I had the pleasure of attending the 9th annual Games for Change festival this June, a celebration of “serious” games with high goals and expectations for the budding medium. In my first report I discussed the importance of transfer when making a video game for education. Here is the second rule.
2) Don’t spoon feed game play. The best educational games are open. There’s a game design rule that has always proven again and again to be true – don’t depend on the instruction book to teach game play; no one reads them. It’s the same with educational videogames. Walls of text and specific linear game play, leading kids on a leash, doesn’t lead children to ask questions or think critically about the material; it’s about as helpful as leading a kid through an instruction book on the concepts you are trying to teach. They’ll tune out.
Jessica Millstone of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Allisyn Levy of BrainPOP presented case studies where teachers flocked to games that didn’t explicitly explain rules, instead opening both players and teachers to multiple styles of play and instruction. The Lure of the Labyrinth, for example, releases players into the game world after a short narrative comic, with no explanation for how to play or what mathematical concepts the game will teach. It is up to the player and their instructor to experiment with the point-and-click interface, which allows children to explore and problem-solve and teachers to provide any level of instruction. Another example, the educational version of Minecraft, duplicates the original commercial game’s open-ended sandbox design, while giving instructors extra powers to better harness the world to their own instructional purposes. Attending educators were especially pleased with Minecraft.edu’s versatility and their ability to craft lessons around its simple block-based game play — teaching children things like collaboration alongside traditional mathematical lessons.
In the final part, I’ll talk about one of the most popular topics at this year’s Games for Change – having kids design their own games for learning.
Tracy Carlin is a Communications and Public Policy Intern at SIIA. She is also a first year graduate student at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology program where she focuses on intersections in education, video games and gender.