- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work at UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for the Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H.
And on behalf of those folks
and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you David Gagnon.
He was born in Elgin, Illinois
and went to Elgin Larkin High School.
Then he came here to UW-Madison to study computer science
and he stayed to get a master's degree
in curriculum and instruction.
He works for the Field Day Lab,
which is part of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
And the Field Day Lab develops educational online games
to advance teaching and learning.
Tonight, he's gonna talk with us about
how only a game can save us
in the development of online games to speed equity
and effectiveness in teaching and learning.
Please join me in welcoming David Gagnon
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
- Fantastic, thanks Tom.
So, yeah, I'm David Gagnon
and I direct a educational game studio
and research laboratory called Field Day.
And I'm talking right now
from the top of the Education Sciences building
and happy to be part of this great university.
So today, we're talking about video games
and as you might guess,
for someone who invested their career
into educational video games,
I probably have a positive opinion.
But I do wanna take a second to step back
and start to address the main concern,
which is this slide that says, "Video games melt kids' brains."
And this is a concern that people have
that literally video games melt kids' brains.
And the concerns are ones that are slightly founded.
You know, video games are a form of entertainment,
usually, when they're talked about.
And there are some concerns to this,
and I think it's good to handle them upfront.
So in a recent study, we see that video gamers,
ones that, you know, report playing video games
a significant amount of time every week,
do talk about some of the problems they run into,
things like lack of sleep
because they stayed up playing video games
or, you know, decreased social time
is also, you know, a concern.
The other one that we hear commonly in the media is
there's real, no research around it that's solid,
but this idea that video games
practice violence and would make people more violent.
So these are some of the things
that people are constantly talking about
and concerned about.
I'd like to turn our attention, though,
to just try and understand who is playing video games
and what this audience looks like
in order for us to really set the stage
for what we're gonna do later in the talk,
which is get into the learning theory of games
and then later how I believe
they can be applied as a public good.
So who plays video games?
This is probably the first,
you know, thing that we can get into here.
So first thing that might be surprising to you
is that based on recent studies that have taken surveys
of game players, we see that the average player
is actually 35 to 44 years old.
So the average player
is probably not that young person you're thinking about.
And the other thing that might be a bit surprising
is that it's about half male, half female.
So when we think about who's playing,
this is not just young guys playing.
The other thing that might surprise you
is that the most popular kinds of games right now
are actually casual games played on phones.
So it's probably a little more representative
of you know, game players
if we think about middle-aged women playing Candy Crush
than it is just 18-year-olds, you know, playing Call of Duty .
That said, there are some really shifting sands
around the kinds of people that play games
and the practices that surround that gameplay.
The biggest one to note is probably this idea
of online streaming.
So this is where game players watch other game players
play games, literally just observing their own play.
And this is a somewhat recent phenomenon,
and it's become very, very popular
with half of reporting game players
spending at least some time a week watching streamers.
Another kinda funny thing here is that
this is encroaching on time spent watching sports.
So the youngest of the kids surveyed really talked about how
they prefer or they're moving more and more
towards watching streamers
than watching traditional sports.
So in one regard, this is an image of,
you know, some of the kinds of kids
that would be playing games
and specifically the ones that are streaming
and getting into things like esports,
which is where game players are playing competitively.
Now the industry around gaming
is also something that we really need to talk about.
It's absolutely huge.
The gross revenues of the gaming industry
at this point, outpace putting Hollywood together
with North American sports.
So we're looking at about $180 billion a year industry
that exists in video games.
And you can compare that to about $100 billion
for Hollywood or $75 billion
for the North American sports industry.
If we compare this like title to title,
one of the largest games that's out
and was released here just in 2020, Call of Duty ,
this game has brought in
what's estimated to be about $30 billion,
just in the last few months.
And we compare that game
to the largest grossing Hollywood film made to date,
which is Avatar that has pulled in a total of about
$3 billion, you know, over quite a few years now.
So we're looking at an industry that is absolutely massive.
And actually, that is one of the reasons why
I'm at a big public university
and not in the commercial entertainment game space
is that like any other media,
games are suffering from the same kind of market pressures
that really do want to see, you know,
kids play longer and longer and, you know,
that's how they're gonna maximize on engagement
and that's how they're gonna maximize on profits.
So the gaming industry itself is a big force to deal with.
And I think that there needs to be some pressures here,
you know, to not only think about it as entertainment,
but some of the ways we do at a university.
So let's shift into kind of part two of this talk,
which is learning with games.
This is a field now, and actually,
we've got deep roots here in Wisconsin.
The Games, Learning, and Society community was founded here,
there was a long-standing conference,
some of the best scholarship came out of this university,
and Field Day really is an extension
and kinda built on a lot of that previous scholarship.
To enter into this,
I actually wanna start with a thought experiment,
which is from philosopher Frank Jackson
and came up with this as part of a book in 1982.
And the thought experiment is called Mary's Room.
So in Mary's Room, we have a fictitious character, Mary,
who lives in a black and white room
with no color anywhere around, there's no color art,
her clothing is black and white,
everything about her world is black and white.
And inside of this room, she has a computer.
And now, Mary is an expert in color.
She could tell you the wavelength
of every color that exists in the spectrum,
she understands the kind of psychometric affects
of color hitting, you know, the eyeball
and being translated into signals in the brain.
She understands the psychology of perceiving color.
Mary is the world expert on color,
even though she's never seen color.
She has access to all the books,
all the theories, all the physics.
So imagine now that this world expert on color
has a problem with her computer.
And this problem creates a large,
actually red apple sitting in the middle of the screen.
And in this moment, something changes about Mary,
Mary now has experienced color.
Now the thought experiment
really is trying to explore the idea
that there are different ways that we can know things
and really makes clear
this thing that hopefully is common sense,
which is that an experience of something like color
is very different than a description
about color or what we probably could just say
that everybody knows this phrase
that street smarts are different than book smarts.
So the learning theory has a very similar
kind of jumping off point to explain this difference
between book smarts and street smarts.
And that theory is called situated learning
or situated cognition.
This theory also came around
about the same time as Mary's Room with the article
by Brown, Collins, and Duguid written in 1989.
And it really makes this big claim
that knowledge is situated, knowledge is constructed
and sits in the middle of these three big ideas.
And that is the activity that the learner
is doing while learning,
the context in which they're doing that learning,
and the feedback systems that exist around them.
So through this theory of situated learning,
we can start to break down learning environments
to understand, you know,
how situated they might be or not be.
So let me turn your attention to this.
This is a top-of-the-line flight simulator.
This is been a mainstay of training pilots
for, you know, years and years now.
And if we take the lens of situated learning
to analyze this flight simulator
as a learning environment, I believe it's very fruitful.
So ask yourself,
what are the activities that the learner is doing
while they're in this simulator?
And to even go a little deeper, like think of the verbs
that you would use to describe
someone learning in this environment,
if you were looking over their shoulder.
There's really a whole hierarchy of things.
At the very lowest level,
they're pushing levers, they're pushing with their feet,
you know, the pedals,
they are looking at instruments and reading them,
they're picking up the radio and talking over it.
The verbs they're using or the actions they're using
are exactly the same actions that a pilot does while flying.
And that would be kind of the highest level of the hierarchy.
They're learning to do these physical actions,
those physical actions are translating into things like,
you know, landing or taking off
and all of those support the high-level thing of flying.
Now think about the context here.
Well, in a flight simulator,
we're training usually on a particular aircraft,
which means everything about that environment
has been physically designed to be an exact replica
of the exact model of aircraft that they're training on,
which means every knob is in the same place,
the stick is in exactly the same spot.
You know, everything about this thing,
as much as money can buy, has made it an identical context
to the context of flying the actual aircraft.
There's also even a social cultural context here,
because when you're in a simulator,
you're within the world of flying,
which means if you wanna,
you know, communicate with ground control,
you're using the same language, the same vocabulary,
the same protocols that a real pilot would.
You're not gonna, you know, pull up the radio
and, you know, talk, you know, as a lay person would.
You're gonna be learning how to use the same language
that we would use professionally.
And the last thing we'll mention is feedback.
Feedback also has kind of a hierarchy to it.
In a simulator, there's the really high-level feedback
you might notice right away, which is like crashing.
But if you go down a layer from that,
every movement that's done is given immediate feedback
through the changing of dials and the changing of the,
you know, simulated landscape outside.
And the feedback is happening,
you know, with these different scales of time.
So very small things,
like just a slight shift of the horizon,
you know, all the way up to,
you know, something a little bigger
like navigating larger pieces of geography.
So flight simulators would be considered
very situated learning environment.
Let's compare that here to this textbook,
which we've seen is a common textbook,
I've given talks like this before
and had pilots mention that they have used this text
as part of their training.
And we can apply the same kind of analysis to a text
and say, what are the activities?
What is the context?
And what is the feedback of learning in this way?
So if we think of the activities of a textbook,
the verbs are a little harder to come by.
I think really it'd be safe to say what reading,
highlighting, taking notes,
and anything beyond those kinds of verbs,
maybe turning pages,
you know, we're starting to get pretty abstract.
So really, those are the verbs, turning pages, reading.
Now, if we think of the context of the learning
that's happening with a text, it's pretty broad.
This could be in a classroom setting,
it could be on your couch at home,
it could be at a Starbucks.
But the context, maybe by design,
of a book is really wide open.
So we don't know much about it.
And then finally, the feedback that's given in a text,
if we analyze that, we would see that potentially,
you know, there's questions and answers
at the end of the book.
But outside of that, it's not, you know,
there's not a lot of assessment happening,
there's not a lot of feedback that happens with a text.
So this language of situated learning
allows us to start breaking apart
learning environments into these categories
and start to have a little more robust
of a vocabulary around the kind of learning that happens.
The last example I'll mention here is
paralleling this scene, which is from a ER Simulation Lab.
There's a $100,000 SimMan 3 who's laying on a table here
and undergoing some sort of crisis.
And this simulator, you can stick a needle into it,
you can measure its blood pressure,
you can, you know, draw blood.
This thing is designed to simulate
everything about a patient you could.
If you notice the context that they're in,
it's a complete simulation of a emergency room
with, you know, every piece of equipment at the same spot,
the clothing matches,
again, the social cultural context
of the way that you're talking
matches how you would in a real situation.
And then also the feedback,
whoever's running the simulation is behind the scene
and trying to mimic the exact kinds of things
that would happen to a patient
undergoing whatever they're training on here.
And we parallel that with a lecture
where again, the verbs are things more like
listening and talking and taking notes.
The context is that of being surrounded by students,
not practitioners, and the feedback within a lecture
potentially through, you know, like dialogue or discussion
would be about it.
So again, situated learning gives us a way
to really come to this big statement.
And it's the one that sets the stage
for why games for learning make a lot of sense.
And that is real learning, good learning
is really a matter of creating a designed experience
for a learner.
And video games are an optimal environment
for simulating experience.
So that's what we can use as our framework moving forward.
So I'm gonna take a couple minutes
to show examples now of the ways
that some very popular commercial video games
have achieved that.
And I'm gonna start with one of my favorite games
of the last, geez, decade,
and that's probably Kerbal Space Program.
So in Kerbal Space Program,
you are guiding a developing space program,
kind of like what the United States was going on
with the Gemini program.
And in this game, you're starting with the most simple,
simple things, basically an astronaut
that you can strap to the top of a small rocket
and you are designing the aerodynamics of that,
you're designing the actual construction of these ships,
you're also working
within the constraints of funding and research.
And over the period of this game,
what happens is you unlock more and more equipment
and more and more technologies and techniques that you know.
And eventually you're in orbit,
eventually you're docking with a, you know, space station
that you've built and exploring deep space.
And this would all come
under the kind of larger category
of good learning environment
with games that I would call a sandbox.
So sandboxes are really interesting
in that they give the player a space to play
and to try things out and to see what happens
while completely mediating the consequences.
We don't have to spend hundreds of thousands
or hundreds of millions of dollars.
We don't have to wait months and months
for things to be constructed, and we can fail all the time
and the consequences are low.
And this sandbox environment created by Kerbal,
I would suggest is a foundational, a good quality
of a well-designed learning game.
Now let's turn over to another game called Rock Band .
Rock band is a very popular game,
it's been re-released in a couple versions.
This is a scene from Rock Band 2 .
And Rock Band in this case, if you haven't played it,
it's a game in which you take on the identity
of a up-and-coming musician
and you play on a simulated drum set
or a simulated guitar
or a karaoke-like digital microphone
and you sing along with some of your favorite songs.
Now, the reason I bring this up is it highlights this notion
of a mediated identity.
And in this case, what happens
is the player is able to not have to just be themselves,
they don't have to just be a novice musician,
they don't have to just be a,
you know, middle-aged woman playing a game
in the living room with some friends.
But we take on the identity of someone who rocks.
And this scene here is one of,
you know, seeing probably my favorite screenshot
of a severe rocker.
Now, by doing that and by taking on that identity,
we get to play around with this thing
that some learning scientists call an epistemic frame.
And that means we get to take on the identity,
the discourses, the vocabulary,
the values of someone who participates in that domain,
in this case, a musician.
And that itself is an educational activity,
that is one that is under constant research
and very exciting.
Also on Rock Band , we'll look at the ways
that we can do feedback in the system.
And Rock Band is a really good example
of providing what I'm calling here
domain-specific feedback.
So when you're playing Rock Band ,
the primary way that the game is communicating to you
whether you're doing well or not is in terms of music itself.
If you're playing the drum line
and you're playing on the drum kit of this game
and you miss a note,
the drums drop out of the audio that you hear.
Or if you miss a note on the guitar,
you hear a squeak where there should be a chord.
And if you think about it, this is a really profound idea
that education or at some sort of learning environment
could communicate with you in the exact domain
of the thing being learned.
Let me contrast that for a minute
with the way that we commonly do things in school.
Now in school, we commonly will do an activity
like researching feminist theory around literature
and we write a report.
And the thing that we get back in feedback is,
well, often a number, 82, and it's the convention
of using numbers and grades to give feedback
for learning that have almost confused us.
And my soapbox moment here actually
comes to pulling out two pieces of vocabulary
that I think are useful going forward.
You will hear people talk about learning with games
or learning games, and then you'll also hear
another word called gamification.
I wanna separate those
while we're talking about Rock Band and feedback.
Gamification is a system that is applied
that uses game-like feedback,
usually points or stars or badges
and apply that to something of a totally different domain.
Everything from probably where it came from,
earning miles on a frequent flyer program with an airline,
all the way down to brushing your teeth
and gamifying that activity.
Most of what I'm talking about is not gamification,
it's something totally different.
If we would use that kind of vocabulary to describe,
you know, learning with games,
what I think we would see is that school,
most of formal school for decades now
has become fully gamified.
We give out grades and diplomas
in a feedback language that's completely different
than the language of the domains themselves,
history and math and you know, scientific inquiry.
And we've done that really out of convenience.
So I wanna make a big case, not for gamifying school,
but providing video games that teach,
which is a totally different thing.
And it's about designed experience.
Okay, off my soapbox.
So let's look at another game, the Civilization series.
In this game, you play the leader of a civilization,
you can pick people like Genghis Khan or George Washington
and you're really guiding a whole civilization
from, you know, its inception
all the way to its complex result.
One of the things that's very interesting about this game
and series of games in particular
and highlights a principle of good learning game design
is that in Civilization ,
the complexity of the simulation scaffolds.
And what this means is we don't get dropped directly
into, you know, running a large nation
with all of its politics, religion, agriculture,
you know, domestic and foreign relations.
And instead, this game has that big simulation
running behind the scenes.
But instead, we start as a simple settler.
And this one settler
only has two things available for them to do,
which is to keep on walking
or to settle and form the first town
or what will become the first town.
And in this way,
we're not kind of front-loading everything
that the learner might ever need to know.
But instead, what's happening
is we're always slowly increasing the complexity
of the simulation, right when the questions arise.
So we first get introduced to animal husbandry
right when we start thinking about farming in that way,
and we get interested in economics
right when certain problems arise within the community.
And by the end, it's kind of amazing
how many complex systems that the player ends up managing.
Now, I'll also turn over,
kind of following along the sandbox theory
and go a little bit more into the idea of failure.
Now, this game, which is called Plague Inc.
is particularly, potentially raw of a topic right now
in our era of COVID.
Plague Inc. , which came out
I would guess, about a decade ago now
is a game in which you really play the forces
behind genetic mutations of a virus.
And your job in Plague Inc. is a pretty dreary one;
you win by killing everyone on the planet.
So instead of teaching, in this case, about viruses
by having you try to block against a virus,
you take on the role of a killer virus
that's trying to wreak as much havoc as possible.
Now what's interesting about this is that,
again, failure and the horrible situation here
is one that lives within the simulation on the computer.
Failure isn't failure in the sense
that it can be in real life, where it can be devastating.
It can be horrible, and especially in the world
of high-stakes testing in schools,
this can be, you know,
a horrible thing that you never recover from.
Instead, failure is bounded within the simulation,
which you can just hit reset if you want.
And actually, better games over the last decade or so
have gotten even better at allowing failure to be fun,
failure not to be a setback, but a way of learning.
So this is a place that video games have a lot to teach us
about good learning is that they put failure
at the center of the learning process
and they make it quick, they make it fun,
and they make an instructional.
Now, another thing that we can put our focus on
with video games is the notion of a fish tank.
So a fish tank is, you know, a metaphor here
that describes the way that the big, complex ocean
can be kind of modeled
by taking just certain species out of it
and putting it inside of a tank.
To understand the way that,
you know, an aquatic habitat works,
you don't have to have every single part on display,
you don't have to jump straight
into the infinite complexity of the world.
But instead, you can create a model,
you can create a fish tank of the ocean,
learn quite a bit, now that you know what to focus on.
This little simulation game,
which is called We Become What We Behold ,
it was produced just a few years ago by Nicky Case.
And it is an excellent example of a fish tank,
as it relates to watching
a couple simple and separate processes
emerge into something much more complex.
And in this case, the game is modeling the idea
that people are attracted to interesting news
and the world of news is rewarded
for giving people something they're attracted to.
And I'll warn you, it turns out pretty bleak
in really only probably 5 to 10 minutes
where you see how the simple pursuit of interest
creates this very, very emergent and very catastrophic situation.
So in this way, video games allow us
to have these fish tanks
that allow us to look at the causes of very complex
and emergent complex phenomenon.
And lastly, the game I'll mention is Pok?mon Go .
And probably, unless you've been hiding under a rock
for the last few years, you've at least encountered
some people that are talking about Pok?mon Go
or have played it yourself.
In Pok?mon Go , the thing that I'll highlight
is that we've got a video game
that is starting to play around with its relationship
to real-world location.
I've got a colleague of mine at American University,
Ben Stokes, who recently finished some work
studying Niantic and the idea of these community days
that Pok?mon was promoting over the last few years.
And we're seeing that games like this
that are played in physical space,
are played out in the real world
can support all kinds of really interesting
location-based activity.
And I have to say that if,
you know, you've met any sort of outdoor educator,
they certainly have had a moment that they've said,
"Gosh, what is this power of a game like Pok?mon Go ?
And how could we harness it?"
Now, we'll talk more about that in a minute.
So educational, I'm sorry,
non-educational games really do even lean into
a whole set of learning theory
and way that we can understand how learning takes place.
And they act as a optimal environment for learning,
I'd suggest, in these categories of things like sandboxes
and of fish tanks and of mediating identity
and mediating failure.
And they all go back to this idea of street smarts
versus book smarts.
Games act as ways to simulate experiences
to provide learners with that sort of learning,
one that's different than you can get
from other forms of learning.
So let's turn our attention then in part three of this talk
over to Field Day
and what we've done and what we've built.
This is a bit of a tall order
when you think about providing an actual,
you know, failure-rich mediating identity environment
for learning that's rich and complex.
You know, this isn't an easy thing to design.
And I think we've made some progress.
So we're gonna take a look at some of those projects,
each with its own little humble goal
and also some of the research that's come out of it.
The first game I'll mention
is Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case .
Jo Wilder was a game that was produced
in collaboration with PBS Wisconsin
as well as the Wisconsin Historic Society.
And this is a game
that is all about a character named Jo Wilder,
a young woman who is working alongside of her grandpa
at the historic society
in order to do the kinds of things historians do.
She follows evidence, she interviews people,
she looks at artifacts, and she ends up arguing
for the correct interpretation of some evidence.
Now, Jo Wilder is a very interesting game,
because instead of teaching history,
which really what its learning goals are centered around
through, again, kind of talking about history,
in Jo Wilder , you take on the role
and even some of those epistemic frames I mentioned
of a historian, so you do the things historians do.
The verbs of the game,
you know, aren't reading and highlighting and memorizing,
but they're really tracing down leads
and corroborating evidence
and, you know, digging through documents
to try to understand the meaning of something.
We happen to need a context to do that.
So during the game, there's two major stories,
one of which is around
the women's suffrage movement in Wisconsin
and the latter one is the formation of Earth Day.
So certainly there are some historical names
and places and figures that are learned.
But the game allows us
to actually have kids inhabit the role of historian.
The game is wildly popular,
it's played approximately 100,000 times a year
at this point.
So it's a real success of a game
and it's targeting towards third through fifth graders.
I've got a little clip that I think will do a better job
explaining what Jo Wilder really looks like.
So I'll just let you take a look at this.
[feet pattering]
[groovy music]
Good, so hopefully some of the images
that you just saw of the Jo Wilder footage
do a better job explaining what that game really looks like
than just words.
Jo Wilder has also become a platform for research.
Now that this game is deployed
and it's being used by hundreds of thousands of kids,
we've been able to use it as a way to understand,
you know, a number of challenges in learning
and learning theory from the data that it gathers.
When kids are playing Jo Wilder ,
like the websites that you're on and things like that,
we can anonymously capture some of the data
of how they play that game
and what kinds of struggles they have with that game.
And this has led us
to a really interesting affordance of digital games,
which is that we can do rapid, data-driven design.
What this means is that we can roll a version
of Jo Wilder out on Monday,
watch, let's say 1,000 kids play it,
see that they're getting stuck at a certain spot,
make a change by the next Monday
and validate that that change helped kids learn
all in a period of days or weeks.
This is just wholly unique to digital games.
There's very, very few media
that have been used educationally
that can do anything like this.
Another round of research
that we've been doing with Jo Wilder
is really trying to understand
how teachers use this practices-based,
you know, become a historian
and think like a historian kind of activity
within a traditional classroom.
So we've been working with a whole cohort
of Wisconsin educators that are helping us explore that
and hopefully come up with model ways
for teachers to integrate practices-based games
like Jo Wilder , so that they don't stop again
just at book smarts, but really become a launchpad
into doing local history inquiry projects
or really taking on those epistomologies
and learning how to think about history in new ways
well, well, beyond the game.
But one of the places I'm probably most excited
about Jo Wilder right now
has to do with a partnership that we have with WEDA,
which is also at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
And they do evaluation work
related around English as a second language learners.
We're looking at Jo Wilder as a way
to start to unpack this very severe problem that we have
in the world of assessment in learning.
Anyone in assessment
will tell you that assessment is not perfect.
And assessment is hard to perform
because often the thing that you're measuring
is not the thing that you wanna measure.
And assessment also has some severe issues of bias.
Effectively and probably put the most curtly,
often it's the kids of the people writing the assessments
that do really well on them
and some of the other kids do not.
And there's all sorts of efforts
to try to fix this assessment problem.
But we're excited to have one line of our research
go at this through using games as forms of assessment,
instead of traditional paper-based assessments.
So our study right now that's ongoing
is trying to use gameplay data,
so how you navigate through Jo Wilder ,
as a assessment for how you are doing
as a English as a second language learner reader
in English.
And we're really excited to be conducting that research now,
and hopefully we'll be having publishable findings here
in just the next couple months.
The last thing that I'll mention around Jo Wilder
as a research platform also is really in that area
of kinda the differences between kids.
Now, we know that there's,
you know, the "good kid," the model student
who shows up to school every day with an apple in hand,
excited to learn history and learn history practices.
And that's great, good on them.
We also know that there's a whole bunch of kids
that probably could care less about learning history,
are certainly a little less interested
in a number of topics.
And they're a little more reluctant.
Jo Wilder , if you spend any time playing it,
it will become very clear that Jo herself is written
to be one of these reluctant characters.
She's not totally bought in to the idea of,
you know, history inquiry
being the coolest thing in the world.
Mostly, she's trying to protect her grandpa
and her pet badger, and she has to do history
in order to get to those goals.
And this is a place of contention,
often within educational environments,
because, you know, almost everybody
wants to have a kind of beautiful moment at the end
when Jo realizes, you know, with a, you know,
a golly gee moment that, you know,
"What I really wanna do is become a better historian."
Well, Jo doesn't ever have that experience.
So our art director, creative director,
when they were writing this,
decided that we wanted to use this version of Jo,
this one that was a little reluctant,
a little non-compliant.
And that was an instinct that we had.
And going back to the idea of data-driven design,
we're now running a study where we have a version of Jo
that both is the compliant character
as well as the original.
And we have a version of the script
that is kind of straight-laced
and another one that has tons of jokes and gags.
The one that we initially shipped.
And where this is interesting
is we can compare these four versions of the game live
using real data from real kids to see who does better.
And when we line that back up
with some survey questions that we ask the kids upfront,
what we're doing is starting to build
a much more nuanced way of understanding
what kinds of educational experiences benefit which kids.
And related, how can we design experiences
that really benefit the kids that often are left out?
And this is something that's really exciting
both from a theoretical
as well as an empirical kind of perspective.
So I'm gonna turn your attention to another game now,
this game is called Lakeland .
Lakeland was, it's a very Wisconsin game,
it was developed with Victor Zavala's
Scalable Systems Laboratory at the College of Engineering.
And Lakeland is exploring Zavala's research
into this complex set of relationships
between farming, the excess phosphorous that's produced,
the quality of lakes, the desires of people,
and the economies that govern a lot of this.
Now, Zavala's research, obviously,
is much more complicated
than something that we could get into this game,
which targets grades seven through nine.
But we were able to do a little bit
of the fish tank approach here
and kind of boil down this complex system
to just some of its basic, basic parts.
In Lakeland , we have these little AIs,
they're the little characters within the game
and they love "dem lakes,"
as it's said over and over in the game.
And they get really sad when their lakes,
you know, turn green and full of algae.
So in this game, the player is constructing this town
and they're trying to do so to satisfy all of the needs
of the characters, as well as keeping the economy humming,
which is required to literally keep food
on the plates of these folks.
The problem with the game
is that there's actually no way to win it.
You can go for longer than certain strategies,
but at the end of the day,
it highlights this big, complicated system
that just like real life, doesn't have an easy solution.
And hopefully, again, it acts as a launch pad
into some complex discussions that can happen around the game.
Lakeland is also a site for us to do research.
Again, it's also very popular, this game is used, again
by about 100,000 kids a year.
And one of the key lines of research that we're looking into
with Lakeland is taking a cue from Jo Wilder
and really trying to understand
how different kids learn differently.
So in Lakeland , again there's all sorts of strategies
that one can use.
And we're using a couple different methods,
you know, things like K-means clustering
or we're also looking at,
you know, sequential pattern mining
as ways to try to understand
what kinds of ways do kids play the game.
And what this is doing
is building a much more robust taxonomy of players
that right now we have at about seven,
there's about seven kinds of main players,
that is gonna give us ways to really lay the groundwork
for games that adapt to and respond to
individual play styles.
Now, mathematically, this is really,
you know interesting, because,
you know, someone who's a minority population,
let's say, 2% or 3% of the population that plays,
we have so much data that we can find them
and we can pull them out to see them as a unique group.
And even though it's a very small group,
a custom intervention could be provided to them
and then tested to see
if it actually was effective at the end.
So in this way, it's the high levels of playability,
you know, like the amount of people that are playing,
it's the scale.
And of course, just the fact
that we're at a public university
trying to serve a public equitably
that allows us to do
some really, really fine-grained interventions.
And we're just laying the foundation, the groundwork
for this kind of work.
I'll now mention a project
that's actually in VR on virtual reality.
And this was a project that we did
with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory,
which is one of the largest science projects
that exists in our country
and happens to be led right out of UW-Madison,
as well as the Wisconsin Institute
for Discovery Virtual Environments Lab.
This project took on a pretty challenging ambition,
which was to try to explain
some of these principles of astrophysics
that are being done by these very, very smart
foundational scientists down in the South Pole
and try to convey some of those insights
to, you know, the general public.
So this is pretty challenging,
'cause if you ever get the opportunity
to talk with an IceCube scientist,
you'll realize that when you're doing foundational science,
it's a little hard to talk about.
They studied these things called neutrinos,
they're very, very interesting particles,
and they've built this sensor array
that's kinda like a telescope
that can look in every direction at once
out at the universe.
It's pretty abstract stuff.
There was a moment,
kind of going back to the idea of a designed experience.
There was a moment when we were talking with the scientists
and trying to figure out what the game would be about
that something really interesting happened.
And it was the raw passion and excitement about the topic
that came through in the scientists
about the mysterious
and awesome universe that we're studying.
It's one thing to talk about math as a lay person
when you don't really understand math.
It's a different thing to describe something
like a supermassve black hole using math,
when math becomes the best language you have
to describe something that literally inspires awe.
And we weren't gonna be able to teach everybody the math,
not that I know the math, to have that awesome experience.
But VR ended up being an optimal environment
to create that same kind of designed experience
of the kind of awe and wonder these scientists work with.
So I'll play a little bit of footage here
of what the discover VR project looks like.
And you'll get an idea of like,
what this actually looks like in practice.
[electronic music]
- Silvia Bravo Gallart: So some of the topics we work with,
you know, astrophysics, are really kind of tough.
There are so many things you wanna explain.
We needed new tools, we needed new technology
and how we could do a better job
by using that and probably reaching out to audiences
that otherwise we're not reaching.
- We were specifically brought in to be thinking about
a touch table display and virtual reality.
We wanted to really impart that kind of emotional attachment
and emotional excitement
about these topics like black holes,
neutron stars, and neutrinos.
And we wanted to transfer that into the experience,
so that kids would feel the same kind of excitement
around science as the scientists.
So as soon as the user puts on the VR headset,
they're transported to Antarctica
and they see the ice cube detector,
they see the cold, snowy environment around them.
And then they become a space voyager.
They go past Pluto, they go to deep space,
and they go out to a black hole and collect their samples
before bringing them back to Earth.
- David: When a kid would take off the headset
and kind of like, look at you wide-eyed
and just say like, "That was the most awesome thing ever!"
- Silvia: So then we said,
"Okay, let's go and test it with physicists," right?
And it's so fun to see how people that know every detail
of what's gonna happen,
just being like little kids looking around,
like even they don't know what they're gonna encounter.
And then taking off those headsets
and be like, amazed.
- In addition to just being wowed
and experience these kind of fun environments,
what we've seen is that they're actually learning things,
that they're actually have takeaway messages
from these very, very short experiences
that we're providing to them.
- There's no way to do a project like this
without having this kind of collaboration.
- Because really what we have accomplished,
and there's no way we could have done that on our own.
- To team up this type of technology
with this type of research
and really use it to create a new way to engage the public,
I think is exciting.
[upbeat music]
- Great, so hopefully here, you were able to see,
you know, some of the visuals that a player sees.
But also, there's this moment where you see the kid
take off the VR headset and just look wide-eyed.
As you can imagine, the evaluations that this game
showed that it definitely was an awe-inspiring
and effective treatment.
Here, the last game that I'm gonna talk about,
really is a cluster of games and it's called The Yard Games .
The Yard Games were really an experiment into the idea
of let's just talk to a bunch of teachers that teach science
and find out where they struggle.
What are the little principles that come up
in their curriculum that are just hard to teach using words
and illustrations and, you know, chalkboard?
And by working with a cohort of teachers,
we were able to come up with
something like 15 different kind of key,
hard to teach moments in middle school science
that were at the top, top, top of the list.
We went through a process of prototyping
in just a few short months,
and luckily with the help and support
of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction,
we're able to create a number of prototypes now
that are being used en masse.
The first one I'll mention here
just as an illustration is the Wave Combinator .
In this mini-game, it's really just a short game,
you get to play with the construction of a wave
using, you know, kind of the common language
of frequency, amplitude, and offset
and then learn complex things like how waves constructively
and deconstructively interfere.
And really get kind of a hands-on approach
to ways of talking about the way waves work
in a problem-solving and kind of puzzle mechanic.
This is just called the Magnet Game .
And in the Magnet Game ,
we really just simulate magnetic fields
and then have a little game loop
where you're trying to predict where the buried magnet is
using things like iron filings and magnetic tape, compasses.
And again, it's a hands-on, experiential way of learning,
you know, this kind of foundational idea
of the way the fields around magnets work.
And then finally, the Crystal Cave is another example
of a short mini-game here that's designed to be taught
as part of a classroom experience
that was done in partnership
with the Material Science Research
and Engineering Center here at UW.
And this game teaches about crystals
and some of the kind of foundational ideas of crystals
as repeating patterns
and ones that have more or less stable structures to them.
Now, all of these, again,
have become this wonderful research platform.
We're doing things like predicting content knowledge
by the way that you play the game.
And we're also looking into things
like predicting things like quitting and frustration.
The last, last thing that I'll mention here
is in response to our earlier statement about Pok?mon Go .
And the question is,
what if we had a mobile location-based game
that got kids outside, but instead of chasing down
invisible things that don't exist,
what if they were actually allowing kids to see
kind of all of the amazing things
that do exist in the world,
but maybe were just outside of you
'cause you didn't know where to look?
Well, this is where the station comes in.
This is probably 10 years of research
that have culminated into this project
that we're doing in partnership
with the Maine Math and Science Alliance.
And the Station is really a platform
for developing location-based games.
And as you can see, this platform has you
as a character that is walking around
your actual streets or forests.
And we really are using the idea of citizen science
or even more specifically, field work as a key game activity.
So this whole gaming system
is really set up to teach you what you need to know,
so that you can make observations of the world
using kind of high-fidelity language.
We're teaching you to see the world
the way an expert sees the world.
And we're not even sure what topics this could apply to yet.
But where we're starting is with things like
looking and being able to trace invasive species
of bugs and plants or looking at the roles
that engineering professionals play
in the design of a city.
These are hyperlocal topics
that we're excited about building into these quests
that can be played using a mobile phone.
Okay, so we're finally to part four,
which is really the punchline of this talk.
And this is the idea that games
are and should be a public media.
So there's a reason,
you know, that I'm into this career
and invested so much of my life into this.
And it really does come back to the idea
that I'm one of these kids that grew up
watching Sesame Street ,
watching Mr. Wizard , you know, watching Nova
and all of the other shows
that really just acknowledge this idea
that there's something profound
about media and its role for an educated public.
And it's also the reason that I'm at a big university
and invested in the public in this way.
Now, let's get right to the center of this.
Why games?
Well, we've laid a theoretical argument out so far
from things like situated learning
as a learning theory, but just empirically,
games significantly enhanced learning
compared to a non-game condition.
And this is the finding of a meta study
that was done and repeated multiple times now
that look at all of the evaluative literature
around educational video games.
This is across topic, age group, form of play,
games empirically are shown to be
just a profound learning environment.
Now, what's shocking to me about this
is that in the medical profession,
when we know a treatment is good,
it becomes a moral imperative to use it and to scale it.
Unfortunately, we really haven't put that kind of investment
into making high-quality educational video games.
One of the big advantages of games as a media
is that they're digital.
And if you look at this map, this is just a sampling
of a couple months of our own analytic data.
You can see that we have, you know, massive distribution,
we're seeing greater than a million plays a year
across our games right now.
And that's amazing, that's fantastic.
But the part that's really, really interesting
is that we're able to distribute at that scale
off a little low-priced hosting solution that we've got
that costs us about $50 a month.
And if that number went up to 2 million a year,
it would cost us a few dollars more per month.
So the incremental cost of supporting a large,
you know, more and more scale,
you know, larger and larger audience is so small
that it's basically immeasurable.
This is really interesting.
This means that we can come up with a learning experience
that can scale out to the entire world
at a cost that's negligible, like it just doesn't matter.
Now that again, you have to combine
with one of these big, scary things,
which is this phrase called the digital divide.
So who would that benefit if it was available?
You know, if we invest more into public good
around video games, who would benefit?
Well, unfortunately, our COVID pandemic
has given us a little kick forward in the world.
It hasn't solved this problem of the digital divide,
but we've made a really large step forward.
A year ago, right when the pandemic hit,
this phrase became very important.
We noticed that there were about 16 million kids
that didn't have access to high-speed internet
at their home.
And if you live, you know, around here
in the, you know, Madison Metropolitan School District,
this number is high.
And all of these school districts got together
and came at this problem with fierce intensity.
And we've really made a change forward.
That number has been dropped,
estimated down to about 12 million kids
that still are lacking access at home.
But what we're seeing is that digital media
combined with Chromebooks,
which are these very, very cheap devices
that are rolling out at scale
and now increased broadband access
is creating an environment where never before
have we seen this amount of young people have access
to this high quality of education from their homes.
The digital divide is certainly a real thing.
And I'm not an expert in this.
But what I can say is that the solutions that we make
with educational games here at the university,
now have access to more kids
from more backgrounds and more places
than we've ever had access to ever.
And where this gets really interesting
is when we think about the number of kids
that will go to their schools
and never have a chance to slow down,
pour a bunch of iron filings out on the table
and play with magnets.
And for those kids, they're gonna have our magnet game
easily available on their Chromebook,
so they're gonna be able to have the next best thing
in experiential learning.
The thing that's particularly interesting in this,
you know, kind of thinking about who's playing these games
is that unlike a lot of curriculum
or other educational treatments, we also can measure it.
We can look at our analytics and find out who's playing
and combined with some of our other research,
who's playing and how,
and what methods are benefiting which kids.
And again, this opens up a profound,
profound opportunity for equity in high-quality learning.
I'm gonna come back around too,
to this idea of games as assessment.
And I would suggest this is another reason
why they need to be scaled widely
and publicly available.
Steinkuehler, around 2010 put a piece out,
really looking at the way that reading assessments
had a severe influence by this simple thing
that you probably already know, which is how interested a kid is
reading the material that they're being tested on.
Kids were found to perform seven to eight grades higher
when they were reading a piece of literature
that was interesting to them
than when they were reading something
that wasn't interesting to them.
There's this problem of learning being decontextualized
from an interesting activity and a paper test,
as well as interest.
When we think about something like Jo Wilder
being used as a learning assessment,
again, we're just at the beginning of this.
But I think there is gonna be a profound opportunity
for contributing to that field of assessment
that's trying to make more equitable assessment,
less biased assessment, and more accurate assessment.
And games are gonna have a place to play in that going forward.
And the work that we're doing right now
is really kind of,
again laying some of the groundwork for that.
Another big idea that we are wrestling with
for games as a public good
is that the public standards are shifting.
If you look at the way science
or history was conceived 15 years ago
versus now, you will see a major theme that is moving away
from kind of content knowledge, factual knowledge
and towards practices.
And this is fantastic.
The next generation science standards put,
you know, heavy weight
on being able to do the things scientists do
like create an experiment
or design a model or argue from evidence.
And this is putting teachers in a pretty rough spot,
because they're having to design
these practices-based curriculum,
but they're doing it using the existing tools
of the classroom, which,
you know, even if you just kind of squint
and look at a classroom,
you realize is really a lecture-based
kind of layout for a room.
Given, there's some chemistry labs mixed in there too.
But there's a lot of room to be moved forward
when it comes to practices in schools.
So as we move nationally
from standards that are set around content knowledge
and into practices,
I would suggest we need to move our content
or our curriculum, I'm sorry,
from, you know, content into practices as well.
I'm showing you a scene right now from Aqualab ,
a project currently in production
that was funded by the National Science Foundation
for us to do just that.
In this game, which again will be free
and publicly available,
we have a game that's all about becoming a scientist
and doing all sorts of practices of science,
like modeling and doing that in order
to interface with and save these different ecosystems.
So the final note here of games as a public good
is this notion of broader impacts.
Now we already have a framework in place
within our National Foundation System,
within NIH and NSF and the others
that puts a responsibility on researchers
to share their findings with the public,
that everything we do inside of our society,
every taxpayer dollar is going to something
that at the end of the day should benefit the public.
And there's quite a bit of money on the table here.
Just picking around the NSF website
and making a couple of calculations,
you know, we're easily talking about
hundreds of millions of dollars every year
that are already allocated to researchers
to communicate with the public.
Now, what I'm suggesting here is really straightforward,
is that we would use digital, freely available video games
as a way to use that broader impacts money
in order to reach a greater public integrator way
than a lot of the existing methods right now.
We have a desperate need in schools
for this high-quality learning material,
and now with Chromebooks and broadband
are really able to consume it digitally.
If we could just pair that
with the problem that researchers have,
which is with their communication,
we could create a curriculum that is publicly available
that would step up our entire quality
of the way that we're doing education nationally.
And that is where we enter
into really the big dream here, the big goal
and the thing that I'll probably spend the rest of my career
working on, which is imagine if we would slice off
even one content area, let's say middle school science.
And we committed to having one game,
one experience that would start every single week of school.
We could produce that collection of games
in just a few years
with somewhere in the avenue of $10 million.
This is a fraction, a fraction of the money
we already have allocated
to getting research to the public.
That public good could be scaled nationally,
could be used by every student,
certainly more students than use,
you know, most things, could act as an assessment,
and would be more equitable
than most solutions that we've come up with to date.
We could, overnight, transform the way
that science is taught in this country.
And I'm not saying that just for science.
Imagine doing the same thing with U.S. history,
imagine doing the same thing with literature.
The opportunity is really something.
It's really in someone like Fred Rogers
that I really just get excited,
for us to be able to look at the affordances of new media,
to be able to look at digital video games
the way Mr. Rogers was able to look at television
and just for a moment to dream how we could use it in ways
that would benefit the entire country,
every single kid,
and then actually put some plans in place to do that.
So that's the challenge I'll end this talk with
and the thing that me and my team will be working on,
really to support every single kid in this country
and hopefully have an entire generation that grow up
having fond memories of being supported
and kinda cared for by Field Day games.
So I'll leave you there.
Hopefully you found this talk kind of fun,
maybe a little inspiring.
And feel free to reach out
if you've got any questions about that, again,
you know, as a researcher at the Wisconsin Center
for Education Research,
we look forward to ways to connect
with all the great people of the state.
Thank you very much.