ChiasmusThe Question Facing Edtech Games
Chiasmus Crew, Wed 04 November 2015, Posts
Chiasmus Crew, Wed 04 November 2015, Posts
The association we make between the word “education” and concepts like curriculum and standardized testing feels almost inescapable. Even within the edtech industry, the source of innovation for new educational products, the dominant focus is on technology aligned to Common Core Standards or aimed at improving standardized testing outcomes. Although this can bring pedagogical and statistical rigor in verifying the efficacy of new and unproven products, focusing on external factors like standards and testing addresses only half of the learning problem -- the other half being factors intrinsic to individual learners like motivation and curiosity.
Many products in fact recognize this divide and have adopted a variety of strategies to bridge the requirements of objective standards and the needs of individual learners. They include:
These tactics can broadly be categorized as strategies to “gamify” the learning experience. Indeed, having reward systems, contextualizing problems in palpable and relatable ways, and providing guided freedom for interacting with content are some of the reasons why successful games are so immersive and really fire up people’s imaginations. Unsurprisingly, educational products that employ these strategies can get students to have a better time while they work through academic standards and prepare for standardized tests.
However, the gamification of educational aims does not solve one fundamental problem: even if educational content utilize strategies from gaming to appeal to individual learners, can the content be truly engaging if they are, at their core, constrained by what is prescribed in a set of academic standards, instead of being open to be taken in different directions by different learners? That is to say, can educational products really bring out the imagination and curiosity of students if their bottom line is to teach a predefined set of skills?
I don’t think so.
What makes some games so compelling go beyond characteristics like flashy graphics or offering choice; they’re compelling because they raise questions and possibilities that are open for players to interpret. For example, the possibility of combining different building blocks in Minecraft creates a world that is a sandbox for whatever creations a player can dream of. In short, truly immersive games are so because they let players make it their own.
Ultimately, this is what the majority of educational products lack -- as much as we can adapt strategies to make educational content more game-like, by starting with a fixed set of standards to teach instead of starting with questions and possibilities that we invite students to make , educational products will at its core feel like hollow imitations of truly great games.
Of course, setting standards for what types of skills students should learn is important to ensure all students are taught a set of fundamental skills, but education as a concept should go beyond meeting prescribed standards: a well-rounded education should also cultivate students’ senses of curiosity and what they believe is possible.
The curious mind seeks out knowledge, and knowledge prompts more questions which fuel further curiosity -- the relationship between asking questions and discovering answers is naturally symbiotic. Given the growing number of products that start from the knowledge end of this relationship, aimed at teaching specific skills, I believe edtech can benefit from a complementary approach, starting with a goal of cultivating curiosity through raising questions and giving students more possibilities, without the explicit end-goal of teaching specific skills. A gamified version of such an experience may come to be as fun, or perhaps even be indistinguishable from a truly immersive game.
There are many challenges facing a product that inherently pushes for questions instead of answers. Experiences driven by questions are naturally more open-ended than those driven by specific outcomes, and hence represent a greater design and technical challenge. Moreover, by going off-script from focusing on conventional academic standards, such a product will prompt new ways to think about efficacy and impact.
Despite these challenges, this is the direction to which the Chiasmus Team will head. We certainly do not have all of the answers yet, but there is something thrilling and adventurous about starting a journey with questions and open possibilities.
The ideas for this post came from my experiences working in the edtech industry and Jane McGonigal’s thought-provoking TED talk on the transformative power of games.