( applause ) >> Thanks for inviting me. It sounds like we're a little loud there.
Thanks to all of you for coming on this lovely Wednesday night. I'd like to start by, if I can, is it okay if I dim the lights
a little bit? So I'm going to see if I can get the lights to the right place here.
It makes the slides a little easier to see. And I'd like to start by telling you a story.
Our story begins tonight with this gentleman, who some of you may recognize as Fray Luis de León,
a Spanish academic from the 15th century, and it ends with this gentleman who is probably less familiar,
he is Will Wright, the developer of Sim City, one of the most famous video games of all time. Our story begins in Salamanca
in 1575. Actually it begins with a trip I took to Salamanca in 1995. And in the University of
Salamanca which as some of you probably know is one of the oldest universities in Europe, there's a classroom that's
perfectly preserved. The classroom is deep in the bowels of the university, and like all Medieval classrooms, at
the front is a giant lectern with a candelabra, lighting where the speaker stands as the professor held forth in class.
Around the edges of the classroom are a set of ornate benches where the faculty sat, as they came and listened to
lectures. And taking up the center of the room are a set of relatively crude benches and tables where
the students sat, taking notes, writing down everything that the professor said because of course in Salamanca in the 1500s there
were no textbooks. So students took notes, that was the only record that they had of what the professor had talked
about. The classroom is perfectly preserved the way it was in 1575 because this man taught
there, Fray Luis de León. He was a famous Spanish academic, a cleric. And he was famous for his book
"De Los Nombres De Christo," which was a book that looked at the various depictions of the life of Christ in the texts
in the bible, and also the texts written around the bible, works known as the Vulgate and the Septuagint.
Those of you who remember your Spanish history know that in the 1500s, to be writing about the life of Christ using texts
other than the Bible was a little bit dangerous. And sure enough, one day in the middle of Fray Luis' lecture,
the Inquisition came, hauled him out and threw him in the dungeon. Fray Luis was fortunate in that
he was arrested towards the end of the time of the Inquisition, and he spent something like four years in jail.
And at the end of the time of the Inquisition, he was released and he came back to his classroom.
And the story goes that on that day, everybody who could fit in this classroom was there. All of the professors of the
university were packed into the ornate benches around the edges of the classroom. All of the students who could
get in were crammed onto those benches in the middle, looking to see, what would Fray Louis say when he came out
of the dungeon? Would he rail against the Inquisition? Would he talk about the
importance of religious freedom? What would the great professor say as he came back into the classroom?
And the story goes that Fray Luis strode back into his class, opened up his notes, and said, "As I was saying
last time..." And went on with his lecture exactly where he had been before.
( laughter ) And my friends, if you're interested in getting a statue erected to yourself outside
a great university, I suggest that this is one way to do it. But being a professor myself, this story got me to thinking,
because of course it had been four years since Fray Luis had been giving that lecture. Almost no one who was in the
room when he walked in, had been in the room the last time. What he was doing was picking up where he left off, but the
people who were there had no record of where that was. This got me thinking, halfway across Europe, and
about a century earlier, to Mainz, in Germany in 1450, which was about the time the Johan Gutenberg
was inventing movable type. And he was inventing it, of course, because he wanted to be able to print Bibles.
Now we have to assume that Fray Luis knew about this invention because of course he got in trouble for printing
a book. So, let's conduct a little thought experiment. What would have happened if when
Fray Luis walked back into his classroom, instead of saying, "As I was saying last time..." and going on with his lecture
exactly where he had been before, he said "For homework, read Chapter 3." What would the illustrious
professors around the edge of that classroom have said? They might have said, "But students won't learn to memorize
if they read a textbook. They'll spend all their time mesmerized by books, lost in the print.
What will they do when they need to know something and they don't have a book?" And of course, these professors
to some extent, would have been right. Socrates argued over 2,000 years ago, "Those who read and write
will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful... They will receive a quantity of information without proper
instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant."
I can say as somebody who has learned to read and write, it is absolutely true that I have become more forgetful as
a result. But the critics also would have been wrong, because again, halfway across Europe,
this time in the same century, Vesalius and his followers de Graaf and Falloppio and Eustachio, after whom
the graafian vessels, fallopian tubes and Eustachian canals in our ears are named, were conducting
the first systematic dissections of the human body, and publishing their results in atlases, in books, which
traveled across Europe so that again, halfway across the continent and this time, a century later in England,
William Harvey could use these detailed anatomical drawings to produce his theory of circulation.
And beginning in the 1600s, we can chart the development of the science of modern medicine through the texts that were
produced: Treatise on the Heart, On Animal Motion, On Fevers, Morbid Anatomy,
and so forth. Beginning in 1700, the number of titles written about medical science becomes almost too
numerous to count, such that today there are-- Pub Med alone indexes 5,000 medical journals, and
some 400,000 articles each year written about medical science. My point of course in not about medicine per say, but that
the development of medicine and similarly much of science, engineering, democratic capitalism,
vernacular literature, and the rest of the culture, society, economy, and technology of the modern world depended
on the printing press. Or, to conclude our thought experiment, you'd hate to be the person who invested in
quill pens in the 16th century. Now it's easy for us to look back and chuckle at the things people didn't know 500 years
ago, but I submit that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Or perhaps I should say people
who live in silicon houses, because we face some of the same blindness today. As a quick example,
consider "Star Trek." The creators of "Star Trek" have imagined a world where we can travel faster than the speed of
light, where we can communicate across vast distances. Those of you who know "Star Trek" know
they have a holodeck. The holodeck creates a computer-generated simulation so real that if something
goes wrong with the safety mechanisms, which of course it being "Star Trek," something always does,
you could die. And in that amazing futuristic world, this is what the creators of "Star Trek" imagine education
will look like. >> All right, let's settle down. Let's settle down!
Right, let's get out our homework pads. This assignment was to write an essay defining the term ethics.
Let's start with Nog. >> I don't have my essay. >> Why not? >> My pad was stolen.
>> Any idea who stole it? >> It happened at Quarks. I put it on a table, and there was some Vulcans nearby.
>> Hold on, you're saying Vulcans stole your homework? >> Yes, sir. >> Yes, that's right,
300 years in the future, people are writing essays on their homework pads and claiming that Vulcans stole them.
In other words, in the world of "Star Trek," education, 300 years from now, looks very much like education today.
And the problem is that many of the technologies that the creators of "Star Trek" imagined are with us today.
Let me just give you one quick example. Many of you are probably familiar with this,
this is Google Earth. It's available for free. You can run it on any computer made in the last two years,
or so, powerful enough to run the simulator. It's a very high fidelity representation of the entire
planet earth, which takes satellite images and lets you zoom in on them. So last time I went traveling
to Washington for example, my daughter asked me, "Where are you staying dad?" I said, "Well I'm staying
right here." And she said, "Well are you going to go see anything interesting?"
And I said, "Well let's see what's around that I might see." Well, oh, it looks like the White House is nearby.
She said, "Are you going to go?" I said, "Well, it looks like it would be pretty easy." I could just go out of my hotel,
take a left turn, I would walk down 15th Ave. When I reached Pennsylvania, I take a right at
Lafayette Park, walk a block, and the White House would be right there. So, being a teacher, I thought
"Wow, this is amazing." Look at the geographic information, the sophisticated technology
that could be at kid's fingertips. What incredible things we must be doing in geography classes.
So I went online, and I looked up some geography activities. This is one that I took from a college course,
a community college course, from the syllabus. Here's a map of Ancient Mesopotamia.
And the assignment in this community college course is to fill out the map of Ancient Mesopotamia.
You're supposed to identify things like the Taurus Mountains, and Uruk, and Babylon, and Ur, and so forth.
You get one point for each of those. You get one point for titling your map "Ancient Mesopotamia"
and for having your name clearly displayed. You get one point for shading the water with an appropriate
color, which I assume is blue. And you get the most points of all, three points, if the map looks neatly done.
And the problem is, in the era of Google Earth, we have kids worrying about this map of Ancient Mesopotamia, when
the map they should be worrying about is this map. This is a map that shows the outsourcing partners
that one company uses in producing its products. We've all heard about how the world is becoming flat.
How we are entering an era of global competition, in popular press reports like Tom Friedman's book
and in more scientific studies, we see that "Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communications
and other advances," as one report puts it, "workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors
who live just a mouse click away... Without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations
of our competitiveness... the nations's children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did."
What is it that we need to do to compete in a world where things that can be done easily using basic facts and
basic skills can be done by somebody with a computer anywhere in the world? Young people today need to learn
to think about innovative and creative ways about complex technical problems. How good of a job is school
doing at giving them those skills? The answer is not very. Something like 50% of Hispanic
and African American students in the United States don't complete high school; 33% of students leave overall
before completing school; 50% of those who left said that they left because classes were boring and irrelevant
to their career goals. And 80% said more real world opportunities might have kept them in school.
If we look at international comparisons, we lag behind the relevant competitors internationally, in terms
of producing young people with science and engineering degrees and other technical skills. In the most recent
Intel Corporations International Science Fair, a high school science fair for kids, 60,000 students in
the United States participated. But before you think that number is impressive, in China the number was six million.
And so we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we need to do in order to prepare our young people for this...
and not this, or this, or this? And my answer is that in order
to answer that question, we have to look back. We have to look way back and understand something about
the history of thinking itself. Because the technologies of the digital revolution are profoundly changing what it
means to think, and thus what it means to learn. I'm drawing on some work in a wonderful book that I highly
recommend by Merlin Donald, called the "Origins of the Modern Mind." Merlin Donald asks essentially
the question, what makes this fellow different from this fellow? And his answer is this:
gestures. The fact that we can communicate with each other using our bodies.
Gestures let us transfer information to one another about how we feel, about what we think.
They let us practice and rehearse skills to build tools, and to pass that knowledge on, to create what Merlin Donald
calls a mimetic culture. The most early hominid culture of communication by gestures, by signaling to one another
that lets me communicate to you what I understand, and you understand something about what I intend.
The problem with gestures though is that they're a little hard to interpret. What is this woman trying
to communicate? Is it love? Is it hope? Is it happiness?
Words are symbols, and what symbols let us do is communicate more efficiently than gestures alone.
Oops, sorry I didn't mean to jump to that! But once we have words, we're not only able to communicate
about isolated ideas, it's possible to string those words together into sentences and ultimately to make stories.
So, for example, last year after we had gone ice skating for the first time on a cold day on Madison's lakes, when we came
home, my daughter said this. >> I raced you! Come on up here! You couldn't catch me!
I was too fast. Hey, let's get some more hot chocolate. I haven't had
some hot chocolate in years. Ooh, yummy! Good, good, good. >> So here she is
telling a story. It helps her make sense of her world. And our ability to tell stories
leads to what Merlin Donald calls a mythic culture, the stories of the great myths that help us understand
who we are and what our place is in the world. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, this mythic information,
this understanding of who we are and how the world works began to be recorded, first in cave paintings in Moscow
and other place across Europe. Later this idea of recording information gets picked up in the Middle East in Babylon,
Ancient Mesopotamia-- Used principally to record financial information, who owes what to whom and how much.
Progressively over time, these early symbols become more and more abstract, like this symbol for barley, until eventually
we get our modern ideographic and pictographic scripts. The point about writing is that what it lets us do
is store words, store symbolic information. That means we can communicate over time and over space
with one another. Words make it possible to organize much more complex activities.
But even more than that, it makes it possible to record information, to step back and to look for patterns,
to understand the way things are related to one another, to create scientific theories, so it's no accident that
the scientific revolution begins in part when Tycho Brahe spends a lifetime carefully observing and recording
the positions of the bodies in the heavens. This body of work recorded in an atlas gets passed on to
his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who uses this lifetime's work of careful observation and recording of planetary
information, to produce his laws of planetary motion, which gets picked up 100 years later, and again halfway across the
continent, by Sir Isaac Newton, who combines Kepler's laws with Galileo's work to produce his theory of gravity,
which of course gets published in a book. In other words, writing makes it possible
to create a literate culture. It makes possible civilization. And it makes possible science. But it does so for a price,
and the price is the long cognitive apprenticeship that young people have to face in order to master the tools
of symbolic thinking that make it possible to participate in a literate culture. So it should come as no surprise
to us that formal education was essentially invented by the literate Greeks. They had the Quaderivium:
arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy; and the Trivium: rhetoric, grammar, and logic.
And if today, we organized these disciplines of human understanding differently, for example we put geometry with
logic rather than with music, these are the basis of our modern academic disciplines. The situation remained
relatively unchanged for the Middle Ages where writing was preserved and reading was preserved
principally so that scholars and monks could read and write the Bible. What changed all this was
the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the early 1800s the United States and other countries going through
industrialization saw a massive growth in the size of industrial cities and workers came in to work in factories.
And with the growth of cities came all the problems 150 years ago that we associate with over crowded cities today.
And then, as today, we saw the people turn for a solution to these problems to education. And so you get educators like
John Philbrick in the 1800s, arguing that the future of our cities will be largely what education makes it.
Or William Harris, who was the superintendent of schools in Massachusetts, later for the Federal Government, argued that
the industrial community cannot exist without free popular education carried out in a system of schools ascending
from primary grade to the university. The purpose of these schools was to train young people for
life in an industrial society. He said, "Each pupil must be taught first and foremost to conform his behavior to a
general standard... to the time of the train, to the starting of work in the manufactory..."
And William Harris and his colleagues Horace Mann and Samuel Howe, and the other school reformers of the 1800s
literally set out to build what they called the "One best system." It was a system that was
designed to train people to do this by having them do this. It's from this period in time
that most of what we think of as modern schooling, most of the features of modern schooling, come.
The egg crate school with individual classrooms and individual desks all in a uniform building,
the age-graded classroom, the nine month school year, the five day school week, the fifty minute period,
the Carnegie unit. All of these were developed in 1800s to produce a system for training young people
for life in industrial America. And they did it by training people to work with symbols. But here is the problem.
If writing stores symbols, what computers do is manipulate symbols. Or to put it another way
in the language of business if you prefer, if writing outsources memory, computation outsources thinking itself.
Let me give you a quick example of what I mean by that. So when I made this slide, it didn't look like this.
On my computer, the slide looked like this. Those of you who have used Microsoft products,
Microsoft Word or Microsoft Power Point, know that when you type in a word like "outsources,"
there is a little squiggly line that appears under it. And the squiggly line is telling you that the word is misspelled
because ironically, Microsoft doesn't recognize "outsources" as a proper English word. ( laughter )
Now, here is how it does that. It's no great trick. It has a list of proper English words.
It searches through that list to see if it can find "outsources." If it can find it,
the word is spelled correctly. If it can't, then the word isn't, and it marks it for me. Now, you could ask, is this
an important part of thinking. Is it really a big deal that the computer can check my spelling? Well, for me it is, because
I'm a terrible speller, and I always have been. And I make my living with words. I write words down
and send them to people. I put words up on a screen in front of people. And I promise you, every single
time I've ever had a typo in my Power Point presentation, and I sometimes put them in just to test this,
somebody comes up after the presentation and reminds me that I have a typo in my Power Point.
Now of course, they're just being helpful. But the point is that people notice these things.
And so for me, the fact that the computer does this means I don't have to check every word in my Power Point against
a dictionary, or I don't have to pay somebody else to do it for me. In other words, what computers
do is outsource simple thinking so that we can do more complex thinking. Let me give you an example
of what the educational consequences of that might look like. So this is the algorithm
for extracting a square root. My guess is looking around that almost no one in this room learned the algorithm for
extracting a square root by hand when they were in math class in school. I actually first saw it when
I was teaching school in Nepal where they still do learn this algorithm. I won't take you through it.
It's a little bit like doing long division, only harder. There's a reason that we don't teach this in schools in
the United States, and haven't for the past 75 or 80 years. Actually, it's probably more like 90, now.
That's because for almost a century, we've had slide rules available. And slide rules are
much more efficient at extracting square roots, and doing lots of other things than the algorithm
doing it by hand is. But in order to use a slide rule, you have to know something about logarithms,
which is why, looking around, I'm guessing about half or 3/4 of the people in this room, including me, learned at some
point in school to read a log table, and you learned a very particular skill. In fact, you learned how
to interpolate, which is how to figure out the correct value to use on the table was when the exact value you wanted
didn't appear, but it was between two other values. This is a skill that was taught principally
in trigonometry classes. The reason is that you use the same skill of interpolation to read a table of sines
and cosines, so it was sort of a good time to teach this little piece of information. Kids spend almost no time
on this skill today. And in fact, the kids in the audience probably, either won't see this at all,
or see it very briefly when they are in high school. And the reason is this. You can go into any drugstore
anywhere in the country, and for 99 cents, you can buy a calculator that does all of that for you.
And in fact, it does almost everything else that kids learn in the first five years of their mathematical education, too.
And so this raises the question, what is it that's worth learning in a virtual culture. Because computers can do
parts of thinking for us, we have to think about what it means to be educated, to be virtually literate
in a new way. There are certain things that we've taken for granted, that we don't teach anymore.
But if that's the case, what do kids need in order to be able to succeed in a global economy?
How should we prepare them for that life? Now my answer, as you can probably tell
from the title of the talk, is they need to play games. And when you say kids need to play games to learn, that's
not necessarily controversial. We have an idea that there are games that kids can play that are good for them.
But when you say kids should play computer games, many people I think, imagine this. This is a screen shot from
one of the most popular computer games of all time. Well, I don't mean that. I mean a different kind of game.
One of my daughter's favorites games is "zoo." They love to play zoo. They love to make a little zoo
and pretend that they are giving out tickets, and so forth. So it's not surprising that
one of my daughter's favorite computer games is this: "Zoo Tycoon." In Zoo Tycoon, you build
and run a zoo. You get to decide things like where to put the fences and how to shape the different cages
that the animals are in. You decide what to feed the animals, and where to put the food and water.
Because if you put the food and water far away from where the people are, then they don't see the animals
while they're eating. You get to decide what kind of animals you want to have in the zoo, how many
and where to put them. You get to decide things like what the paths should look like, where to put trash cans.
Because, of course, if you don't put enough trash cans, your zoo gets dirty and people don't like it.
You can put donation boxes and concessions stands. You decide what to sell at the concessions stands,
and how much to charge for them. Once you have built your zoo, you can actually go into your zoo and see what it looks like
to walk around as a patron. You can see the other patrons, and find out something about what they think.
This little girl is apparently learning something about elephants right at this point. You can also find out
a whole bunch of information about how your zoo is doing. You can get a graph of the monthly attendance
of your zoo over time. You can get a profit and loss statement of your zoo, showing the different expenses
and the different sources of revenue and how your balance sheet looks. You can see here that in March,
my daughter's zoo was losing money, but that's actually okay, because the reason she was losing money is that she had
a large animal acquisition that month. She bought some elephants. And then the next month, because
of the increased attendance, the revenue has gone back up and her zoo is back in the black,
or in the green, in this case. And there's nothing particularly unique about the game in this respect.
There's Railroad Tycoon, and Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Sim City, and a whole host of other games
the similarly present kids with a very rich virtual world that they can solve real problems in.
One of the things I'd like to emphasize here, is that this is not the game that my daughter is playing
when she plays Zoo Tycoon. This is. >> Put an ice cream stand there.
>> I will. >> Really, sometimes I do. Then you have to clean up garbage.
I don't like doing that. >> Oh yeah, then we won't do it. >> No, but it's okay.
I can clean up garbage. >> Then they'll get more money. >> One of the great developmental psychologists
of the last century, Lead Bvegotsky argued that "Pleasure cannot be regarded as the defining characteristic
of play." Rather, what happens when kids are playing, is that in play a child creates
an imaginary situation. And all play is the realization, in play form, of tendencies that cannot
be immediately gratified. That's why, of course, when my daughter plays zoo, there is always a concession stand
that she builds where you can buy gifts and trinkets. Bvegotsky's point is that games create worlds.
But again to reiterate, this is not the world of the game. This is. Just as this is not the world
of the game. This is. Or to put it another way, a game is always a culture.
As anyone who, for example, has been to a Gambler's Anonymous meeting knows. But what does it mean to say
that something is a culture? It means that in order to be a part of the culture, you have to know certain things.
There is just knowledge that you have to have in order to be a participant in this particular way of being
in the world. You have to have certain skills. There are just certain things you have to know how to do
in order to participate in a culture. You have to have certain values. You have to care about the same
kinds of things that other people in the culture care about. And you have to have
a certain identity. You have to see yourself a member of this culture. In addition to knowledge, and
skills and values and identity, you have to have something else. You have to have a particular of epistemology.
You have to have a way of making decisions and justifying your actions, of knowing what it is
you should do and why. And these things, knowledge, skills, values, identity, and epistemology come together
in what I've called in my work an "Epistemic Frame." You can think of an epistemic frame like a pair of glasses
that somebody puts on when they become a member of a community. When they start thinking like a particular type of person.
That's a nice metaphor, because what is suggests is that part of what an epistemic frame does, is it
colors how you see the world. It makes certain things seem important and other things seems less important.
It brings certain things into focus and hides other things. But at the same time, it marks you as the kind of person
who sees the world in that way. Other people see you wearing that set of glasses, and they think that you
are a particular kind of person. Now it turns out that this idea of epistemic frames is not just a property of games like this.
It is also a property of cultures where people do innovative and creative work of the kind that matters in the
world, because as it turns out, we know a lot about innovation and creativity. And we know a lot about
how people think about problems that don't have standardized answers, that aren't just solved with basic facts
and basic skills of the kind that we see in school. And one of the things that's true about innovative
and creative thinking, and the people who practice it, is that innovative and creative thinkers, professionals
in the broad sense of the term, practice a certain kind of thinking that Don Sherm has characterized
as "Reflection-in-action." The idea of Reflection-in-action is that it's thinking
that reshapes what we are doing while we are doing it. To put it another way, innovative and creative thinkers
link ways of knowing with ways of doing. This linkage between thinking about something and
being able to work on a problem simultaneously, takes place in a professional practicum. You can think of an architecture
studio for architects and graphic designers, internships and residency for doctors,
moot court for lawyers, capstone courses in engineering or journalism. The idea of a practicum is that
you have the opportunity to take action, to work solving problems. But then to systematically
step back from what you're doing and reflect on that action. To think about what worked and what didn't, and why,
with your peers and mentors. This combination of action and reflection-on-action, these cycles that get closer
and closer together until eventually it forms the mature reflection-in-action of a trained professional.
What this means is that the practicum creates this epistemic frame. It creates this way of thinking,
and therefore, we can simulate that. We can look at a practicum and we can build
a computer simulation of it that lets players have a chance to do the same thing and learn to think
in the same way. Let me give you a quick example. Here's a game we've developed, "Urban Science."
In the game Urban Science, players become urban planners. Urban planning is a great example of the kind of
innovative and creative thinking that young people need to master in order to succeed in a complex world.
If you look at the Association of Planning Web site, they say planners need to develop plans
for how land is used, work with the public, analyze problems, visualize futures,
compare alternatives, describe implications, and be technically competent and creative.
In the game, players become part of Urban Design Associates, a planning firm, redesigning their city.
So when we play it here in Madison, the kids, middle school kids mostly, redesign State Street.
They redesign the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood. They redesign a neighborhood on the North side of Madison.
They have a desktop where they get emails from the people in their firm. They communicate back and forth
about the things that they should do, the problems that they're facing, what it is that they need to do
to solve those problems. As part of the game, they go on a virtual site visit on Google Earth
where they can talk with different stake holders in the city, and find out the things they care about
in their neighborhoods, and whether they're interested in traffic, crime, housing, or waste or pollution, or the other
issues that face the city. They can take that information back, that is what people care about in their neighborhoods,
and they use a geographic information systems model, the same tools that planners really use to look at
how different land use choices, different zoning changes the things that people care about,
things like parking or culture. In this case, you'll see a player is taking the Civic Center and
turning it into a parking lot to see what would happen. Not surprisingly, the amount of parking goes up,
and the cultural index for the street goes down. They are able to take all this information and produce
what planners call a preference survey. A preference survey is actually a series of different possible
planning alternatives, different possible futures for the city, that they give to the stakeholders,
and then they get feedback. What parts of the plans do you like? What parts of the plans
don't you like? And they are able to take all of this feedback and use it to produce
a comprehensive plan for the redevelopment of Madison, which they're then able to build out in a three-dimensional
model, showing people who move through the model of their proposed redesign, why they've made particular
planning decisions, and what the features and advantages and disadvantages of their particular plan might be.
Now of course, we're not just interested in whether kids learn to play this game well, although that's
a nice thing too, but we want to see whether this has any impact on the way they think about
problems in the real world. So one of the things we do is we test them before and after they play the game.
And we give them problems that don't come up in the game but are of the kind that you might face
and might use urban planning as a way to think about. So for example in one problem, we asked them about
a fictitious town in Wisconsin that has too much trash. They don't have enough space for the trash they produce,
what should they do? So before playing the game, one player says, "I mean, they could look for a new landfill,
like a new place to build a landfill." After playing the game, the same player says about
the same problem, "They should not have closed down the recycling plant. They could have cut other
stuff, or they could've raised taxes to increase revenue... They should keep a recycling plant because they should be
helping to reduce the amount of waste which is... their goal... They could export the trash...
but then that would cost a lot more money... and they're making budget cuts..." This is actually just a small
excerpt from the player's answer after playing the game. In other words, after playing Urban Science, the players
of this game are thinking about the same kinds of problems and issues that my daughter was thinking about
in Zoo Tycoon. >> Yeah, I can clean up garbage. >> Then they'll get more money.
>> But now, the players in Urban Science are starting to think about them the way an Urban Planner does.
In other words, Urban Science is a game to be sure, but it's a very particular kind of game.
It's an epistemic game. In general, an epistemic game is a game that re-creates the epistemic frame
of some valued social practice. I'm going to give you one more quick example, and then I'll make
a few closing remarks. And hopefully, we'll have some time for questions. So here's another game
we've created, another epistemic game, "Digital Zoo." In the game Digital Zoo, players
become bio-mechanical engineers. They design virtual creatures, creatures of the kind that you might see
in say a Pixar movie. The tool that they use to do that is called a SodaConstructor, which is
available free online if you look up SodaConstructor. SodaConstructor, when you open it up, you see
a little creature called the "Dainty Walker," which walks around. And this is a simulation of
a spring mass modeling system. You can go into the construct mode, and you can add parts to this little creature.
You can add little masses and little springs that connect them. In this case, we'll add a mass
on top of the Dainty Walker. And what we'll see is when we run the simulation, the Dainty Walker
becomes less dainty. You can also change some of the parameters in the simulation. In this case,
we can increase gravity. What we find is if we increase gravity enough, the Dainty Walker
doesn't even walk anymore. As players are doing this construction, they're working as engineers do.
That is, they're going through iterations of what is called the Design, Build and Test cycle,
explicitly coming up with ideas, building them, and then testing out the results of their design,
and improving their design through this process of continual iteration. What they are trying
to construct are creatures that have some kind of emotional content. That they are characters
that might appear in a movie. So for example here's one player's creation. They are supposed to be
a voiceover with this that goes something like, "I'm sad. Why me?" Interestingly, I was looking
over the shoulder of one of my students while they were showing me this. And another graduate student
came by and said, "Oh, it's a graduate student working on their dissertation." ( laughter )
So clearly, it's fairly communicative. While they're taking this action, they are also
reflecting on that action in the same way that real engineers do in their capstone course.
In fact, we studied a capstone course in bio-mechanical engineering. And what we found
is that there are three ways in which engineers learn to step back from the action that they are taking and
think about what they are doing. One of them is in their design notebook. Players keep design notebooks
as part of the game. They also have team meeting with their design advisors, who are more experienced engineers,
who help them think through the design process. And of course they meet with clients who tell them
what's working about their designs, and what still needs improvement. In the end, they produce
a prototype and proposal for characters in the movie, in this case, "Lindsay the Happy Butterfly."
Again, we're not just interested in whether or not kids can learn to play this game. We want to know whether
they learn something about engineering design. So again, we test them before and after.
And one of the tests that we give them is we ask them how they would solve an engineering problem.
In this case, it's making a structure out of toothpicks and marshmallows that would hold up a book.
We don't actually have them solve the problem. We have them draw a flow chart of how they would solve it.
This is a pretty typical flow chart before players play the game. And you'll notice
it's pretty linear. I would do this. I would do this. I would do this.
This is the same player's flow chart after playing the game. As you can see, it's more like
the iterative cycles of a good engineering design. And in fact, we conduct a controlled study
where we look at players playing Digital Zoo, that's the engineering game, and players who play
another epistemic game, the same length of time, same kind of players, but they're not doing
any engineering in the game. What we find, not surprisingly is that the control group, their engineering designs
don't get any more complicated, because they haven't been learning to think that way. Whereas in the Digital Zoo
group, even though they start out with less sophisticated designs than the control group,
they improve substantially from playing the game. Now some of you may be thinking "Wow, that seems like
an awful lot of work." Is this really fun? Well, it turns out, yeah. Because part of being a
professional is taking pleasure in what you do. Professionals enjoy the kinds of challenges
that problems present when they're not problems with the same answers every time.
Part of developing the epistemic frame of a professional, of learning to think the way a professional does
in a practicum is learning to care about the things that professionals care about. So what happens is that
through the process of playing this game, players are changed into the kind of people who care about these kinds of problems.
More than that though, young people in adolescence, and even before, are tremendously interested
in power. They're interested in their own sense of efficacy, in how the world works
and what place they're going to have in it. What these games do, is they can peel back the curtains
and show them the way that the world works, or at least some part of it works. The point isn't necessarily
to create them all as engineers, or architects, or doctors or lawyers, but to give them opportunity to see what it would
be like to be somebody who makes the decisions that make the world run. Now, part of the reason
for doing this, obviously, is economic. But part of the reason is also that games like this,
like Digital Zoo, and Urban Science, and Science.net about journalism,
and a host of other games is that they allow us to imagine a world where everybody who went into a doctor's office
understood something about how a doctor thinks about problems, about the questions they ask, about the kinds of evidence
they look for, about how they make decisions. What would our medical system look like, a medical system that
takes something like a sixth of our Gross Domestic Product every year. If everybody who went
into the doctor's office had the way of thinking. What would our body politic look like?
How would decisions get made in the public sphere if everybody who picked up the newspaper or
turned on the radio or watched the television understood something about how a journalist thinks,
about why some stories get reported and others don't, about why coverage looks one way and not another.
What I'd like to do is to contrast this way of thinking about what games can do with most of the games
that probably many of you have seen targeted for educational purposes. Here is one of the best known
educational games of all time, "Math Blaster." In Math Blaster, you fly around the universe
taking on obstacles and overcoming challenges like finding the sum of 30 and 10.
There is a host of games like this. This is "Zombie Division," where you move through a dungeon
killing zombies by finding their proper factors. There are games about learning spelling, games about
learning Bible verses, although those aren't used in public school for the most part. There are even games
about learning typing. What all these games have in common in this. They're all about
mastering the basics. They're about learning basic facts and basic skills of the kind that you need
to pass standardized tests. In other words, these are all the modern day versions of this. There is a reason that when
we think of uses for technology, we tend to think about doing more of the same, rather than doing something different.
And it's because if this is an epistemic game, so is this. It's in fact a very effective
epistemic game. It's just that it's a game about a way of thinking that isn't particularly useful
anymore. Now of course, the point of all this isn't that every kid should spend all their time
playing with computers, and not doing all the other things that we know are valuable for kids.
Of course, it's important that kids should be outside, that they should be walking in nature,
they should be playing football, and stickball, and baseball. Shows where I grow up that I say stickball, right?
They should be spending time hanging out with their friends talking about nothing. They should be spending time
reading good books. They should be spending time watching movies, and watching television,
and learning how to do that responsibly, and do it well. They should be doing arts and crafts projects.
And they should be spending some time using the technologies that shape the world around them.
Growing up is all about finding a balance. And our job as parents and as educators is to help kids
find that balance. Because ultimately, if we live in a world that looks less and less like this,
and more and more like this, we have a choice to make. We can use the technologies that are creating a world
of global competition, complex innovative thinking and problem solving to prepare kids
for a life in that world. Or, we can essentially say to kids that what we've been doing for the last 150 years
is just fine, and we don't need to change it. So, I'll stop there. For those of you who are
interested in learning more about this, I have a book that came out recently, "How Computer Games
Help Children Learn," that gives these examples and many others, and gives some more background
on these ideas. For those of you who can't wait to find the book in the bookstore,
there is also a Web site, epistemicgames.org that not only has more information, but has a blog
where you can join in the conversation and share your ideas, and share some more of our ideas,
and the research group about games and how they might change the way we think about education.
So, I'll stop. Tom, I trust you'll tell me when we're out of time for questions. But in the meantime,
if you folks have any, I'd be happy to talk. Thanks very much. ( inaudible )
This book is geared to parents and teachers, although I do know of some children who've read and enjoyed it, too.
Yes? ( inaudible ) Sure, I'm just going to repeat questions, because they're
taping this. The question was, how about games for conflict resolution, bullying and other problems like
that. We haven't developed a game for bullying, although there is a commercial game that is about
the issues of bullying. As you might imagine, the questions about whether bullying are good or bad are a little
more complex in the commercial game. It's not designed specifically to be educational.
There is a game that I talk about in "How Computer Games Help Children" called the Pandora Project, which is about
learning to think like a mediator, somebody who does mediation and conflict resolution.
It turns out that there's actually been a lot of work in the last 20 years on how people learn to exercise that skill.
And we've taken that and turned it into a game, which we've tested with some very good results.
One of the things that you hope comes out of learning to think like a mediator is recognizing that problems don't necessarily
have right and wrong answers. There are people who have legitimate differences. The job of a mediator is to help
them work through those differences. That's the kind of result that we see coming out of kids
playing the game. ( inaudible ) Yes, the Pandora Project is described in the book.
The game on bullying, which I think is called "Bully," is not described in the book. Yes?
( inaudible ) That's an excellent question. The question is what about games for children with disabilities,
which is an excellent question. None of the games that we've developed have been designed specifically for children with
disabilities. But interestingly, I was speaking at the National Center for Technology Innovations
conference a year ago, which is a government funded organization that looks at adpative technology and technologies for
kids with special needs. And one of the things that people there were very interested in, and actually have
published a paper about is the fact that one of the problems that all kids face is, what happens when I'm done with this
thing that I've been doing for much of my life, which is school, and I suddenly have to move on and do something that
has a very different set of rules and expectations. That problem is even harder, in many cases, for young people
with special needs, because schools are, at least these days, make adaptations in ways that the workplace doesn't
necessarily. And one of the things that games like these provide kids an opportunity to do was to try out
what it would be like to a professional, what it would be like to do work in the real world, to understand what you
might be interested in, to understand what some of the things that are hard and easy about it are.
So, although we haven't tested these with kids with learning differences or other special needs, it's certainly possible
to imagine that in the same way that these games can help kids who don't have issues with school, and with learning as
it's currently done, that they would have an opportunity to actually get something more out of it.
Other questions? ( inaudible ) So the question is, how does this fit into a no child left
behind world. And in one of the arguments that I make in the book is that it's not entirely clear that in a no
child left behind world that schools are moving in the right direction. In fact, they seem to be moving
in exactly the wrong direction. So my hope right now is that what we can do is develop these games and play them in settings
that don't look like traditional schools. We test these in summer programs and after school clubs.
We've worked in community centers. And the idea is to show what's possible.
If we take technology and use them to teach the kinds of things that we know kids need to learn, rather than trying to
help kids do better on standardized tests, one of the things we find, of course, is that kids who have an experience
like this over the summer often go back and do better in school, because they have a sense of themselves as being somebody
who's capable and competent, because they get specific academic skills like writing or math or science, because they
learned to talk to adults in a way that makes them more comfortable in school. So, there are positive effects
in schools. But I think the bigger thing is to be able to show what's possible if we use technologies
to their fullest. And to build up the political bill that it would take to change a system like no child
left behind, that ultimately what we need to do is build an example of what would be better than what we're doing right now,
so that parents, and teachers, and school board members, and other people who care about kids' education can say, "Hey,
what about that over there? What they're doing over there is really cool. Why can't we do that over here
in school?" Because in order to make schools do these kinds of things, schools have to change in
fundamental ways. What it is that we're looking for kids to get out of school has to change.
There's nothing wrong with accountability. There's nothing wrong with testing what kids get from their
learning environment. But if you test the wrong thing, if you test basic facts and basic skills in a world in where
what you have is basic facts and basic skills, you don't become redundant in the workforce, you start out redundant in the
workforce. Then there's no way to use technologies to get kids what they really need, because the
school's asking you to do something totally different. So in a sense, these games are about changing no child left
behind. They're not about adapting to the conditions of no child left behind.
Yeah? ( inaudible ) Sure, and let me just try and summarize that.
If I haven't summarized it well, you can tell me. The question is along the lines of what role is the technology
really playing in this. You could learn many of these things without these technologies.
And in the future, we'll learn them with a different technology anyway, so what's important about the technology here.
And a way to think about that is I have a colleague here at the university who I was talking with about these ideas and these
games. I was telling him about a game, the Political Machine. So the Political Machine
is a commercial game that's available today. It's along the lines of some of the games that I was talking
about. You run a political campaign. You're the campaign manager. You decide what the candidate's
position on the issues should be. You decide where to set up campaign headquarters, where to
give speeches, what the content of the speeches should be, where to raise money, where to have ad buys and in what medium, what
should the ad be, should they be positive or negative, who's going to be your running mate. You have a budget, obviously,
that you're keeping track of. The game is based on continually updated real world data about the voting patterns of people in
the various states. The game's called the Political Machine, by the way. I said, so here's this
opportunity to run a presidential campaign, and he said well, why wouldn't you just run a campaign for student body
president in your school. That's a real campaign about real issues. It's not a virtual campaign.
It's not a campaign on a computer game. I said, well that's true, but only one or two people get to
run the campaign in a campaign for student body election. Somebody has to just be the voters.
If you play the Political Machine, everybody can run the campaign. Not only that, if you have a
campaign in school, you wind up talking about issues about, you know, who should have access to the water fountains and when.
If you play the Political Machine, you actually are looking at the issues facing the body politic of the day.
So the point isn't that we're able to do things that we were never able to do before. But we can do them on a scale
that we weren't able to do before. And we can make them accessible to kids in ways that they
weren't accessible before. So of course, ultimately the technology will change even more, and we'll be able to do
even more things. But the point is in some sense, these are old ideas. John Dewey was talking about
learning by doing things that matter in the world 150 years ago. But now we have technologies
that make it possible to do that in a way that was much more difficult in the past. So the point isn't that these
are things that we couldn't ever imagine before, although some of them are pretty cool, actually, if you look at some of the
games. But what they do is make it easier to take the good ideas and to do them in ways we
weren't able to do easily before. Did I get your question right? Tom, one more question, or were
you asking a question? ( inaudible ) Great. ( inaudible )
That's an excellent question. I'll just repeat it quickly. Tom's question is, there's some really important differences
between the apprenticeship kind of learning that these games are about, that learning to do things in a real world,
vocational education, other things, are about, and learning in a class of 20 kids. And one of the differences is
that you have more adults, more experts, more mentors per kid than you do in a typical classroom.
There are a few answers to that. The first and most important is technology is not going to help us get good education on the
cheap. We need to pay for things that matter. We need to be investing in
schools. And it doesn't just mean buying them computers and buying them Internet connections, although
that does. Adults matter. And if we want kids to learn well, we have to have--
We have to be willing to pay for adults who are thoughtful and well-trained to be interacting with them.
So nothing that I say after this should be taken to believe that what we're going to be able to do is drastically cut our school
budgets because we could replace teachers with computers. The second thing is, if you look at professional training, almost
always, professional training doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in connection with people in the community who are
really doing work. So architects come back and they serve as critics in the design studio.
In medicine, their training takes place in the hospital. In engineering, people who are practicing engineers come back
and participate, and so on. So part of what we need to do is change our idea that school and education is something that
takes place in a little isolated bubble with no connection with the outside world. And the fact that we can make
education be about learning important ways of thinking by working on real problems, makes it much easier to bridge that
gap. You're not asking engineers to come and teach high school physics.
You're asking them to actually interact with kids around engineering, just as an example. The third thing is that part of
what these games are about is this relationship between action and reflection on action. Right now, games are very good
at letting kids take action. Reflection, having an opportunity to talk about what you've done and think through it
with people who know more than you do, is a little bit harder. It's not impossible, but it's harder.
And one of the things that we're working on, and ultimately we hope is going to be possible, is not to just let kids have
that action be something that the computer supports, but to actually have the players interacting with non-player
characters, with characters from the computer that help them think through some of the same kind of issues.
So in the same way that the computer helps with spell checking now, our hope is that one of the things that we can do
is have the computer help with other parts of mentoring and feedback that kids need in order to play these games.
We have, in the game Urban Science, where they communicate over email. They're communicating with
non-player characters sometimes. These are non-player characters who are not very smart. They're just literally going
through a script. But one of the things that's interesting is, the kids start to relate to those characters as
if they're real people. So one of the characters is Kurt, the head of Urban Design Associates, the person who says,
"Okay, here's what we're working on next." He's the boss. And when players were sick or
late with an assignment, they would send an email to Kurt, apologizing for being late, and telling him when it was that
they would have the next thing in. Of course, they knew that Kurt wasn't real.
There was no pretense that Kurt was a real person behind a curtain somewhere. But when you interact with
somebody who gives you the right kind of feedback in the context of a game, you're willing to play along.
So we think that it's going to be possible not only to let one real person play many different characters in the
game, which obviously makes it much more efficient in terms of the number of people that are there, but also to start to use
our understanding of those interactions to let the computer simulate some of them. So part of my answer is that
over time, it will get more and more efficient to be able to play these games. Other questions?
Yeah? ( inaudible ) Yeah, excellent. ( inaudible )
Sure, an excellent question. Let's just start by acknowledging there are a lot of bad--
Oh, I'm sorry, my bad. The question was, what about violent games. What about games that are bad
games. These games are good. They're designed to try and get people to think in good ways.
What about games that are things that are not valued social practices, that are in fact shunned social practices.
Everybody's favorite example is Grand Theft Auto, but there are lots of them. If these games are teaching kids
good things, aren't bad games teaching kids bad things? Is that a fair summary? Yeah?
Okay. So let's just start by acknowledging there are a lot of bad games out there.
There are a lot of games that are really good games that are really bad for kids, just as there are a lot of bad books out
there. And there are a lot of bad movies out there. And there are a lot of great
books that I wouldn't read to my five-year-old. I love "To Kill A Mockingbird." It's one of the best ever
written, but I wouldn't read it to my eight-year-old right now because I don't think she's ready for it.
So there's no question that part of our job as adults is to make decisions for kids about what they read, and what they watch,
and what games they play. I wouldn't let my kid go into a book store and just choose any book to read, or into a video
store and just choose any video. I wouldn't let them go into a game store and just choose any game.
So part of what we have to do is be selective. I don't think anybody's denying that if games have good effects,
it's possible for them to have bad effects. What's important, I think, is recognizing that we have to help
young people learn to choose good games, help them choose good games, and play them well. And part of what that means is
playing them reflectively, having a chance to step back from what they're doing and do just what you were saying about
the bad games, as well, which is to think about what they're doing, what worked and what didn't work, and why.
And how computer games is help children learn, the single biggest recommendation I can make is play games, if you're a
parent or a teacher, play games with your kids. For one thing, you'll find out a lot about what they know
and don't know. For another thing, you'll probably learn a lot about games and how they work.
You'll certainly have an opportunity to talk to them about something that they care about.
That's always good for relating to kids. But even more than that, you'll learn something about how these
games work. You'll learn something about how to help them choose good games. And you have an opportunity to
engage them, to talk with them about what it is they're doing and what the lessons that they're learning are.
So absolutely. Anything that can be done well can also be done badly. Games are no exception.
But what that means, is it's even more important to understand something about how games work, and what can make
games good, so that we can focus on how to build good games and use them well. And obviously, how to steer kids
away from games that are going to be bad. ( inaudible ) Oh, the amount of screen time.
Yes. The question was, what about the amount of screen time, does that change, would you recommend that
kids spend more time if they're playing good games rather than if they're not playing good games.
Screen time is actually an interesting notion. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example,
recommends that kids under two have no screen time at all, which is interesting to me because it suggests that movies,
and television, and games, are all the same because they have a screen. And that that's the property
that's most important. I don't think that's actually the property that's most important.
I think there are reasons for limiting the amount of time that kids spend doing any one activity.
I would be just as worried about a kid who spent all their time reading books and never got outside and played sports, as I
would about a kid who spends all their time playing sports and never picked up a book, as I would about a kid who likes
sports and books so much that they never learn to use a computer. So the question is about
balance. It certainly, obviously, I'm like any parent or educator, I'm happier if kids are spending
time reading good books, rather than just reading trashy novels, or if they're playing good games rather than playing bad games.
But I also recognize that it's important that not everything a kid does has to be fundamentally educational.
It's important to spend time just doing something because it's fun, as long as it's not, you know, damaging in some way.
So again, the watch word is balance. It's fine to play some games that we otherwise wouldn't say,
"Wow, you're learning a socially valued way of thinking." If that's the only kind of game you ever played, that's probably
not such a good thing. So it's really less a matter of if you're playing the right games when you could spend more
or less time, as thinking overall about what's the balance of experiences that any young person is having.
Yeah? ( inaudible ) Well, there are certainly countries that are focusing much
more than we are on using technologies and even using games, either in their culture at large, so games play a much
larger role in Japanese and Korean culture, for example. Or there are countries that are investing much more in thinking
about how these technologies could change their schools. Britain, for example, does probably a better job than we do
in investing in technology and thinking about games in schools. Singapore. I'll just give a quick example.
In Madison, we have a $10 million structural school deficit in our school district every year.
Singapore, which is three or four times larger than Madison, is investing about that much money, $10 million, in each of
seven schools, which are going to be model schools of the future, over the next ten years. So there certainly are places
that are taking this more seriously than we are today. Interestingly, many people here in the United States have looked
to overseas competitors that have lots of high-stakes tests, that do lots of drill on basic facts and basic skills, and
we've tried to move our school system in that direction. At the very same time, many of those same school systems,
Singapore being a great example, are actually looking to the United States to try to make their curriculum less about
basic facts and basic skills, because what they're finding is they have kids with lots of technical skills, but they can't
think in creative ways. So nobody is doing this perfectly. But on the other hand, if you
look at the directions that people are moving, you could hardly be moving in a worse direction, in terms of where
we're putting the focus of our schools. ( inaudible ) The question is competitiveness
and has research shown that it's important for kids to be competitive with one another while they're playing, or just
competitive with themselves, trying to do better. We actually haven't looked at that directly, except in the
case of the conflict resolution game, which is an interesting one because when you're a mediator, you're working for
your side. When you're playing a game where other people are representing the other side, so it's
intensely competitive in some sense. And yet, one of the things that we find is that many of the same
things that are true about cooperative learning and working together in a group operate in the same way, even though
people are in competition with one another. For the most part, though, in a professional setting, if you're
in competition, you're in competition with some other group, or some other firm. I mean, there are cases,
obviously, where you're trying to get advancement over the people in your own firm. But these games tend to mostly
focus on cooperation and working together to solve problems rather than trying to compete to out do another group.
So the short answer is we don't have a lot of data specifically on whether or not it's better to have kids be competitive or not
in the context of these games. Anything else? Well, thank you. ( applause )