What teachers can learn from video games

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I’ve recently integrated an Xbox racing game into my Year 10 science class. Students played Formula 1 2010 to learn about Newton’s laws (click here for more info). This got me back into video games. Over the weekend I started playing Fable II – an action role playing game (RPG) on the Xbox. I’ve always been a huge fan of RPGs, more than any other game genre. Whenever I play RPGs, I become totally immersed in the game. I can spend hours being totally focused on the game. Every time I tell myself to stop I’d say to myself “let’s just finish this village first” or “let’s just defeat this boss first”.

While many teachers think of video games as recreational activities or even ‘a waste of time’, teachers can learn a lot from video games. How can we transfer the elements of video games that make the player sit in front of the screen, focused on hours on end, into the classroom? I found myself pondering this whilst playing Fable II.

I think video games harnesses many elements of educational learning theories associated with cognition and motivation. Here’s three elements:

1)      Video games are challenging, but too challenging.

In Fable II you are presented with missions or tasks that you have to complete. The game gives you enough information at the start to get you going, but you have to work it out for yourself by talking to characters in the game and finding clues in the virtual world. It’s often not easy to complete the mission. However, the game provides you with enough clues that you can complete the mission in a timeframe that won’t make you quit the game for good. This sounds really familiar to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), where it is proposed that effective learning occurs when the learning experience is placed between what a learner can do independently without help and what the learner cannot do. Closely associated with ZPD is the concept of scaffolding, where hints and strategies are provided to help the learner bridge the gap between what they can do and cannot do. Video games often place the player at the ZPD, and guides them from what they can’t do initially to defeating that impossible boss, and level up! In Fable II, verbal and visual clues are provided to help you complete a mission.

2)      Choice and personalisation

Fable II allows you to choose to be male and female and to be good or evil. Throughout the game, you are presented with choices that give you points for being good or evil. Eg. When you find a missing bottle of wine in the village, you have a choice of giving it to an alcoholic or his relative who wants to help him with his alcohol addiction. Giving the alcohol will give you points towards being evil. Giving the alcohol to the relative will give you points towards being good. (I accidentally stole a toy from a chest at someone’s house and have gained some evil points). Fable II also gives you a choice to complete the main game or to go off and play mini-games in other worlds, then go back to the main game. It also allows you to choose your own clothes, etc, which gives you a personal connection to the game.

Student direction is one of the elements in the Quality Teaching Framework. I find that students will usually be more motivated to complete a task and be more self-regulated if they have chosen to do the task themselves. If they feel they have some ownership on the task, the more likely they’ll be engaged with the task. Like in Fable II, teachers can provide students with more choice in what they want to learn and more opportunities for personalisation.

3)      Ability to take risks

Video games allow you to take risks. If you do something wrong, you die, but you can come back and try again. In Fable II I know I can try out some new skills I’ve acquired in the game knowing that if I stuff it up, I can revise my strategy and have another go at it. In video games you are encouraged to adopt the strategy of trial and error and learn from your mistakes. In contrast a lot of educational tasks only let you take one shot at it. As teachers, perhaps we need to create opportunities that allow students to have multiple attempts at a task and encourage them to reflect on how they can improve on their previous attempts.

4)       There is a strong narrative

Fable II, like all other RPG games, has a strong narrative. It has a storyline that involves mystery and human emotions such as revenge. This is the main reason I like RPG games more than any other genre. Racing, fighting and puzzle games do not have storylines. I still play these games but they don’t glue me to the screen.

From personal experience I found that many students also like stories. Narrative is another element of the Quality Teaching Framework. By linking interesting stories with mystery and suspense, teachers can also glue their students’ attention to the lesson.

After finally being able to detach myself from the Xbox, I find myself wondering how can we as teachers create learning experiences that have the same engaging factors as video games? Or perhaps I just like video games a little too much.

Mucking around

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My current attempt to integrate Xbox racing games into science is generating interest amongst a fair few teachers. My class loves it. As one student said today “All classes should have an Xbox”.

So why aren’t more classes using the Xbox?

A few weeks ago I ran a professional learning session for science teachers on how they can integrate Xbox games into teaching Newton’s laws of motion. I suggested an array of activities to cater for students of a range of abilities. Yet the Xbox booking sheet only holds my initials as no other teacher has requested it for their classes. As the faculty’s head teacher and the school’s technology coordinator, I want to reflect on how to encourage teachers to implement what they learn in professional learning sessions, particularly with technology.

There are many reasons why teachers may not implement what they learn in professional development courses. However, I want to focus on the need to ‘muck around’. With technology in particular, it’s essential to muck around and spend time to explore the software before deciding how to use it to enhance learning. In a reading I had to do for uni Richardson (2009) highlighted that teachers need to make a personal connection with the technology before being able to consider the pedagogical implications of the technology for their classroom practice. IMHO, to make this personal connection, you need to muck around.

With the Xbox, I spent a lot of time mucking around (playing three different racing games to decide on the best game for my class, which game mode to use, which race track, difficulty level and how much freedom students had in choosing players and racing tracks to ensure time efficiency). Then there was mucking around with hardware. Which data projector was best? What cables did I need? Overall it involved two weekends of playing Xbox at home, several visits to video game shops and several hours of playing the Xbox at school. And I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it! 🙂

In contrast, the other teachers didn’t have this opportunity.  All they had was a half hour session of me showing them how to set up the Xbox, how to play Formula 1 2010 and the various activities they can implement for their classes. They didn’t have the chance to discover for themselves how the Xbox worked and the potential it can have on their students’ learning. They didn’t have the chance to muck around for hours playing different types of games and reflecting how the games can be used in their teaching.

The hard part now is how do I create these opportunities where teachers can muck around, self explore and reflect? How do I create opportunities for teachers to want to muck around?

Note: The school’s teachers have been fantastic at adopting other technologies such as IWBs and 1:1 laptop initiatives. Perhaps the Xbox takes relatively longer to get used to.

Will I have the time? Xbox and Newton’s laws

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I started using the Xbox with my YR10s to explore Newton’s Laws of Motion. Students are working in groups of 3 or 4 and are filming their gameplay on Formula 1 2010 with the webcams on their laptops. Two lessons of Xbox later, 5 groups have filmed their gameplay with 2 groups left to go. After they film their gameplay, they will import the film into Adobe Premier Elements and annotate the film to use Newton’s laws to explain the race car’s motion.

This got me thinking about time. Whether I’ve got the time to do such a project. In previous years, I would just teach Newton’s 3 laws with a prac or two assocaited with each law. This would’ve taken 3-5 lessons. However, with the Xbox involved, it will now take me almost double the amount of lessons. While I know using the Xbox activity will allow students to use higher-order thinking skills of analysing, evaluating and creating, I also feel the pressure to “get through the content” to prepare the Yr10s for the School Certificate Exam. Time taken away from “content” or exam preparation is often sited by teachers as a reason not to integrate multimedia technology in their lessons (Complexities and challenges of integrating technology into the curriculum)

In an age where there seems to be an increasing emphasis on high stakes testing (eg. NAPLAN and MySchool), are high-stakes testing really the best strategy to use to ensure that all our students are prepared to partcipate in a 21st century digital society? There are so many YouTube videos out there telling teachers and the community that education needs to change because technology is evolving so fast. We need to develop our students’ critical thinking skills and the ability to adapt to change. I want to do this. I want my classroom to be a place where students use technology to develop these skills. But at the same time I worry whether that’s taking time away from NAPLAN, School Certificate and HSC preparation. Maybe it’s time we need to rethink how we assess our students.

Xbox and Isaac Newton

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 I have recently acquired an Xbox 360 for the science faculty at my school. I’ve always been an enthuaistic gamer (more into Nintendo games like Zelda) and have been investigating games based learning for a while and was deciding whether to try out the Xbox, PS3 or Wii in the classroom. But then an Xbox 360 was handed to me!

My Year 10 class are studying Newton’s laws of motion at the moment. I liked the idea of using commercial games to support learning rather than using educational games. I came up with the idea of using a car racing game for students to learn about Newton’s laws. They will work in small groups where the gameplay will be recorded, then imported into a video editing software and add text annotations to explain the motion of the race car using Newton’s laws. Their end product should be something similar to this.

Now that the activity is in place, the next step was to find the most appropriate game. I tried out Need for Speed Shift as it came free with the Xbox console. While the graphics were awesome and the game gave a “real driver experience”, the game took too long to load and there were too much of the storyline to get through before you could play the game. I needed to get my whole class playing the game in two to three lessons and Need for Speed Shift just takes too long.

The next game I tried was Formula 1 2010. The initial game set-up took a while (choosing teams, driver names, etc), but once that’s done, you can just race around a grand-prix track in one or three laps – perfect for students in the classroom. After spending a weekend trying out all the tracks, I worked out that Melbourne and Montreal were the easiest. I might get all the kids to be Mark Weber and race in Melbourne just to be patriotic!

All I’ve got to do now is to actually implement the activity, which will be in two days time. All equipment are set, activity sheets (Xbox project newtons laws_wordpress) are done, other teachers have been trained, and one of the deputy principals will be visiting to see how it goes. Wish me luck!