The Future of Learning Technologies

As we have covered many times in our blog we are living in an age where new technologies are being developed and released all the time and these technologies have fantastic uses in the world of education and more general learning.  A recent article discusses various learning technology trends of 2012.  These include cloud technologies (software online rather than on a single computer) and flipped learning (spending ‘home time’ doing things such as reading and listening to educational podcasts and ‘lesson time’ discussing and doing group projects).

One of the trends that the article cites is gamification.  It argues that games based learning is on the rise and it is effective as games “provide meaning through real engagement, immediate feedback and a sense of accomplishment that is well-integrated with sound pedagogy”.  In fact, the article quotes a neurologist in saying “games provide an individualized achievable goal that initiates the dopamine-reward system, which provides a powerful pleasure response”.  Scientific proof that games based learning is great :)  Another mechanism that occurs was discussed in our previous blog post, ‘Neuroscience, Stress and Games Based Learning’.

The article also suggests that games based learning works so well because it is a safe environment in which to explore.  I mentioned in a previous blog post (‘Unorthodox Uses of Games in Education’) an article entitled ‘9 ways virtual learning is better’ which is really worth a look and this makes the same point.  In fact number one on their list is “With virtual experience, there is no risk. No danger. No loss of money or resources (other than the cost of designing and doing the activity). Minimal loss of time. Not so in the real world”.

http://envisioningtech.com/education/

This is a nice little graphic from envisioningtech.com to represent the future of educational technology.  A large part of the visualisation is gamification, which they argue is so effective as it offers “instant feedback to acquired knowledge through achievements and reward systems”.  Another benefit is that is allows ‘self-paced learning’.  It looks like the future could be pretty bright for education technology, which could lead to some pretty bright kids.  Let’s hope that some of these technologies can actually break through the red tape and stagnation of the education system.

Kinect Games Based Learning

I have spoken in a previous blog post about the amazing uses for the Xbox Kinect with children on the Autism Spectrum.  However, there are also many other ways that Kinect technology can be used to teach a wide range of things.  The website http://www.kinecteducation.com/ has tonnes of educational games that people have developed for a wide range of subjects.  Some of them are a little basic, which is what you might expect for such a young market.  However, it is clear that the Kinect has great potential for games based learning.

I do recommend taking a look at that website as it is full of interesting games and lesson plans etc, but I’m going to focus on one game developer in particular in this blog who has particularly caught my attention.  David Renton is a games developer and lecturer based in Scotland.  He has created several games for the Kinect, which look both educational and great fun.

The first game is Kinect Angles.  This game aims to help children learn angles, percentages, fractions and decimals in a fun way.    In-game, the screen shows a picture of the game-players through the Kinect’s webcam-like system with superimposed images on top.  The aim of the game is to visually represent angles correctly with ones’ arms.  The game can be played individually or as a pair, competitively or not.  In David’s own words, the game “promotes active learning methodologies.  Pupils are engaging with their learning in a physical and multi-sensory manner, meeting the needs of different learning styles; aural, visual and kinaesthetic.”  One child, in a pilot lesson said, “It’s active and you understand it better than just doing it in your jotter.”

The second game is Kinect Time.  It works in a similar way to Kinect Angles, but is used to help teach children time.  Again, it can be played individually or as a pair.  In David’s words, “The point of the game is basically to set the hands on the clock to match the time digitally displayed, you do this by moving your arms; Kinect captures the motion and my game translates it to the hands on the clock face.”  Visit this blog post for a video of the game in action.

Three “Games Based Learning” Development Tools Explored

Developing with Adobe Flash

A lot of the games based learning products that I have developed over the years have been done using Flash. Adobe’s Flash is a fantastic tool and creates efficient code (a small file size that is great for web work) but is not necessarily that easy to use for non-programmers. In the last year, I have had a look at some other tools, which can be used to develop games based learning (even if that is not their primary purpose). This blog post is an overview my findings.

Captivate and other Rapid Development Tools
I have used Captivate within the context of e-Learning experiments and have blogged about these before at http://www.games-based-learning.com/2011/10/instructional-design-e-learning-and.html. The Situated example was an attempt to push Captivate to its limits. The SITUATED-training (http://www.pixelfountain.co.uk/captivate-situated-training-demo.html) course puts the trainee in a virtual setting where they need to visit various locations, talk to characters and interact with objects. The instructional design embeds a system simulation inside a dynamic story line. At the end of the training, the trainee is presented with a dynamic end report that shows what they did and didn’t do. The example I developed was a mini project management game, but the approach could be used in humanities and science education.

Captivate is traditionally used for system simulations, but it has a simple scripting language that can be used to control variables, visibility of screen objects etc. It is a bit clunky for people with programming experience, but as you can see from my SITUATED-training example, it can used to develop quite sophisticated solutions. For this reason and the fact that it feels more robust, I would rank Captivate above rapid development tools such as Articulate and Lectora.

Note: My experiments were done using Captivate 5.5 and I note that version 6 is now available.

Construct
Following on from a games workshop design project (http://www.games-ed.co.uk/games-design-workshop.html) with school children in St Helens (Merseyside, UK) I developed a prototype of the chosen design – Eco-Busters. Partly because I wanted to avoid the slow development process of Flash, I fished around the Internet for a game development tool. I settled on Construct 2 from http://www.scirra.com/. Scirra state that Construct allows you to create games effortlessly. They say Construct is a ground breaking HTML5 windows game engine that lets anyone make games without any programming experience.

My experience was that Construct is indeed powerful and easy to get into. But, the caveat I would give is that I have been programming on and off for 30 years – how time flies :( Anyway, I would say that Construct is a tad more difficult than Captivate but is infinitely cheaper in that it is free and Captivate is £850 on the Adobe site.

The Eco-Busters prototype can be found at http://www.pixelfountain.co.uk/Eco-Busters/ Note the game is HTML5, so you will need IE9 or Google Chrome or Firefox. The game is far from complete, but you will get the idea of what Construct can do. Make sure you read the instructions as the children’s design required an intricate method for controlling two characters.  Also, there are other examples on http://www.scirra.com/.

MIT App Inventor for Android Devices
I was recently looking for a tool to develop mobile apps and again I wanted something that was quick to get into. App Inventor lets you develop applications for Android phones using a web browser and either a connected phone or emulator. Originally developed by Google, App Inventor has been made open source and has been taken on by MIT see http://appinventor.mit.edu/.

You build apps by working with:
 The App Inventor Designer, where you select the components for your app.
 The App Inventor Blocks Editor, where you assemble program blocks that specify how the components should behave. You assemble programs visually, fitting pieces together like pieces of a puzzle.

Once I had got the App Inventor loaded and connected to my phone, which was a bit fiddly due to me having to find a USB driver on the HTC website, everything worked smoothly. Overall the programming environment was straightforward and powerful. The blocks editor might be slightly tortuous for accomplished programmers but the visual approach will suit the novice. In fact, I did a little bit of programming with my 11 year old.

At this stage, I haven’t developed any games based learning, but App Inventor shows potential for gamified quizzes and one of the tutorials is a Whack-A-Mole game.

Conclusion
The above three development tools are not the only tools out there. I chose the above tools as they were easy to get into but also were more than simple presentation builders. Please feel free to comment on any tools that you have used.

Unorthodox uses of Games in Education

Some people are under the impression that games based learning refers simply to course materials being somehow re-worked into a game.  However, this is not the case.  Games based learning is essentially the gamification of learning (using gaming principles to aid learning).  This is not limited to traditional subject materials, but can be used to teach people any number of things.  Yes, it can be used to help teach vocabulary and algebra very successfully.  However, it can also be used to teach life skills and enable people to learn how to learn and think for themselves.  It can also encourage other features such as teamwork and good communication skills.  And of course, games based learning is not limited to children!  

Image courtesy of the threesisters on flickr 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tripletsisters/7394261682/

These are some of the ways that people are using games to teach a wide number of things to people around the world that you may not immediately have thought of:

Second Life
Second life is a virtual online world.  You create an avatar which can interact with people and explore the world.  As this article explains, the game has been successfully used to teach languages (through tutorials, texts, links and online learning groups), train medical students (through discussions, images, videos, patient stories and weblinks) and even to teach genetics and genomics!  Jean-Claude Bradley (a professor and user of Second Life for education) argues that “With the growing popularity of gaming, we anticipate that more students and faculty will use virtual platforms like ‘Second Life’ to extend the education experience. On this platform — where anything is possible — the Library gets to explore new ways of supporting academic programs, research and student learning, limited only by the scope of the imagination.”  The article lists Harvard, Stanford and MIT as users of Second Life. 

Money Island
Another virtual online world type game is Money Island, aimed at people under the age of 21.  Money Island teaches students about financial responsibility, as this article explains.  The students learn how the economy works, about saving and spending, earning and investing, interest, using credit wisely and so on.  The game also features tools for teachers and parents to track their child’s progress and detailed lesson plans.  As a young person myself (20), I feel that financial matters were lacking from my formal education and believe this game would be a welcome addition to the curriculum (and might create a more reliable generation of bankers and investors etc).

Minecraft
I am personally not too familiar with Minecraft, but as this article explains, “ it's a sandbox style game where users can mine for resources, create buildings, fight off monsters, and use their skills in crafting to make weapons, armour, tools for harvesting, and even rollercoaster-like mine carts”.  There is lots of material on the internet about Minecraft being used in schools.  The article afore mentioned talks about children learning skills such as prioritising, efficiency, developing strategies, digital citizenship and the value of hard work.  These are all obviously very important skills and are the types of benefits of games based learning which I am trying to convey in this post.  School shouldn’t be about just teaching children Maths, English, Science etc, surely it should be developing the next generation of adults.  This blog contains a very detailed lesson plan based around Minecraft, which states that the two learning outcomes are to “Apply knowledge of 3 dimensional landscapes to construct a digital landscape and community [and] Collaborate with classmates to plan and create a digital community”.

Angry Birds
Yes, you did read that right.  There are some genius teachers who have found a way to make Angry Birds educational and this lesson in particular looks great!  For those of you have escaped the wonders of Angry Birds, you essentially work your way through a number of levels where you catapult birds which have different special qualities at structures in order to destroy pigs which stole the birds’ eggs at the start of the game.  Yes, this game exists and yes, it can be educational.  This teacher designed a transdisciplinary lesson around the game including maths (velocity, trajectory, angles etc), history (history of the catapult, modern day uses of the technology) and even music and art (the culture of the time around the invention of the catapult).  Children played the game on an ipad, but also built their own catapults and played the game in real life.  All the while, the teachers asked the children questions such as “What makes the catapult more accurate?”, “What are some forces that act on objects in motion?”, “What happens when the arm of a lever is shortened or the load is moved?” and “How do we calculate motion?”.  Genius!  I don’t think I need to say anything else about this one.

Kinect for XBox
The Kinect device, which is basically a webcam which tracks your movements and projects them onto an onscreen avatar, has had huge unexpected success for children on the Autistic Spectrum.  This article explains how the children can do with the help of Kinect what it would have taken them months to do in intensive therapy.  The games work in helping children interact socially with others as the games are “more predictable and less threatening than real life”.  Several games specifically for children with Autism have now been developed.  This article describes similar results with the Nintendo Wii.

And finally…

Nerf Guns 
Have you ever wondered whether it is possible to teach maths with Nerf guns?  Well apparently the answer is yes; yes it is!  This blog shows you how to teach maths and more specifically ‘coordinate graphing’ with Nerf guns.

As you can see, there is a world of games based learning out there and it may take on less conventional forms that one might first imagine.  Games are being embraced to teach life skills, motor skills, communication skills, subject based skills and so on successfully to a wide range of people, in a fun way!  Games based learning may be the way forward and as this article argues, virtual learning may in fact be better than traditional ‘experiential’ learning.

However, having said this, these commercial games may not be perfectly suited to learning.  They largely rely on great teachers developing great lesson plans and crowbarring them somewhat into the curriculum.  This may just be an indication that games based learning is in the early adopter phase and as such, teachers are finding unorthodox answers to their problem.  They want to use games, but the only ones available to them are commercial games or curriculum ‘games’ which do not have the same edge.  An earlier blog post  talks about the uses of games in educational settings and how commercial games can fall short.  It also suggests ways that purpose built games can overcome these factors.  It’s definitely worth a look!  This article talks about what makes a good learning game.  The author notes that if someone can score highly without learning, they will do (which may happen with commercial games) and as such, learning games should contain certain elements.  I think that as games based learning becomes more prevalent, we are likely to see more purpose built games of a similar calibre to some of these commercial games becoming more mainstream.

Ten Reasons why Games Based Learning Works in Education

The following list (in black) is from connectED with some of my thoughts (in green).

1. Familiarity – Most students use technology regularly at home, so integrating technology and games based learning into their school life can be very quick and easy. 

2. Engagement – Games based learning can be engaging for children of all educational levels and interests as good educational games draw on different learning styles and they offer something a bit different from the norm.  Games can also be used to engage the disengaged.  Feedback from games-ED workshops frequently mentions this.  For example, “it really captured their attention” and “the students were engaged in the activity” (from an earlier blog article, found here) See a wonderful example here on the Guardian blog ‘An English teacher discovers digital literacy really works’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2011/dec/05/engage-disengaged-students-digital-literacy.

3. Blended learning has a real place – blending traditional printed media with interactive multimedia gives you the best of both worlds. Technology no longer needs to play a supporting role.  A benefit of games based learning is that it gives people the chance to learn by doing (and being, see earlier blog article).  Rather than simply listening to a teacher or completing written work, students get the chance to engage with interactive software with the opportunity to receive immediate feedback and see the results of their actions (in learning simulations, such as those by pixelfountain).  For example (see Proof of the Pudding article) in the words of one pupil, “It was great being in charge of the town and seeing what the result was.”

4. A cost effective option – In terms of the outputs and results, games based learning is relatively cheap to implement.  Most schools have access to computers and additional consoles can be bought relatively cheaply (and used many times).  However, cost is seen as one of the main barriers to games based learning.  Specifically educational games are often cheaper than commercial entertainment games (when multiple licences and consoles are taken into account, see The Games Based Learning Planning and Analysis Tool by Paul Ladley).  Some games may also represent better value for money than others if they can be used across the curriculum and for various age groups.  games-ED games for example are designed to be used in this way. 

5. Content galore! – Educational apps abound and it’s now really easy to create your own multimedia educational content for use on everything from language labs to macs, pcs and ipads. The Internet is stuffed full of free resources to help bring content to life everything from Voki (used to create your own avatars) to Camstudio (records all screen activity and turns it into a small video file).  Some companies also offer schools and organisations tailoring services, so the games can be personalised to the particular school etc.

6. On a mission! – games based learning also refers to the use of ‘mission’ and ‘quest’ based learning. A lovely example here from Soar Valley College where students used Sony PlayStation Portable and augmented reality software Second Sight to bring the secrets of the solar system to life. http://www.connectededucation.com/case-study/making-sense-of-the-solar-system-with-sony-playstation/ Goals can be extremely motivating for learners and this is especially true for children, when it is not always obvious why they are at school.  Using fun, goal-based games gives children a goal to aim for which can be very motivating and aid greater learning and retention.  Playing in a quest like way can also increase skills such as collaboration and communication skills, problem-solving skills and encouraging students to think of the ‘bigger picture’, which are important ‘soft’ skills to be learnt.

7. Flexibility – Game based learning techniques are not just restricted to inside the classroom. Teachers report bringing class sets of PlayStation Portables out on field trips to make video diaries.  Robust and durable, these new technologies mean educational content can still be accessed on the move.  Some companies also make social networks for students or include home use in their licences so that the children can play games at home: homework that is fun.

8. Stay ahead – getting stuck in and embracing new technologies helps brings teacher multimedia skills up to date, equally an understanding of game based learning helps to support schools and teachers to make the most of the technologies they already have. See an example here of a successful game based learning intervention and deployment in action at The Richard Rose Morton Academy in Carlisle.http://www.connectededucation.com/case-study/richard-rose-morton-academy-leads-the-way-in-game-based-learning/.  An understanding of games based learning can greatly improve teaching methods and help the achievement of learning outcome and schools’ mission statements and so on.  However, as games based learning in education is relatively newly recognised (through research etc.) but seen as ‘the way forward’, it looks good for the school and individual teachers if they have experience of teaching through games.  It is a competitive advantage.

9. 21st century workplace skills, more and more organisations require different skills from the old Industrial model (see earlier blog post). Game based learning encourages these 21st century requirements of independent thinking, mission and quest based tasking, communication and collaboration skills.  As mentioned earlier, ‘soft’ employability skills are extremely important and children of all ages should be encouraged to develop them, ‘the earlier the better’ so to speak.  One student in a games-ED workshop said, “It was really good fun and it increased my knowledge of working together and sharing”.  These skills are not only good for employability but are obviously good social skills to be learnt too.

10. The students love it! On a recent game based learning project designed to engage Y5 pupils in literacy at Foxhill Primary School when asked “Who likes writing?” at the start of the project, only 13 hands out of 23 went up. When asked “Who has enjoyed writing about our eye pet?” all 23 hands in the class went up!  pixelfountain has had similar feedback from students (see Proof of the Pudding parts 1, 2 and 3).  For example, a student at one workshop said, “It was fun and a great way to learn”.

Oh and its fun!