Tutorial

Understanding games and games culture, identifying interesting titles and reviewing them for teaching, and building the mindset and the infrastructure to bring games to your school and into your teaching on a regular basis, requires the effort of more than one enthusiast. It is valuable to discuss games. Your colleagues might better understand why you are fascinated by the potential of the medium and why you insist on teaching with games when you start playing games (together) and discussing them, even though there are so many obstacles for doing so at your school.

And just a quick aside, probably you are not the only person in your staff interested in games and playing them. Games as a medium are so popular and widespread these days that statistically speaking it is highly probable at least some of your colleagues are playing them anyway already. This offers great opportunities for getting to know more games (also for teaching), competently using more platforms and interfaces, explaining the added value of this approach to other stakeholders or simply finding connections for learning projects that include several colleagues and subjects. You might find new ideas and understand different points of view on games, as texts, as art, as digital products, etc. Additionally, it might also just be a good and exciting time to play and evaluate the most popular entertainment medium of our times as part of your preparation for projects.

4-1 Using games is a group effort

Playing a game in class to use it as a learning medium requires effort on several sides. Not only you as the teacher need to prepare to use a game. If you use VR games, the setup is complex. There might be prepared facilities at your institution, then lucky you, but you still might need to get in touch with the administrator or teacher responsible for the setup and go through the technical preparations with him. Also games on other platforms need proper preparation, even social games, card and board games. Find colleagues to develop your project together, including specialists for the technical setup at your school, colleagues who are into gaming or even students who developed digital and gaming skills and knowhow through their hobby.

Besides that, games are a topic for discussion. The discourse around games in mainstream media throughout the last few decades has been, at least partly, problematic, biased and polemic at times and potential negative effects of gaming have been seeded into people’s heads by media discourse. You need to make sure that everyone included in your project and that might be even your head master or other colleagues because they are asked about your work with games, should know why and to what effect you use games in your projects. So, make sure to communicate this properly, let them maybe try out the game or explain the pedagogical background and the results that you expect. If you work with minors, it might also be necessary to communicate this to the parents and invite them to try out the game and discuss the topic in general or demonstrate the use of the game in class.

So, we deem it essential to go through a preparation phase that does also prepare the learning space and the people surrounding it to make use of this specific game in class. Of course, you can also go through this process on your own, but having the support of some colleagues can be of great help here.

Games can be considered a new learning medium. Video games are also learning media in the digital context. As the transformation to a more digital oriented style of education is still ongoing practically everywhere, developing expertise in one area of teaching with digital tools like the use of video games for teaching is something that is highly desirable. Some of your (younger) colleagues might be gamers in their free time already. So, looking for and getting together colleagues for establishing a gaming group at your educational institution, can be of high value also in terms of developing expertise of digital education and supporting the transformation to digital education at your institution.

4-2 Participatory culture and Prosumers

Finding aspects of participatory culture around a specific game

Games are part of digital media. This digital culture creates new forms of media participation and interaction. Books, radio and television were consumer-oriented media. Instead, media in the digital realm offer the chance to participate in the discourse and media production process. They create participatory culture, something that profoundly changes society and the discourse and participation in it and thus will also drastically change the structure and the content of education.

Henry Jenkins (p. 91) clearly defines what can be understood as participatory culture.

He describes a participatory culture as one:

With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
Where members believe that their contributions matter
Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Participatory culture exists within gaming as a whole as well as for specific games (also beyond digital games), especially long and complex games that are popular and have a large community. For Jenkins, the development of participatory digital culture is a challenge for the users as well as the educators, but it also provides great potential for life-long learning and the development of the right skill set for the 21st century digital world.

He also raises specific concerns that need to be considered when you integrate these concepts into your pedagogical work: the participation gap, the transparency problem and the ethics challenge. There is “unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youths for full participation in the world of tomorrow.” The transparency problem means that the “challenges young people face in learning to recognize the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.” And the ethics challenge is the “breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.” These considerations are of course also relevant for basic skills teaching and can be addressed by bringing games as one form of participatory culture and digital medium to your classroom. When you bring a very popular free-to-play game to your classroom like Fortnite for example all of the concerns mentioned above will be at play with its players and you can help develop the right attitude towards these games with the group of gamers in your class.

Participatory culture is the culture of prosumers. The digital tools and media platforms nowadays make it easy for the participants of such a digital culture to not only be consumers, but to actively take part in the discourse around a game and become a producer themselves. You can see that with the sheer number of YouTube channels and Twitch streamers. If you are interested in finding out more specifically about your students, we suggest a quick and informal survey with your students to see who of them has an active YouTube or Twitch channel or has already contributed to games culture in a specific way. You might be surprised how many there are in your group of learners, especially if they are young and grew up in the digital age.

When it comes to (informal) learning in this culture Gee’s concept of affinity spaces might be relevant, if you are able to work with popular and complex commercial games. Affinity spaces are (digital) spaces around a cultural product, in our case games. Communities are built around games and the fact that you play and enjoy the game makes you eligible to enter this relatively open-ended group of people. They are mostly hobbyists, but there are some professionals in the mix, too, and in general there are different statuses and merits that you can earn through mastery, other expertise or simply by following this culture for long. Everyone can be a teacher there while at the same time always also potentially being a learner. You can easily use that in your game based learning project simply by asking your students what they play, for how long, what they have contributed to this culture and what they think they can contribute to your project. Still, it is not easy to bring the benefits and the interaction from these groups to your classroom, but affinity spaces have a high significance for game based learning in your classroom.

Games culture supports being creative with games and making the production of texts, etc. an integral part of your project. Gamers are pro-sumers, that means in gaming culture you are not only consuming digital media products from your favourite pop culture, it is also quite normal to also become an active producer in this culture. Gamers create texts, videos, guides, let’s plays, live streams, fan art and fiction, mods, artwork for games, levels, etc. It is just what they like doing and for many it is the reason why they identify with a game and its culture so much and show engagement way beyond the consumer culture that we know and live in.

We will describe this attitude in more detail in the Research and Discussion Track under Using Games for Learning and Teaching in the guidebook (p.91). When we are talking about the reasons why gamers behave like this, we are looking at affinity spaces and participatory culture and are referring especially to the works of Henry Jenkins and James Paul Gee.

4-3 Digital skills and popular gaming culture

With playing video games you are automatically confronted with the development of a digital skill set. You also can learn part of the digital skills deemed relevant for education through other media and educators are busy finding solutions, tools and creating curricula to do so with programs and e-learning content. But there is a fundamental difference. Learning in and around games is not like classical teaching and learning that is still often instructivist (see learning theories in our guidebook (p. 77). It is experiential and learner-focused. It creates a new mindset, a new can-do attitude in learners and consists of learning principles well suited for acquiring 21st century skills and preparing learners for the future.

Games are in general mostly learning and testing systems. Except for a few specific genres, games are sets of problems that invite players to test their skills against them and succeed by learning and practising a challenge, whatever this might be, and get more proficient at it. A game about coding, one particularly attractive buzzword in education at the moment, like Lightbot, presents you challenges in basic coding concepts and the levels build on each other, so that you elaborate on the basic concept and understand the task in a flexible system with direct feedback. It typically presents, like most other games, well-ordered problems that ask for active engagement and experimentation. Digital skill sets do not only include coding and computational thinking, they also span digital citizenship, the awareness of your digital footprint, digital financial literacy, media production knowledge, to name just a few. These will be highly relevant in the job market in the future. Thus, your students need to be properly prepared for them. They already do acquire knowledge and experience by being an active part of games culture for example, but education can add a lot of extra value here, when using games that help to illustrate, train and reflect on certain concepts from the digital world, like security, media presence or digital production. Again, we can mention some games that can fit in here well, like A Normal Lost Phone, Her Story, or the Orwell series. Other games, about coding, complex systems, and digital realities, can also be really interesting here, like Event [0], Baba is You, or Autonauts. One game studio deserves extra mention here, when it comes to learning and understanding coding. The Zachtronics portfolio of games with titles like Shenzhen I/O, Infinifactory, Spacechem and Neon Noodles is part of a program for schools called Zachademics, in which you can get all of their titles for free, if you apply as staff of an educational institution.

The context around games offers a number of possibilities in digital media production and creating texts around games in different forms of presentation, from video to guides and wikis is interesting to most players. There already exists a vast library of all kinds of media products around games. The culture grows through media that is created by professionals as well as fans and this can present the perfect environment also for students to create more around a game as well as a valuable source for understanding games and their culture, or the mechanics and the market, the genres, etc.

Playing games means taking part in this popular culture and the media production and consumption around it. It means collecting and developing knowledge and skills outside of formal education. It means collaborating in a community and in games. It also means the knowledge of platforms, interfaces and conditions for playing or setting up a specific way of playing a game, be it hosting a game or a tournament or changing the game with modifications and such. It also means being creative and curious and being a learner and a teacher at the same time.

Try to find out more about the gaming habits of your friends and colleagues. If they play games, they might be an active part of the community. They might be able to help you with the setup of a game for your classroom or just give you some advice on specific games, on communities or on which aspects of games culture might be worth a closer look in the context of game based learning. You might realize that you are not alone when developing your expertise, testing games and making sure that the game you like to use in your project also can be brought to your school in the right way, no matter if it is the setup and requirements, the right way of communicating with stakeholders or maybe finding the right game for your project.

Let’s Play

In this part there will be a discription of the collaboration in the institutions that took part in the project for bringing the game to their courses. Answers will be given to questions like:

Who was involved in the preparation and how?
Did you ask other teachers for expertise about the game?
What did they tell you?

KTANE

Bringing the Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes (KTANE) to our course was quite easy. Our school’s teachers are accustomed with working with new methods and learning tools. The project manager had a discussion with the teachers and they decided that this game could be used for teaching English. After that, the headmaster of the school was informed, he gave permission and the teachers started working on the implementation.

The English teachers worked together with the project manager in order to use the game in their teaching according to the guidelines of the project. They set the goals of the implementation, made a plan of it, tested the game, printed the manual of the game and implemented with the students.

None of the school’s teachers had ever used this game before but they were experienced in using games inside the class. They gave us some great tips for using games for teaching and the implementation went well.

Co-creation of an escape room

Co-creation of an escape room is not exactly a game, but it is the process of creating a game that can be used for teaching. It was an idea of one of the science teachers of our school. He presented his idea to the headmaster and the other STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) teachers and some of them worked with him and the students in the co-creation of this room.

Some other teachers of the school provided their experience of playing other escape rooms (not as teachers but as players of the escape room).

Connect Four – the Article Game

Teachers for German as second language. Discussion for the idea please see below step 5 – how do find the game.

The game was discussed and tested with colleagues before the implementation into class. The colleagues said that it is a very good play to round up a foreign language lesson as well as brings fun into boring grammar.

Moreover we discussed:

How much space is needed (So that not only one person is in front of the whiteboard.)
How do we have to sit that each student can watch the game?
For the feedback and repetition process, it is important to collect all used words (make a wordlist) as well as memorize / write down the errors. (teacher should be in charge for that).

The Reactor Game

Teachers from the learning workshops on professional orientation, career planning and career start. Teachers knew the game and further developed the game to use in their workshops more comprehensively. The discussions where around pre work / learning for the students as well as the implementation of a feedback round according to feedback rules. In the teachers opinion this was necessary to have an effective learning effect.

The game was also played and tested with teachers who are in training. The teachers experienced that the game has several ankles. It can be used for team building as well as a game to strengthen communication and to become aware of one’s own strengths and weaknesses. The monitoring allows to strengthen attention and monitoring.

ACT ESOL

Very little collaboration was needed within the college because the principles are so simple. However, the tutor and manager from City Lit Universal Skills attended a specific ACT ESOL: Language, Resistance, Theatre Training Workshop which was very helpful in providing an overview of the thinking and examples of how to play. The Centre then held a training session with other ESOL tutors and reflected on how it would work in their contexts. The responses was how enjoyable the ACT ESOL was and how rich it could be in terms of a learning experience.

Lateral Thinking Game

The only collaboration needed was a discussion between tutor and manager on how best to play to the game but the rules and purposes of the game are so clear, little preparation was needed.

The game playing was discussed at a training session as an example of how learners can become involved in play and how the game requires the multiple skills such as speaking, thinking, reading, listening often at the same time. The other comment was that it was surprisingly well received by the learners.

Achievement

1 Choose a game that might be interesting for your courses and identify the steps you need to take to include everyone using the game. First projects might need more preparation and communication, using games more often will eliminate some of the conversations necessary. What needs to be communicated and who needs to be contacted?

2 Present a game that would be valuable but hard to integrate into your learning. The reasons for this can be manifold. It can be a difficult topic, maybe it needs advanced hardware or the gameplay sessions are really long. It still might make sense to use the game in class. Choose one game and apply the process of going through the checklist and identify the communication that needs to be done to use it like presenting it to parents or going through the value of the game with colleagues.

3 Go through the sources and find one video/podcast/article. Watch or read the piece, write a short summary and define a place for this topic in one of your potential gaming projects. Discuss the idea and the integration in the project with your colleagues and add it to the board here.