From Engagement to Research: How Serious Can Gaming Get? Games for Learning

Speakers Moderator: Victoria Van Voorhis Presenters: –Andrew Coulson –Sylvia Martinez, President Generation Yes –Vibhu Mittal –Dan White

Goals for This Session Getting Educators and Learning Game Designers aligned… What are the barriers to adoption for games in the formal education space? What is efficacy? How do we measure it? What are best practices in testing?

Sylvia Martinez President, Generation YES Target Market/Grade levels –K-12 –Malaysia Discipline areas –technology literacy –project-based learning across the curriculum –game development by students Scope –Technology curriculum –Professional development for teachers –Technology integration in subject areas –Game-like learning, not necessarily game-based learning

Current projects Teaching STEM subjects through constructive materials, digital, real world, and fabrication Connecting digital citizenship and student leadership Beyond the test: Creating classroom tools for project- based learning and competency-based assessment Giving students agency over the computer –Students programming games –Using a variety of open ended tools, including game engines and sandboxes (Minecraft) to create 21st century learning opportunities for students

Sylvia Martinez President,Generation YES “ Students should be agents of change, not objects of change. Learning games that simply make old content delivery more efficient subverts the power of game-based learning. Research that focuses on test scores is only telling half the story, and not the most interesting half. Creating research opportunities for schools that answer THEIR questions, not just yours, can be extremely powerful.”

Andrew R. Coulson President, Education Division Discipline area –Mathematics Grade Levels –Pre-K to middle school Scope –Supplemental, comprehensive, grade- leveled curriculum Current User Base – 430,000 students, 14,000 teachers in 26 states

Current Projects: Multi-year study on effectiveness of Spatial Temporal Approach Methods –Present all math concepts as interactive virtual manipulatives, without upfront abstractions –Provide instructive animated feedback which explains visually why each answer is right or wrong –Students win their way through a year-long videogame Key Findings –Visual approach accessible to all student subgroups including ELL and SPED –Highly implementable as a supplement to any core curriculum –Grades realize double or more math proficiency gain compared to controls

Andrew R. Coulson President, Education Division MIND Research Institute “ST Math (Spatial Temporal Math) presents all math concepts as onscreen virtual manipulatives, and maximally animates how math symbols and procedures work, to take advantage of all students’ innate visual reasoning abilities, to ensure that math is not memorization of meaningless procedures, and to develop confident student problem-solvers.”

Dan White,CEO Filament Games Target Market/Grade levels –K-16 Discipline areas –STEM, Social Science Scope –Game-based learning –Tracking/Assessment Tools –Web-based gaming portals

Learning is already fun! (Our goal is not to sugar-coat or obscure the learning, but to embed it in a context that is readily accessible to the learner)

Vibhu Mittal, CEO, Root-1 Discipline areas – Elementary/Middle School language arts Grade levels – K, 3 and 7 –K-8 by end of summer Scope –vocabulary, grammar, usage Current User Base –US –Singapore –UK

Key Findings Practice significantly improves performance Engagement requires fine balance between familiarity and novelty, challenge and success Cultural differences can be significant factors –users teach a character vs learning –character identification –language ambiguity can be a problem –motivational approaches are different (badges vs performance)

“Build a system that allows users and teachers to design and deploy their own learning applications with their own content.”

Contact Information Victoria Van Voorhis Andrew Coulson Sylvia Martinez Vibhu Mittal Dan White