e-mail unless it’s necessary.
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen
The game looks interesting. I would be curious to see what you (and other people here) think at our attempt that is also about to release any week now.
You can find a demo on its web-site here: www.playinghistory.eu – any feedback, bugs and comments are highly appreciated.
Best,
Simon
On 29/10/10 19.32, "David Langendoen" <da...@electricfunstuff.com> wrote:
Hi Winston,
I think this is a great question and an issue that doesn't get talked about much. The angle I'm taking on your question, particularly for classroom usage, is the issue of implementation and available teaching time. And how different teachers with different time constraints, technology issues and teaching styles can all (or mostly) find a way to use your product.
My company has done a lot of work with Scholastic, among others, so spent a fair bit of time observing the lessons around making a piece of educational software broadly accessible.
We are also the developers of the Mission US history adventure game(s)... www.mission-us.org <http://www.mission-us.org> ... which launched nationally last month.
Rather than writing an epic post on this, I'll just highlight a couple of key things we've observed:
1) If you're lucky a teacher may be able to allocate 20-25 minutes of a 45 minute class to some kind of technology experience. The rest of the time usually takes the form of some pre-teaching, the logistics of getting kids on the computers and ready to go, and then some kind of whole class wrap-up. It's easy as a game designer to say "On the XBox 360 kids customize an avatar and wander around a virtual environment in 3D...we better do something similar or else they won't like it." Big mistake. Kids tend to compare their in-school experiences with textbooks, not AAA titles.
To your point about Dimension-M... we don't think it's advisable to have lots of walking around that doesn't tie to the learning objectives. Fine on your own time, but deadly on the tight clock of the classroom. We got a lot of questions from the funder of Mission US (CPB) about why didn't we make this 3D? How come the player navigates from place to place on a map and not at a street-level view? And the answer is simple: get the player to the juiciest decisions as quickly as possible. You're not trying to put "With over 40 hours of gameplay" on your marketing touts...so don't pad.
2) Related to the above, although slightly off-topic from the question, we avoid plug-ins like the plague (with the exception of Flash, which has sufficient ubiquity). Asking a teacher to figure out the byzantine technical restrictions of his or her school network to install Unity is trouble 95% of the time. Further the game should load in seconds, not minutes... and you can't count on something being cached already.
And with all that in mind, how can a teacher interpret your experience if they only have 10 minutes today? What if they have an hour? And what are the lesson plans and supporting materials that help them quickly structure the experience in a way that meets their needs and assures them that this will meet their state standards, etc.
Best,
--David
On 10/29/2010 12:44 PM, Winston Wolff wrote:
I've been playing a number of serious games lately and I've observed that many of them have a low rate of decisions to make per minute and I wonder if other people have a concern with this? Take for example Dimension-M--After 10 minutes of play, you have wandered around to find the first probe on the island, thus solving your first X,Y location problem. You might solve a few more in the next 10 minutes. That's about 3 problems in a 10 minute period. Now admittedly I only played the first level of Dimension-M--perhaps the later levels get faster. But I see this in all sorts of serious games.
My concern is that we want serious games to be "better ways to learn." But one aspect of "better" is almost certainly to waste less time. The learning in games is supposed to come from "learning by doing", i.e. you are practicing what you've learned. Each action is preceded by a decision. So it seems to me that serious games should aim for lots of action. And a game that is too slow is ineffective in teaching compared to a traditional classroom.
Thoughts?
Winston Wolff
Stratolab - Games for Learning
tel: (646) 827-2242
web: www.stratolab.com <http://www.stratolab.com>
Best Regards,
Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen
CEO, PhD
Serious Games Interactive
Griffenfeldsgade 7A, 4. floor
DK- 2200 Copenhagen N
Phone: +45 48 44 51 92
Mobile: +45 40 10 79 69
Linkedin: http://dk.linkedin.com/in/egenfeldt
Web: http://www.seriousgames.dk
Blog: http://www.egenfeldt.eu
Try our games:
http://www.playinghistory.eu
http://www.globalconflicts.eu
Skip
> time "wandering around the enviornment" was what should be avoided.
I see your point, but I guess I’d like to see a controlled study on this.
Wandering around might help build suspense, that when resolved gives the player a jolt of satisfaction, that helps trigger memory. Where as more instant feedback might not produce any result at all.
I don’t know.
Thinking about this, it might be like flipping the flash cards over too soon. If the student doesn’t try to remember, then flash cards are not very effective (at least for me). But if the student ‘racks their brain’ (interesting how we even refer to this as suffering) then they are more likely to retain the information. No pain, no gain :-)
If this is true, then there is probably a point of diminishing returns: letting them wander about for 4 minutes may be no better than 3 minutes, or something like that. But this is something that could be, I think should be, studied in a controlled environment.
From: Scott Sirota
[mailto:ssi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010
3:08 PM
To: Skip
Cc: Winston Wolff; Games for
Change
Subject: Re: [G4C] Decisions per
minute
Although I agree with your idea, I think that the general point was that time "wandering around the enviornment" was what should be avoided. If a given problem in Dimension-M took 10 minutes, I think that would be fine. It's the time not engaged with material that is of concern.
Mary Wharmby
really enjoy exploration (wandering around the environment) even exploring dead-ends. Most players
asked for more than I had given them. So, while I'd also like to see a controlled study, I don't think we
can discount the role of fun in learning. If players are having fun and enjoying the game, it follows
that they will be more engaged by the academic material as well and perhaps retain it better. I can't
think of the reference off the top of my head, but I know I've recently read that fun does increase
engagement and aid learning. If a game becomes all academic material and no fun, we may be
missing an opportunity.
On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 11:35:55 -0400, Skip wrote
> > time "wandering around the enviornment" was what should be avoided.
>
> I see your point, but I guess I'd like to see a controlled study on this.
>
> Wandering around might help build suspense, that when resolved gives
> the player a jolt of satisfaction, that helps trigger memory. Where
> as more instant feedback might not produce any result at all.
>
> I don't know.
>
> Thinking about this, it might be like flipping the flash cards over too
> soon. If the student doesn't try to remember, then flash cards are
> not very effective (at least for me). But if the student 'racks
> their brain'
> (interesting how we even refer to this as suffering) then they are more
> likely to retain the information. No pain, no gain :-)
>
> If this is true, then there is probably a point of diminishing returns:
> letting them wander about for 4 minutes may be no better than 3
> minutes, or something like that. But this is something that could be,
> I think should be, studied in a controlled environment.
>
> _____
>
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David Langendoen
I would never contest that students like and enjoy exploration and that it can be valuable in a number of ways, both for engagement, learning, and retention.
My original point was more that you have to make smart decisions in terms of what content you develop and the freedom permitted the user from two perspectives: 1) Your implementation model (in school vs. out of school; the time available, etc.); and 2) Your budget in money and time.
In the product my company developed in partnership with WNET (www.mission-us.org), we had to take the player through the events leading up to and through the Boston Massacre, conveying a number of perspectives, primary source documents, etc. Just to get that experience across we needed at least 4 20-25 minute classroom sessions, which is asking a lot already. If we let the players explore to their heart's content by walking through the streets of colonial Boston that would have not only busted our implementation model but crushed our budget.
If our primary learning outcome was the clothing and architectural style of the times, then we WOULD have wanted that kind of exploration.
So to someone else's point, the exploration should have some kind of real inherent value... and I would argue that in most cases "kids like it" is not a sufficient hurdle, at least in time-constrained implementations.
You can make other arguments about whether schools should be time-constrained in these manners... but we (meaning my company, not everyone on this list) need to make products that will be used by the current regime!
Cheers,
David
Allan Shore
| Forgot to add the representative quote from Strait Talk ... this is important for those trying to blend values to make games pay off in fun, learning and social benefits. Again, here's what Stanford offers from a group dedicated to bring conversations together: "Not once in Bridgespan’s own presentations of the cycle have we successfully stimulated conversation between funders and grantees. Maybe we weren’t using the right format. Or maybe when funders and nonprofits get in the same room, honest talk just takes a walk. Lack of trust, mismatched power, and a long history of not telling it like it is are enormous barriers to addressing the root causes of the starvation cycle." That is an amazing admission. Allan |
--- On Thu, 11/4/10, David Langendoen <da...@electricfunstuff.com> wrote: |
Allan Shore
| Though I suspect the concept of a regime varies, the fact of the matter is that people in nonprofit and for-profit sectors don't know how to speak to each other. Money gets in the way. As such, as I complain regularly, less gets done to understand what we can integrate into the arsenal of Avatar weapons of serious advancement than people who care about socially responsible options deserve. Don't believe me? Okay ... try the still-liberal but respected Stanford Innovation Review. They too see that Strait Talk in Mixed Company is difficult, if not impossible. Here's one example ... which is absolutely amazing and should suggest to people why they need to add a budget line item for people who get what the value NGOs offer to the
discussion! The silence I generally cause usually suggests people don't get it. Perhaps talking strait is better. |
Allan --- On Thu, 11/4/10, David Langendoen <da...@electricfunstuff.com> wrote: |
|
To: gamesfo...@googlegroups.com |
David Langendoen
I know that divide can sometimes be tricky, but I'd say it happens more than you might think. I'd like to clarify that our project is a public/private partnership and grant funded. We don't make a dime on usage and the product is given away for free to anyone and everyone. On the other hand our goal is to get thousands of middle-school social studies teachers using this in their classrooms -- so thinking about implementation is critical. We not only have to convince the early adopters but the mainline teacher.
And let me put another spin on exploration... we let teachers and students explore a small but critical moment in American history over the course of a week... an event that might be normally covered in a single class. We provide not only the game, played 4-5 days for 20 minutes... but an entire suite of downloadable activities, lesson plans, writing prompts and ways to reflect on the experiences of the game.
So we decided not to let the kids move an avatar around (using a map and location based system instead), but rather convert the time they might have spent getting from point A to point B into time that the teacher can spend in whole-class discussions helping kids build connections between each of their experiences and the big historical questions.
By the way, I think this is a great discussion... and not trying to tout our game, but one of the lenses that I see this process through and a handy example. Other great examples of private for-profit companies in this space are Filament Games and e-Line Ventures.
And if you think we're still talking over each other, I'd love to hear more from your perspective.
Best,
David
-- ** David Langendoen ** Partner, Electric Funstuff ** www.electricfunstuff.com