Learning+by+Design

=Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines= Lahee Choi, Nicole Hiraga, Kevin Nguyen, Jessica Weingarten

Introduction
The Hypothesis: Learning in schools and the workplace can be improved by paying closer attention to well designed computer and video games.


 * How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn their long, complex, and difficult games and not only learn them but pay to do so? Why is it so motivating?
 * The answer lies in how game designers are using good methods of getting people to enjoy the experience and trigger learning.
 * Good game designers
 * Are practical theoreticians of learning.
 * Can make worlds where people an have meaningful new experiences, experiences that their places in life would never allow them to have or even experiences no human being has ever had before – having the potential to make people smarter and more thoughtful.
 * Example: [|Star Wars: knights of the old republic] immerses the player in issues of identify and responsibility.
 * Many computer and video games are long, complex, and difficult. It is not in our nature to be eager to do difficult things. We cannot force people to face the challenges neither can we dumb it down for the sake of appeal. So what can we do to have people be engaged in the games? Or better yet, how can we engage students in learning? Learning is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans. If we consider effective computer and video games, we can make school and workplace learning better (Gee, 2005). This does not necessarily mean using game technologies in school and at work, but rather applying the fruitful principles of learning that good game designers use. If we translate the motivation children have for games into the classrooms, we would be able to create a true active learning environment.

Empowered Learners
toc

Co-design

 * In good video games every action has a reaction (the game changes with the player).
 * Learners need agency. They must feel like they are active participants, not passive consumers.
 * The learning environment must be personalized and flexible in order to advocate buy in and engaged participation
 * The take away idea: do your students feel like your students are guiding your instruction? Are they helping to design their own learning?

Customize

 * People learn differently.
 * This aligns with the theory of [|Multiple Intelligences].
 * Students should feel fearless in trying new learning styles, while discovering which learning style fits them best.

Identity

 * Deep learning is cultivated when students commit to assuming an identity.
 * Video games allow students to become those characters, therefore creating an investment in the game.
 * In order to understand the content, have students adopt an alignment with a field expert (one example is a scientist).
 * Students should be able to understand the values, attitudes and actions of a person from the field. The students should understand the "players" from a holistic perspective.
 * By adopting an identity, students will obtain many facts about the subject without added effort.

Manipulation and Distributed Knowledge

 * Very detailed, intricate tasks allow people to feel a strong sense of accomplishment.
 * In video games, the character knows things outside of the player, and vice-a-versa. Between the two components (player and character), the task can be accomplished.
 * Distributed knowledge allows varying strengths to be utilized in order to accomplish a task.
 * Smart tools are technologies and tools that allow the learner to manipulate the world of the smart tool in a fine-grained way.
 * An example of a smart tool would be an equation in math: without human application, the equation will not be realized.

**Problem Solving**
Designers of good games have used good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning through effective practices of problem solving. Following are 7 principles of learning under Problem Solving that could be applied to education in order to make learning more effective and enjoyable.

Well-Ordered Problems
Principle: Games: Education:
 * The problems learners face early on are crucial and should be well designed to lead them to hypotheses that work well for immediate, and later and harder problems as well.
 * Problems in good games are well ordered.
 * Early problems are designed to help solve harder problems.
 * Order in which learners confront problems in a problem space is important.
 * Confronting complex problems too early can lead to creative solutions, but approaches that won't work well for even simpler later problems.
 * Problem spaces can be designed to enhance the trajectory through which the learner traverses them.

Pleasantly Frustrating
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Learning works best when new challenges are pleasantly frustrating in the sense of being felt by learners to be at the outer edge of, but within their level of competence.
 * Learners must see that their effort is being paid off with evidence that they can see.
 * Even when learners fail, they must be able to see how the failure can lead to progress.
 * Good games adjust to challenges and give feedback.
 * Players feel the game is challenging but doable and that their effort is being paid off.
 * Learners should be able to adjust the difficulty level while being encouraged to stay at the outer edge, but inside their level of competence.

Cycles of Expertise
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause the learners to have to think again and learn something new.
 * Learners practice their new skills set to an anotomatic level of mastery only to it eventually be challenged. [[image:CRI.jpg width="212" height="223" align="right"]]
 * Good games create and support the cycle of expertise, with cycles of extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, then a new challenge, and then new extended practice.
 * Experts routinize their skills and then challenge themselves with the new problems.
 * the cycle of experitse allows learners to learn how to manage their own lifelong learning and to become skilled at learning to learn through:
 * reflection
 * learning new things
 * integrate old and new

Information 'On Demand' and 'Just in Time'
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Verbal information is best given “just in time” (when it can be applied immediately) and “on demand” (when it is needed).
 * Verbal information of the manual is made concrete through the player’s experiences in the game.
 * After playing the game, the manual is clear because it can be situated in the context of the game.
 * Games such as [|System Shock 2], [|Enter the Matrix], and [|Goblin Commander: unleash the horde] give information just in time and on demand.
 * Schools rarely give information just in time or on demand (for instance, lectures and textbooks).
 * Manipulatives, demonstrations, experiments, and simulations would all give information just in time and on demand.

Fish Tanks
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Fish tanks are simplified systems, stressing a few key variables and their interactions.
 * Learners see basic relationships at work and develop toward mastery of real system.
 * Good games have fish tanks as tutorials or first couple of levels.
 * Games such as [|Rise of Nations] give tutorial scenarios.
 * Models are usually fish tanks - simplifications of reality.
 * Models and simulations can be fish tanks in the classroom.

Sandboxes
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Sandboxes are situations that feel like reality with no dangers or risks.
 * Sandboxes allow learners to feel authenticity and accomplishment.[[image:ht_BuildaSandbox_hero_image.jpg width="318" height="98" align="right"]]
 * Good games have sandboxes as tutorials or first couple of levels.
 * Good games do not kill joy, risk taking, hypothesizing, and learning – instead, they make player feel competent before they really are.
 * Games such as [|Rise of Nations] and [|System Shock 2] create sandboxes for the learner.
 * Students can’t learn if they feel like a failure, feel too much pressure, or understand too little.
 * School is often too risky and punishing.
 * Schools, especially at-risk learners, need horizontal learning – time to explore and play around before climbing the vertical ladder of learning new skills.
 * Students should see failure as informative, not as a final evaluation or a way to curtail creativity, risk taking, and hypothesizing.

Skills as Strategies[[image:10277_1279919487.gif align="right"]]
Principle: Games: Education:
 * Practicing skills out of context over and over again is meaningless.
 * Learning and practicing skills is best done with a set of related skills as strategy to accomplish a goal.
 * Good games have skill packages as a means to accomplish goals.
 * Skill packages are seen as sets of discrete skills only secondarily.
 * Games such as [|Rise of Nations],[|Goblin Commander: unleash the horde], [|Pikmin], and [|Metal Gear Solid] provide skills as strategies.
 * “Play the game” in school means using oral and written language to learn academic areas.
 * Skills for reading, such as sounding out letters, thinking of word families, and looking for sub-patterns, should be integrated with the strategy of comprehension.

**Understanding**
There are principles relevant to learning that can be taken from good computer and video games. These educational implications apply to student learning that help students understand.

**System Thinking**
Principle: Games: Examples: Education:
 * People learn skills, strategies, and ideas best when they see how they fit into an overall larger system to which they give meaning.
 * We must be able to see how concepts fit into a larger meaningful whole.
 * Good games help players see and understand the rules on how each of the elements in the game fit into the overall system of the game and its genre (type) – what works, what doesn’t, how things go or don’t go in the world.
 * Games like [|Rise of Nations], [|Age of Mythology], [|Pikmin], [|Call of Duty], and [|Mafia] give players a good feel for the overall world and game system they are in. Players have an understanding of the goal and the genre of the game they are playing. Games like these allow players to develop good intuitions about what works and about what they are doing in the moment that fits into the game as a whole.
 * When students fail to have a feeling for the whole system which they are studying, they fail to see it as a set of complex interactions and relationships. Each fact and isolated element they memorize for their tests becomes meaningless.

Meaning as Action Image [[image:systems-thinking.png width="216" height="142" align="right"]]
Principle: Games: Examples: Education:
 * People usually think through experiences they have had and imaginative reconstructions of experiences. Words and concepts have their deepest meanings when they are clearly tied to perception and action in the world.
 * The very core of games is to make meanings of words and concepts clear through experiences the player has and activities the player carries out.
 * Games like [|Star Wars: knights of the old republic], [|Freedom Fighters], [|Medal of Honor: allied assault], and [|Operation Flashpoint: Cold War crisis] are effective in making ideas, ideologies, identities, or events concrete and deeply embedded in experience and activity.
 * For human beings the comprehension of texts and the world is ‘grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action (Barsalou, 1999a p. 77).
 * If you only have verbal and book information, you can’t really understand what you are reading, hearing, or seeing.

**Conclusion**
Games show us that learning can also be fun. They trigger deep learning that can help us understand concepts. Even when we know how effective games are, it is difficult to find them integrated for education or the workplace learning. It is not the cost of spreading the games, but rather it is the cost of changing people’s minds about learning. To go deeper, it is the cost of changing the most change-resistant institutions in which are schools. Learners are said to not being able to devise their own learning, but rather they need the smart tools and, most importantly, good designers who guide and scaffold their learning (Kelley, 2003). Game designers are the ones who create the programs that engages children in computer and video games. For schools, these designers are the teachers.