“When or where am I going to actually use this?” My guess is that every teacher has heard a student utter these words somewhere along the way. As teachers, it is our responsibility to capture students’ imagination to help them connect what they do in the classroom with the world around them. Yet, how can we, as teachers, help them not only acquire the educational content we are teaching, but also the ability to use content to solve real world problems?

I believe the answer lies in game-based learning. Video games are practically second nature to the majority of students today. As players, they always want to know what is next, what is behind that obstacle and how can they advance to the next level. Using what they know about the characters, their abilities, the hurdles and the environment, they attempt different ways to achieve the game’s objectives. In an academic game, this trial and error approach builds students’ knowledge, not only of the content itself, but also how to apply the content in different ways to advance.

Through their own pace and rhythm, students can trace back to a place in the game they made a mistake, conclude what went wrong, dig into the educational content and, ultimately, change their approach to solve the problem. Correcting his or her own mistakes is infinitely more valuable for a student than having them retrospectively pointed out.

In the Triseum calculus game, Variant: Limits, this theory holds true. I showed the game to my 15-year-old son who loves playing games but knows very little about calculus. He moved through the game’s task and challenges to figure out what to do next. Of course, his progress wasn’t without failure. He is too young to know and understand the depth of the calculus concepts, but his trial and error approach enabled him to draw some important conclusions in a more intuitive way, applying what he learned from both his successes and failures. This is problem solving at its best; not to mention, he got very excited to formally learn calculus!

Game-based learning also creates an ideal environment for student collaboration, a valuable lesson these students will carry into their careers, no matter their chosen field.  Playing in pairs, interacting with each other and helping each other navigate through the game deepens their knowledge of the concepts while, at the same time, developing their social and teamwork skills.

Academic games don’t just teach us content, they teach us how to think creatively and use the content to solve problems. What’s more, the game-based learning experience integrates something students  likely enjoy doing in their free time with tangible learning, and that is what learning should be – fun, deep and engaging!

About the Author

Anica teaches math at the primary school Toplički heroji in Žitorađa, Serbia. She is a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEE) and a Scientix ambassador. Her passions lie in new education technologies and developing students’ digital skills for the 21st century, engaging them in a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts and their applications in real life.

In recent years the European Union has aggressively invested in research on innovative approaches to education, including game-based learning and gamification. Europe’s openness to new learning strategies is encouraging. Their many successful game-based learning efforts  serve as a model for games playing a critical role in improving education.

European Conference on Game-Based Learning
In October, educators, policymakers, game designers and business leaders from around the continent will convene for the 12th European Conference on Game-Based Learning. This time around, the event will take place at the Sophia-Antipolis campus of the SKEMA Business School, between Nice and and Cannes in southern France from October 4-5, 2018.

By fostering a vibrant exchange of ideas between people interested in new approaches to education throughout  the continent and around the world? , the conference plays a key role in pushing game-based learning into the mainstream and highlights key research on educational games.

European Schoolnet
European Schoolnet comprises education ministries from 34 countries that have joined forces to research and advance innovative teaching methods. Founded in 1997, the group is focused on leveraging technology to enhance education as well as making sure education across the continent is aligned with the technical skills 21st century employment demands.

Game-based learning has been a big focus for European Schoolnet. In Fall 2017, European Schoolnet partnered with Triseum to collect and analyze evidence on game-based learning from classrooms in five different countries: Norway, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Poland. The ongoing initiative, which focuses on the 2017/18 school year, will assess the impact of a variety of game-based learning strategies to help develop best practices educators across the world can use to drive their own curricula.

Open Education Europa
An initiative of the European Commission, Open Education Europa is aimed at helping educators across Europe share ideas on how to improve education through digital technologies.

One notable initiative, Making Games In Collaboration for Learning (MAGICAL), focused on the learning opportunities educators can unlock by getting students to design their own digital games. A group of researchers developed a platform students with no coding skills could use to create their own games. Classroom pilots in five countries (Belgium, Italy, Greece, Finland and the U.K.) introduced the concept to students ages eight to twelve, with very encouraging results. Researchers discovered strong evidence the process elicited a high level of engagement from the students and contributed to collaboration skills.

STEM Alliance
The STEM Alliance is an initiative supported by a variety of organizations and businesses that aims to equip young Europeans for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. To that end, one of its main goals is to develop new ways to get young people engaged and excited about STEM subjects. Naturally, game-based learning is an approach the organization has identified as holding promise in this regard.

In 2017, the STEM Alliance had three schools –– in Romania, Italy and Greece –– use Triseum’s adventure game, Variant: Limits, to teach calculus. The feedback from the participating students and teachers was extraordinarily positive. Students described the game as fun and effective at teaching the subject matter. “The game is really different from the other technologies I have tried out,” said one student., “It motivates you to continue playing and discover what else might be coming your way.”

I recently returned from the annual NAEA convention where I had the opportunity to lead a workshop for teachers and give a keynote talk. Reflecting on the event, there seemed to be a general consensus that games do, in fact, play an important role in the teaching process.

The workshop was attended by teachers from all across the U.S. as well as Singapore. In the workshop we explored a foundational approach to game-based learning (GBL), including the vocabulary of game design and the benefits of this modern approach. Having taught this workshop now several times to art teachers, I’d like to share some of the more thought provoking questions that I have been asked along the way and the insights I have discovered.

“Do games teach?”

When looking at the definition in the Oxford Dictionary of what teach and teaching mean, we discover the following: “Impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) as to how to do something” and “The occupation, profession, or work of a teacher.”

Yes, games can impart knowledge and show the user how to do something.  However, teaching only happens through a teacher. In my opinion, “Do games teach?” isn’t the right question to ask. Similarly, we don’t ask, “Does a book teach?”, yet you certainly can learn a lot from a book and a teacher can use a book to teach. The same holds true for games. You can learn a lot from games and a teacher can use games to teach.

Popular entertainment games show players, for example, how to kill aliens (HALO), how to command a civilization and advance it (Civilization), how new proteins are formed (Fold-It), and even a different perspective on the Iranian revolution of 1979 (1979 Revolution: Black Friday). However, games nor books nor any other medium for that matter are a substitute for a teacher and should never be seen as such. Great teachers inspire and educate students with or without any additional tools or media. A game is another tool in a teacher’s toolbox to be used when the teacher deems most appropriate in his or her way, just like a book. Books are used in different ways in a classroom and so are movies and other media. I believe the same holds true for games.

The workshop I ran showed teachers how they can make games with something as simple as paper and pencils and then turn those games into effective learning tools. Of course I have been extremely privileged to work with art teachers who are very creative, and in the matter of only a few hours, they developed games for their classrooms that were fun and could be used for teaching.

“What is the most challenging thing I have encountered when bringing games into classrooms?”

I had to think about this question for a minute. Unfortunately a common barrier is the teachers themselves. Many teachers have a full plate and don’t necessarily get the support they need to try new things. Others simply believe playing games is a waste of time. Many teachers don’t play a lot of games themselves and don’t know how to approach the subject or bring games into their classrooms.

When working with teachers, 90% of the time I find that if they are given the support from their administration, colleagues and parents, and given the time to learn how to bring games into the classroom, they never turn back. Once a teacher has experienced the power of games for teaching and learning, it is difficult to see education in the same light as before. This holds true for teachers across all grade levels and even universities. I have yet to meet a teacher who successfully implemented GBL in their class and saw the excitement, engagement and increase in mastery of their students, who then came and said, “No I will not use this again. I will go back to the way I have been taught how to teach.”

It doesn’t matter if you use off the shelf entertainment games, learning games or make your own games (or even have your students participate in making them), the power of GBL is so overwhelming when done right, it is difficult to imagine a classroom without it.

Last year, my students (4F 2016-2017) learned limits in a traditional way, and they had an 80 percent success rate on the final test. This year, I introduced Variant: Limits to my students (4F 2017-2018) and they achieved a 100 percent success rate on the final exam. No one failed, and this year’s group of students even experienced an average grade growth rate of 10 percent compared to my students from a year ago.

What does this mean? To me, it means that not only did my students enjoy the subject matter more, they actually performed better. Since Variant: Limits doesn’t cover all of the calculus curriculum mandated in Italian schools, we have had to re-engage with other learning tools and traditional resources. Yet, my students keep thinking back to Variant: Limits. It’s like replaying a favorite movie clip or song in your head. The replay both the mathematical aspects and the story elements.

Variant truly changed their attitudes about math. They have become more deeply involved with the concepts, they retained the information, and they had fun. Now imagine if all learning tools resonated with students the way this game does?  Lucky for us there are three more games in the series on the horizon!

About Giulia Bini

Giulia Bini has master’s degrees in Mathematics and ICT in Education and is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Didactics of Mathematics of Turin University. She has been teaching Mathematics and Physics since 1993 in several secondary schools in Milan (Italy) and, since 2009, she has been a resident teacher at Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci. She develops innovative approaches to teaching including both CLIL and ICT based methodologies, collaborates with national and international publishers for evaluating textbooks and educational material, and is involved in teacher training regarding the usage of ICT in education.  

The positive role games play in the learning process has attracted significant attention from prominent thinkers. A large number of TED talks, for instance, have focused on various intellectual and emotional benefits that games offer people of all ages. A few have explicitly focused on game-based learning.

The following videos are worth checking out!

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In this video, Paul Anderson, a science teacher in Montana, describes how teaching through games offers distinct advantages to the traditional classroom teaching model. Perhaps most controversially: he says games teach students that it’s OK to fail. Indeed, it is through your repeated failures in a game that you finally figure out how to do it right.

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Entrepreneur Gabe Zichermann describes how many of today’s video games teach kids problem-solving and management skills. Unlike the simplistic games he grew up playing in the 80’s –– Pong, Super Mario Bros., –– today’s games are incredibly complex and demand their players to be fast-thinking multi-taskers. These complex games represent the majority of entertainment that millennials and those younger than them have ever consumed. That fact has reshaped the way young people (Zicherman calls them Generation G) learn, teach and approach problems. It’s an opportunity, he says, that we must recognize and embrace.

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The average child today will spend 10,000 hours playing video games by the time they’re 21. That’s almost exactly the amount of time they spend in school from ages 10-18. In other words, says Jane McGonigal, kids are engaging in a parallel education system outside of school. It’s not such a bad thing, she explains. Among other things, in contrast to the sterile learning objectives they are often told to strive towards in the classroom, games provide kids an opportunity to play the role of a hero, waging a battle with “Epic Meaning,” striving for an “Epic Win.” That motivation unlocks what McGonigal refers to as “Blissful Productivity,” in which you work towards a goal that is far away, and “Urgent Optimism,” in which repeated failure is a part of the process that makes victory more rewarding.

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Tom Chatfield explains how the system of rewards found in games makes them such effective learning tools. The constant rewards –– for developing a skill or beating a level –– is what keeps people “progressing and engaged.” Furthermore, the data generated by today’s gamers are helping game developers pinpoint exactly how to design rewards to maximize a player’s motivation to continue playing.

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Daphne Bavelier, a neuroscientist, describes the positive effects of video games on the human brain. Brain imaging shows that even games that are not traditionally viewed as intellectually-oriented can help develop key cognitive skills. Notably, Bavelier shows that video games, long derided as damaging attention spans, actually enhance a brain’s ability to focus.

I recently was asked why I use games in the classroom. Simply put, games motivate my students, which in turn motivates me. I’ve used a variety of games over the years, from simplistic and rudimentary to highly interactive and digitally advanced. While most are excellent tools for practice, I believe that immersive and sophisticated video games go beyond the ritual of practice, captivating students’ attention and empowering them to learn new and complex concepts.

Take Variant: Limits, for example. Because it links the pedagogical goals of calculus with the game’s challenges, and because the game flows much like the entertainment games my students play outside of school, it allowed them to ‘play to learn’. Much of the content in the game was new for them, yet I didn’t have to push them to get through it. They wanted to apply what they were learning throughout the game so they could see what would happen next, and they wanted to finish the game.

I assigned the game as homework, starting with one week of Zone 1 (the first level in Variant: Limits). We used class time and lab time to share ideas about the mathematical meanings in the game, check in on the content, address any questions, and introduce the additional zones or levels. Some students were so eager that they jumped ahead and played the game before I had reviewed the concepts. Talk about sheer excitement. For some of my weaker students, who tend to practice less in general because it takes them longer to complete activities, they actually engaged with the content more using Variant: Limits than they would with other assignments. Because they were playing a game, it hardly seemed like homework.

I also created additional puzzles and activities to accompany the game. My goal was to make sure that students were not simply advancing through the game because of trial and error, but rather that they understood what it was they were trying and how it was relevant.  This allowed me to further gauge how connected my students were to the content so I could reinforce the concepts. Each puzzle and activity was created within the context of the game so I knew students would engage with them. For example, I created a video that walked students through the graphing exercise  of finding a limit of a piecewise function and a drag & drop assessment where they had to plug in the correct variables. The puzzles and activities were so successful, that I created an entire library of content, assignments, and assessments that I used within my course and encourage others to use when implementing Variant: Limits.

Last year, my students (4F 2016-2017) learned limits in a traditional way, and they had an 80 percent success rate on the final test. This year, I introduced Variant: Limits to my students (4F 2017-2018) and they achieved a 100 percent success rate on the final exam. No one failed, and this year’s group of students even experienced an average grade growth rate of 10 percent compared to my students from a year ago. What does this mean? To me, it means that not only did my students enjoy the subject matter more, they actually performed better.

Since Variant: Limits doesn’t cover all of the calculus curriculum mandated in Italian schools, we have had to re-engage with other learning tools and traditional resources. Yet, my students keep thinking back to Variant: Limits. It’s like replaying a favorite movie clip or song in your head. The replay both the mathematical aspects and the story elements. Variant truly changed their attitudes about math. They have become more deeply involved with the concepts, they retained the information, and they had fun. Now imagine if all learning tools resonated with students the way this game does?  Lucky for us there are three more games in the series on the horizon!

About Giulia Bini

Giulia Bini has master’s degrees in Mathematics and ICT in Education and is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Didactics of Mathematics of Turin University. She has been teaching Mathematics and Physics since 1993 in several secondary schools in Milan (Italy) and, since 2009, she has been a resident teacher at Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci. She develops innovative approaches to teaching including both CLIL and ICT based methodologies, collaborates with national and international publishers for evaluating textbooks and educational material, and is involved in teacher training regarding the usage of ICT in education.  

Remember the days of Oregon Trail? How about Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? While learning games have been around for decades, technological advancements are creating an entirely more modern gaming experience – one where quality mirrors the digital literacy expectations of today’s student, one that entices the student to play and play again, and one that aligns a game’s outcomes with the goals of the course.

Every game teaches the player something, from the very basics of how to play the game to achieving the game’s objectives, whether it be killing zombies or winning races. As Eli Neiburger points out in the paper “The Deeper Game of Pokémon, or, How the World’s Biggest RPG Inadvertently Teaches 21st Century Kids Everything They Need to Know,” entertainment games are proven to teach very complex skills and knowledge. Unfortunately, in today’s world, knowing how to kill a zombie or effectively battle Pokémon doesn’t necessarily translate to a useful skill.

Mastery: What Level is Acceptable?

Mastery is a key component of measuring what a student has, in fact, learned. What do students receive if they achieve 90 percent mastery? In most situations, they receive an A, yet 10 percent of knowledge has been left on the table. And what about students who receive a B or C? Consider what happens if students leave knowledge on the table year after year, from elementary school to college. While they may be earning A’s, there is a significant compounding knowledge gap.

Think about this: how would you feel if you knew the pilot who is flying your plane achieved 90 percent mastery? My guess is uncomfortable at best. Now imagine if I told you that the pilot achieved the 90 percent mastery by watching someone else, reading about it, and hearing lectures about it. Are you going to get on that plane? I know I wouldn’t. Yet this passive learning approach is exactly what we are offering students today, and then we wonder why they are not competent in the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Thankfully, this is not what is happening in the aviation industry. All pilots undergo rigorous hands-on training before they are allowed to fly. The same holds true for engineers, doctors, firefighters, police, and numerous other professionals who participate in experiential learning and on the job training before they are considered competent in their fields. Now, take an experiential learning game. Students simply can’t progress to the next level until they achieve 100 percent mastery of the current level.

Motivation: How Many Times is a Student Willing to Try?

Most learning games will not allow the student to proceed to the next level if he or she achieves anything less than 100 percent. Yet achieving 100 percent mastery doesn’t just happen. It requires practice, repetition, and oftentimes, failures.

In the typical classroom, it is unacceptable for a student to make 10 or 20 attempts to master a concept, and failure is somewhat public. However, when studying effective learning games  within the LIVE Lab in the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University, we have seen that students play games assigned as homework an average of 10 times between 2 and 4 hours each time. This indicates not only engagement, but also removes a student’s fear of failure, reinforcing the fact that multiple attempts are not only okay, but encouraged. When students play games they are not afraid to try something and fail. If the games are well designed, students will try and try again as they are intrinsically motivated to succeed and achieve 100 percent mastery. We call this the desire for the epic win. With fully immersive and interactive games, students benefit from experiential learning, mastering the content they need, which ultimately translates to useful skills.

Merit: What is the Role of the Student Learning Objective?

Having said all of this, games should not be viewed as a silver bullet or a replacement of the instructor by any means. Like any other medium, they have their place and are one tool at a teacher’s disposal.

Building effective learning video games is not just an art and a science.  The game development is  time consuming and costly, assuming the game strives for entertainment quality and that the learning game production meets student digital literacy expectations. Karl Kapp provides a great introduction to learning game design in his book, “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education.”

Learning video games should always start with the end in mind. What do we want the player to learn? Or what is the Student Learning Objective (SLO)? Once concrete SLOs are identified based on instructional design theories, then the assessment is defined to determine how students will be evaluated on mastery of the SLO(s). It is important that the SLO is integrated into the game (i.e. not solving a math problem and then playing the game, but solving the math problem as part of progressing through the game). When deciding if game-based learning is the right form or method for any given SLO, faculty will want to assess how the game fits into the syllabus or lesson plan, as well as the time it takes to play the game.

Not a Real-Life Replacement

In my opinion, experiential learning is key, in whatever form it takes. Video games are not meant to replace real-life experiences if they can otherwise be obtained. For example, if you can take your students into a forest for a lesson on the natural environment, why utilize any other means? Technology, and specifically game-based learning, should not be viewed and used only because it exists, but it should be used because it enhances the experience or allows students to experience something otherwise not possible, like a historical event.

While I believe we will have effective learning games for every subject in the future, today there are few available. Unfortunately, there is not a single source that can test and rate the effectiveness of learning games. However, the power of game-based learning is coming to light in significant ways through immersive experiences that allow students to connect with content on a deeper level. Game-based learning makes curriculum relatable, driving knowledge mastery, inspiring motivation, and boosting measurable learning outcomes.

 About the Author

André Thomas founded and serves as the director of the LIVE Lab in the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University, where he also teaches game design, game development and interactive graphics techniques. He also serves as CEO of Triseum, which creates entertainment quality, immersive learning games for foundational subjects. Previously, he was Head of Graphics for EA Sports Football (including NCAA, Madden NFL, Head Coach, and NFL Tour), the longest running and most successful sports franchise in this history of the games industry.

This article was originally published in eCampus News and is available here.