Tutorial

Many schools are on the edge of becoming more digital and are in the process of transforming the institution into a place for digital learning. Some might be further on their way already, others might still not be that developed in terms of infrastructure, equipment and expertise. Therefore, game based learning today is often about the question of what is actually possible in a specific setting. You have to consider what you have available at school, if a game works with the devices you have, what the length of a typical play session can be, etc., etc. Therefore we will finally provide the checklist that can give you the answers you need to know if you can use the game in a project.

Additionally, game based learning (especially when learning in games is involved) will change your teaching and the way students are learning profoundly. What this actually means will be presented in the chapter below. Your project might also cover other subjects and knowledge and skills and maybe go far beyond your actual curriculum. This is not a problem, it actually is an opportunity for you and your colleagues to work together, teach beyond one subject and collaborate. Game based learning needs space and time, so bringing it to more than one subject and planning larger projects will offer more time to play and work with the game. A project like this can also consider the possibilities for a flipped classroom or blended learning approach. This might make more gameplay possible, opens up more space and time for playing, especially if your students are motivated, and might also open up possibilities to use technology that might not be available in your classroom. Game based learning projects and the work with games and games culture sometimes even span several years in school and have their own curriculum, like the development of Esports education programs or game design courses in schools and educational institutions.

6-1 Challenges in bringing games to classrooms

To make sure a game is applicable in class you need to go through a list of aspects, so that it can be used in your specific classroom in the way you would like to.

Using analog games like card or board games, of course, doesn’t require any digital hardware, internet or devices like smartphones, laptops, etc.. You don’t need to consider devices or the internet connection, unless you would like to approach game play or the culture around a specific game, or would like to look at gaming in general through a different lense and focus maybe on discussing and reflecting topics in games, specific games, genres, protagonists or something similar. You might also consider documenting play sessions and creating video footage around a game, then hardware checks and preparation are necessary, too.

Digital games need hardware to bring them to classrooms, a number of different devices, platforms, software and hardware that is able to run the respective game. Depending on the number of players per piece of hardware, you need to make sure that these devices are available and running. Beyond that, topics, presentation, as well as age ratings need to be considered.

It makes sense to go through a checklist for a game to be clear, if and how it can be used in class, like this one:

Checklist

After having answered all these questions, several possibilities might come up to bring a specific game or a topic, genre or game mechanic to your class. The same game might be available on several platforms, or can be presented without having a number of PCs or a good internet connection.

Bringing a game to the classroom and opening up the potential of gaming culture for your teaching can work in a lot of different ways. Going through the checklist shows what is beyond reach for your specific classroom, but it can also answer a few questions around the possibilities for game based teaching with certain games.

You might have found a game that would be great for teaching, but some of the necessary prerequisites for playing in class are not met. Then, you might return to the model by Tom Hildgen in Step 3 and find a different way of making this game a topic in your classroom.

6-2 Games change your teaching

In the following we need to take a quick look at learning theories and why games are this interesting for teaching and learning. As the headline says, games will change your teaching and the learning of your students. When saying that, we talk about a project that puts playing a game or creating in and for a game in the centre of your endeavours. Talking about games, watching them and reflecting on them does not automatically change your style of teaching. It might bring additional motivation for your students, but learning in games leads to a fundamental change for your classroom. We presented the foundations for that extensively in the guidebook (p. 67) and will only bring up a few aspects here. If you like to find out more feel free to use the guidebook for help.

Gee’s learning principles

One of the most important researchers to understand the fundamentals of game based learning is James Paul Gee. We extensively present and discuss his work on games in the guidebook (p. 81) but it makes sense to also bring up some foundational principles in good games that will be relevant when it comes to developing your teaching and the student’s learning.

Games are great tools for learning because they treat the learner differently than regular education. Some of the reasons why learning with games is fundamentally different are that games create an identity for the players, they make learning interactive and provide immediate individual feedback. Learning with games is production-oriented, failing in a game holds few consequences in comparison to real life, empowering players to take risks. ‘Failure’ in a game is a good thing, it provides direct feedback to the players to enable him/her to adapt. Games can often be customized by the players and they convey a sense of agency for the players. They present well-ordered problems, are challenging, put performance before competence and always provide the opportunity of situated meanings. And beyond that, games and especially simulations offer the opportunity to learn in a systemic fashion, always embedded and interconnected.

In our manual, we also have a look at a longer list of learning principles in games developed by Gee, but this might be too academic and might lead to far for this course. We mentioned some aspects already, like the possibility of joining affinity groups and participating actively in a community, or learning through discovery. For you as a teacher, you have to change your role in the process of learning with games. You are more of a guide and a mentor when applying game based learning and your focus can be more on social aspects and to guide the students to play the game ‘the right way’.

The concept of Growth Mindset

One aspect of learning, or rather the mindset of the learner is something worth considering, too. According to Carol Dweck, a psychologist from the US who has been a professor for psychology at Columbia and Harvard University, there are two different mindsets in people. A fixed mindset is constituted through the belief that intelligence is static. This leads to a desire to look smart and a tendency to avoid challenges, give up easily, see effort as fruitless, ignore useful negative feedback and in general feel threatened by the success of others. A growth mindset instead, sees intelligence as something that can be developed. It leads to the desire to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as the path to mastery and to learn from criticism to be able to find lessons and inspiration in the success of others. Dweck states that [the] passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

Playing a game is something that fosters a growth mindset in people, as you have all the ingredients necessary for the development of such an attitude. Games present challenges one after the other, they will make you fail and retry again, make you invest effort into the solution for the challenge presented to you in the game and be inspired by the results of others in the game, presented to you via the many channels of games culture, videos, wikis, guides and the like.

Through video games you can see “learning as a complex and emergent process, an ongoing fluid relationship between personal knowing and collective knowledge as the learner/player observes and acts in the observed world.” Complex learning happens in adaptive, self-organizing systems that offer experiences to the learner, so that the understanding and the learning happens by transforming the learner. Video games offer exactly this, adaptive, self-organizing systems and simulations to play with and make sense of. Games “encourage players to focus on connections and relationships [...] rather than decontextualized skills and facts, thus encouraging meaningful learning and understanding that empowers learners to adapt their perceptions and resulting actions in the video game world. Learning is understood as an emergent process, an ongoing renegotiation of the perceived boundary between personal knowing, collective knowledge and the environment as a person observes, acts and engages in the perceived world.” Therefore the success of the medium, therefore the engagement of (young) learners with these problem-solving tools called games and therefore the recommendation to bring them to classrooms, for all age groups and skill levels, including basic skills teaching.

6-3 Project-based and experiential learning

Using games beyond one single subject

The more time you can provide with a game, the deeper and more complex the learning can be for your students. This does not include all games of course, it is dependent on the complexity and replayability of the game. There are small games and it is alright to use them for small projects and only play one or a few lessons as part of your project. But big, successful or competitive games offer a potential that can profoundly change your whole school and the way your students learn and interact with their environment.

So, there is a wide range of possible game based learning projects for you and your school or institution. You can choose a learning game like Dragonbox Elements or Algebra and use it in class and at home to let your students practice what you also teach at the same time. You can discuss certain aspects of games and their culture in your class to write essays about it, practice argumentation, or learn more about the games industry and how to develop the skill set to join this industry. You can use a game in several subjects and connect the content of the game to topics for this subject (like described in the projects outlined below, 7-1). You can create a game, some part of a game or adapt an existing game to new rules, a new storyline and setting, etc.

But you can even go beyond that. To give you a few examples, here is a list of projects that made use of games in a more comprehensive way. Minecraft is probably the game all pupils know. It is also the game that offers the greatest amount of support and material for teachers when it comes to using it for education (Minecraft Education Edition). But it is also used in projects like the following: You can rebuild your school or your part of your town in Minecraft. To do this properly, students are asked to build everything true to scale, but of course adapted to the world and the tools Minecraft offers. How do you bring your everyday reality to this world? Students are asked to look and to measure and to create a plan and a blueprint of the real world building or settlement. They need to discover all the relevant aspects of the objects in question.

You can use the city building and development simulation Cities: Skylines for a similar purpose. The topic of the project is to rebuild (part of) the city as closely as possible in the game. To make this possible, students have to find out about the infrastructure of the town, the budget, all the different shops, facilities and institutions. They need information about energy and resource management, about waste facilities, public transport, etc. Maybe they can include information about what the inhabitants think about their city and do surveys. A project like this takes an enormous amount of time, probably the better part of a school year. But in our opinion, you can probably include many teachers and subjects in your project and the learning beyond the regular curriculum content can be tremendous.

As a final example, we would like to bring up the topic of Esports once again. Esports, or competitive gaming, has its own culture. It is a culture of digital media, personalities and high performance. For many young people, it is a dream to be part of this culture or to find a job in similar areas in the context of gaming. So, Esports, live streaming, and video content production, as a project at school, is highly desirable for many of them. They are motivated and invest a lot of their time into these fields already anyway. More and more schools and universities have realized this and the field of Esports Education is developing quickly. Schools and educational institutions use the fascination for Esports and streaming to create attractive learning environments for students. They start teams, do livestreams, and offer tournaments. They connect their subjects to the field of Esports and teach and apply the skills the players need to develop their career in Esports at school. It is a new approach that has only been followed for a few years now. But it is attractive nonetheless, for the students, for schools and also for international networking between educational institutions.

Experiential Learning

Especially in the project ideas mentioned right before, experiential learning is at the core of the project. Learning is connected to the real world and the reality the students experience and live in. The connection between formal learning and the real world is highly desirable. As we stated before, ideally all learning should be situated like this. The connection between the in-game experience and the real world can even create a stronger connection between the learning content and situation it is happening in. We will give a short explanation below, how experiential learning works and how it is connected to game based learning.

Experiential learning starts with the premise that good educational design has to consider “the learner’s place in society, how they might contribute to it, and how they - as an individual - experience it. Every learner’s experience will be different, and the best learning environments (and teachers) should be able to adapt to these differences. Kolb’s adaptive learning cycle that is at the centre of experiential learning consists of four steps and actually can be seen as a model that our recommended game based learning cycles in class are a reflection of. The four steps are active experimentation (doing), concrete experience (feeling), reflective observation (watching) and abstract conceptualisation (thinking). Step one is actually playing the game, step two is about following guidance in the game, approaching challenges and receiving the feedback given by the game, step three is thinking about, reflecting, observing and discussing the experiences made in the game (happening while playing and especially supported in our feedback rounds when discussing gameplay and creating connections to the real world) and step four consists of formulating theories and hypotheses for how to succeed in specific challenges (done in- and outside of the game).

6-4 Beyond school

Playing the game at home

If you work with games, there is a good chance, your students will play at home anyway. It might be the game you use or other games. Statistically speaking, almost half of the population play digital games on a regular basis (only minor differences from country to country) and more than 80% of your adolescent student population play games and consider it one of their major pastimes. Games are an important part of popular culture among young people and the discourse in their peer groups is strongly influenced by games culture.

This means that games are important for many students and they own or at least know how to use the common devices for gaming from smartphones to consoles and computers. It also means that you might also ask your students to play the game at home. If playing is part of their homework or preparation for a course and they are into gaming, they will be very motivated if they like games and especially the one you offer as a tool for learning. But it might also be the case that they play beyond the point they are asked to or play it differently to what you expect. We talked about why before. Other research around a game, like watching Let’s Play videos or research in the wiki or the forums, might also be easy for them, as they do that on a regular basis for other games as well. So, there is maybe more time available for your project, if part of the work is done outside of your lessons.

Other approaches to teaching like a flipped classroom model, blended learning or remote learning benefit from this fact, of course. Still, you need to make sure that every student has access to devices for playing, of course. Just because they like gaming and take part in the discourse and the culture, does not mean that they can afford the devices or the games.

In a flipped classroom or in a blended learning setting, games work well because they already are complete tools for learning and they are motivating as such. Gameplay sessions work well outside of the classroom and the focus within your lessons then can be on the reflection of the gameplay, on strategies, or on connections between the game and the curriculum, the real world, etc. It is similar for blended learning, the game can be a stand-alone experience, if you guide your students in face-to-face sessions and connect the gameplay to the rest of the project content. And for remote learning using a game can be attractive, too, it might even be the reason for some of your students to show active participation and engage more than they normally would in the context of video meetings.

Larger projects that connect the outside world to games, as described before, can of course also lead to playing a game outside class, be it a Minecraft club, an Esports team, or something else that establishes gaming as part of your school culture beyond regular lessons. This may then reinforce the effect of your game based learning project and strengthen a culture of teaching with games at your school.

Analog vs. digital

Analog games can be valuable resources for game based learning, too. They can be tools for learning and they can also be a topic in class. They offer great opportunities for game design and creative projects. Analog games like escape room games or pen and paper roleplaying also offer exciting possibilities beyond playing the game. Playing these games can also happen in a board game club at school, but playing at home for a project seems difficult to imagine. We explained the differences between analog and digital games as tools for learning in our guidebook (p. 52). Card and board games do not lend themselves well for learning outside of the classroom at home. They are not technology dependent, but often you have one or two games available and the games cannot be split into pieces. You need the full game to play it together and this has to happen in the classroom.

Additionally, something else only came to mind due to the fact that remote learning became prominent throughout the period of the project. It is the simple realization that analog games do not work well in remote learning. Digital games fit into blended learning and a flipped classroom model quite well. To enable such an approach with analog games would be hard to imagine. Of course, many successful board and card games like Carcassonne, Codenames, Risk, Agricola, or Ticket to Ride, have also been translated to the digital space and digital versions of them are well done and easily available, so if you want to bring a classic board game to your classroom, but have to work remotely with your students, the digital version of a board or card game might be the way to go.

An interesting development needs mentioning in our opinion, too. As you can see in the chapters before, games are converted from analog to digital and vice versa. Additionally, some analog games make use of extra digital applications to keep track of the progress or add more elements to the game. But you can find most well-known analog game classics also in great digital versions, sometimes even adding to the gameplay in the digital version. And these digital versions might be a great substitution for the analog version, especially when it comes to distant learning or a flipped classroom model. Some games come in the look of a board or card game, but are only released in digital form (Dicey Dungeons for example), and some successful digital titles like Civilization, Cities: Skylines, Portal or Stardew Valley are also converted to a board or card game, often differing a lot in gameplay to the original video game.

Let’s Play

In this part there will be a presentation of the checkilist of the games used by the partners and a description of the work/learning in the project beyond the game.

KTANE

Checklist KTANE

The learners tried to communicate with the others from their team by playing a game and no just because they “had to”. They tried to learn new words and phrases in English because they wanted to play the game and do well while playing it.

Co-creation of an escape room

There is no checklist presented for this because it is not exactly a game but a co-creation of one.

The learners were creating an escape room that would be played by other learners from our school. And this is way they tried so much. Because they wanted to present something good and something that the others would like to play. It was really interesting that the learners that co-created the room were so passionate about it and this motivation made them learn a lot about STEAM.

Connect Four – the Article Game

Checklist Connect Four – the Article Game

The students realized that they learn while playing and that they start to talk without having fear of saying something wrong.

Also the discussion after the game is much easier, because the game makes a good and relaxed atmosphere. It is very good to wrap-up main errors. Because the game is linked to fun, the students memorize the correct article more easily.

The Reactor Game

Checklist The Reactor Game

It was very easy to motivate the group to play this strategic game. Monitoring the game and each group participant gave them the possibility to further work on these competences in the group. Moreover they had the possibility to see strengths of their mates/students, social competences, communication skills, etc.

The game strengthens following skills and competences:

Students got an ability to work in a team.
They learned to communicate and to solve conflicts.
They had to foster their capability to cooperate.
The students had to work on their ability to solve problems and they had to make decisions.
Some students had to take over the initiative.
Analytical and strategic thinking as well as out-of-the box thinking was very important.
Some used their organizational skills.

All these skills and competences were important for the further classes in career planning and career start.

ACT ESOL

Checklist ACT ESOL

Beyond this particular instantiation, we learned play can very much be a learning experience particularly where experience is understood as something that transforms the subjects so they are changed by what they have undergone. In this case students revisited something that they had previously experienced, something (mildly) traumatic, and relived that and reconfigured it so that it became something else, something that contained a different possibility or ending and their subject position was changed accordingly. We learned that this experiential involvement was effected not by having a pre-stated learning objective or a conscious representation of what students would learn, but by students following the demands of the game, the scenario to be enacted, and their being drawn into tasks and demands of the play. In so doing, possibilities for learning, spaces for learning, opened up to them, like self-creating ‘gap-fill’ – “What do I have to say here?” “What is a better phrase to use?” – in addition to allowing for a post-play reflection and more considered focus on language.

We are taking this learning into other aspect of classroom practice, in particular task-based learning and experimenting with developing competence through performance rather than establishing the former before attempting the latter.

Lateral Thinking Game

Checklist Lateral Thinking Game

We learned from this game that conditions of play similar to those in ACT ESOL could be created but by using or playing a very different seeming game. By following some basic rules – suspending disbelief, resisting cheating to find the answer and attempting to work out the logic of the puzzle – students became absorbed and caught up in the story and the play. We learned that play centres on there being something ‘at stake’ – here the solution to a problem – and the alternating attempts to solve the problem by different learners created the to and fro movement typical of game play necessary to absorb the learners’ into it. Here the oscillation was between the creation of a possible solution and the almost immediate realisation that this establishing of order and resolution needed to be rejected. This swing took place both within each player and between them. Each game became a short history of proposal and rejection, of presentation-depresentation, of potential success and realisation of failure. In becoming so involved in the story-puzzle and its possibilities, the players became immersed and interested in its forth-coming, in its immanence, following and being guided by what was emerging from the story, in other words the hints of a solution that the story itself suggested. As Bourdieu writes, "the good player is the one who, as in Pascal's example, 'places' the ball better or who places himself not where the ball is but where it is about to land. In either case, the forth-coming in relation to which he positions himself is not a possibility which may happen or not happen but something which is already there in the configuration of the game and in present positions and postures of team-mates and opponents." (Pascalian Meditations p208)

Achievement

1 Choose three different games (serious game, game popular with your students, board game) and go through the checklist. Some information can be easily found, like the age rating, the price or the platform, but other info like the duration of play sessions or relevant content creators might need more research. If you are not able to acquire some of the info or don’t understand some of the specifics, find a person to support you (this might be even one of your kids who are into gaming anyway).