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Games-based learning: the door to equity through agency

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Did you know that in Aotearoa only 4% of digital technology employees are Māori? and 27% are female? (New Zealand Digital Skills Forum, 2021) Perhaps you could have guessed that. We know digital content affects almost every aspect of 21st century life. Our future digital creators need to reflect our varied cultures and world views. Games-based learning might help bridge the gap.

As you reflect, while reading this blog post, see if the penny drops and you can uncover the hidden kīwaha.

Engaging ākonga

CORE facilitator, Viv Hall, has many stories of deep engagement in learning when facilitating students creating and developing their own digital games. Games-based learning allowed the students to engage in new ways.

She recalls a group of girls coming up to her after a session and saying, “Miss, Miss, guess what we’ve discovered? Girl power. We can all do it, we can all code.” (CORE Education, 2020b)

She talks of a year 6 student who had struggled to engage with learning at school. “He stayed there coding and watching the videos and working away for an hour. He was in front of his computer, he was engaged, and he was creating … He displayed amazing resilience. It was magic totally!” (CORE Education, 2020a)

Games-based learning can lead to high engagement and could increase the diversity of those involved in digital technology.

Game creation

As educators, we may have heard of or studied the zone of proximal development, the theory that scaffolding and working alongside more capable peers can strengthen the learning experience for ākonga. How does this change when ākonga are the designers and creators of games? Games can be transformative. Participants can create and play characters they are not in the physical world, and that reflect their cultures.

Marlborough secondary school kaiako, Duncan, took part in CORE’s games-based learning online programme. “It has changed my practice and others because we have used elements of games-based learning and have incorporated these into some of our new junior courses. For example in Ancients Alive, a year 9 and 10 social studies course, the students use the creativity element to help build a structure in Minecraft that reflects a cultural narrative.”

CORE’s unique games-based online programme design includes many games-based learning practices that help participants’ reflect on their own behaviour to gamification. Duncan says, “Reflecting on the elements, competition drove me and the side quests as someone who far prefers a narrative as opposed to problem solve and badges.”

Games-based learning practice programme with choose your path options. Characters used with permission from Gamefroot.
Games-based learning practice programme with choose your path options. Characters used with permission from Gamefroot.

Gamification elements

A feature of games-based learning is the many elements that make it accessible and engaging for different students. It can provide plenty of agency. Games-based learning can allow for students to be successful as themselves as they take up different roles in game creation.

Te Mako Orzecki noted in a recent CORE blog post on engaging Māori students in design thinking, the “notable rise in Māori role models in tech and innovation industries”. With role models to follow, and the variety of elements available through games-based learning, it can allow a variety of ākonga to engage with their learning in different ways. For the ākonga who like to push the boundaries, they can find extra information or add in hidden side quests or touches of detail. Gamification gives the agency and space for them to be creative. Another example was a student with autism spectrum disorder in a class working on game development. They made a brilliant tester of a game because of their skills in looking for perfection.

Gamification elements used with permission of Andrezej Marczewksi, Gamified UK.
Gamification elements used with permission of Andrezej Marczewksi, Gamified UK.

Games-based learning in the classroom

Viv Hall worked with students in game creation within a schools’ local curriculum. She says part of their mahi was to retell some of the stories they’d learned about the local iwi. “We had the mahi they had already done, that was place-based learning and they had their context and that was the knowledge of what happened and tying it back to a modern day application which was something they were used to which was gaming.” (CORE Education, 2020c)

University of Auckland used games-based learning techniques to help engagement at tertiary level. During online learning, the principles of game design in design programme lessons proved to be engaging and motivating for their students. Attendance at the online classes had a 90% attendance, which previously face-to-face lectures never achieved. “We’re using the mechanics and principles of successful game design, to teach and motivate students,” former head of their Design Studies programme Associate Professor Deb Polson said. Deb is now Professor and Associate Deane at RMIT University, Australia. The lecturers also noticed that as students started to engage with this approach it fostered creativity and the social side of online learning – strong friendships started to form.

Games-based learning has exciting possibilities and can make for more equitable outcomes, particularly if everyone – students and teachers – collaboratively learn a game platform together.

 

Did you find the hidden kīwaha? How did knowing something was hidden, this element of gamification, affect your engagement with reading this blogpost?

References

CORE Education. (2020a). Engagement with Gamefroot by students who often struggle with other mahi. Games-based learning | CORE Education [Podcast]. Retrieved 16 May 2021, from https://core-ed.org/research-and-innovation/podcasts/game-based-learning-channel/showPodcast/153

CORE Education. (2020b). How to embrace your coding fear with Gamefroot. Game-based learning | CORE Education [Podcast]. Retrieved 16 May 2021, from https://core-ed.org/research-and-innovation/podcasts/game-based-learning-channel/showPodcast/152

CORE Education. (2020c). Place-based learning with Gamefroot. Games-based learning | CORE Education [Podcast]. Retrieved 16 May 2021, from https://core-ed.org/research-and-innovation/podcasts/game-based-learning-channel/showPodcast/149

New Zealand Digital Skills Forum. (2021). Digital Skills For Our Digital Future [PDF]. New Zealand Digital Skills Forum. Retrieved 16 May 2021, from https://nztech.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/01/Digital-Skills-Aotearoa-Report-2021_online.pdf

Orzecki, T. (2021). Innovation is in our DNA: engaging Māori students in design thinking [Blog]. Retrieved 17 May 2021, from http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2021/03/innovation-is-in-our-dna-engaging-maori-students-in-design-thinking.html

University of Auckland. (2020). How the principles of gaming are being used in the remote Design Programme classroom – The University of Auckland. Auckland.ac.nz. Retrieved 17 May 2021, from https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2020/04/21/how-gaming-is-being-used-in-the-design-programme-classroom.html

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Finding your voice in a digital world

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Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

2020 threw us all a curveball. It was the year of baking banana bread, viral TikTok trends, and online learning. Forget Year of the Rat, 2020 was the year of the Zoom chat. Education, along with the rest of the world, was virtually redefining itself. When I looked ahead to the uLearn20 conference, my first as a presenter, I was both invigorated and daunted by it being online.

While Covid-19 has been the source of some of our problems, more so it has amplified those we have already been facing as a community. It was an amplifier of digital inequity issues, forcing us to reassess our measures of academic achievement. It amplified our pedagogy, forcing educators to adapt our practice to suit a digital format. It has shown us that we need to rethink not only what but how we teach. But has technology been a hindrance or an enabler? Well it kind of depends on who you talk to.

Zoom

Zoom is a tricky beast. Have you ever caught yourself zoning off in your staff Zoom meeting? You are busy reading emails in another tab, or scrolling through your phone trying, all the while, to look like you are listening. I will admit, I am guilty of this. It is an all too real experience. The way we use and view technology as a means for teaching and learning, often depends heavily on the approach we take within the kanohi-ki-te-kanohi (face-to-face) environment of the classroom. I have listened to teachers complain about students sitting with screens off as they talk for 20 minutes into the abyss. I cannot help but question if this is not merely an extension of their kanohi-ki-te-kanohi classroom practices.

The problem with online learning spaces is that they are authoritative. They are focused on teacher-centred knowledge telling, evaluation, and the presentation of unquestioned findings (Juuti et al., 2019). Here is the rub – neither in-class nor digital teaching should be, or has to be authoritative. Digital learning offers us the opportunity to change the script, rethinking learners’, and educators’, roles, personalising learning, and to approach knowledge in ways that promote equity, diversity, and inclusivity (Bolstad et al., 2012).

During the first lockdown, my extended family met regularly on Zoom and we found exciting new ways to pass the time. We would share a novel we were reading, write collaborative quizzes where each family would contribute a round, and we even made a game out of guessing people’s favourite songs. Whilst these experiences were fun, engaging and worked to not only maintain my connection with family, but to strengthen it, at the same time, it got me thinking – what was it about these conversations that made them so enjoyable?

The answer: Talanoa.

Talanoa

The word ‘talanoa’ is a term meaning to talk or speak. In my research, I’ve drawn on the work of Togi Lemanu and other Pacific academics who developed the Talanoa model. (Manuatu, Vaioleti, Mahina, Seve-Williams) (Lemanu, 2014). I have seen how effective Talanoa conversations can be in helping educators better understand the interests and passions of their students.

In my research, I aimed to use four attributes that make the ‘talanoa’ meaningful and rich: Ofa, Malie, Mafana, Faka’apa’apa (ibid). I was interested in how these attributes apply to the way we do digital teaching and learning. And, I wondered whether our most enjoyable and productive digital spaces were inadvertently echoing the principles of Talanoa? Below, I explain how these were applied in my research.

Ofa/Love

When we talanoa, we begin with questions about who we are and where we come from. By providing an opportunity for all involved to feel known and to have their gafa, or genealogy acknowledged, the barriers to building relationships are removed. In my classroom Talanoa, I have observed that this process takes time. I have learnt that you must allow space for these stories to be told.

During the first lockdown, I asked all my classes to engage in a Zoom ‘Show and Tell’, where students could bring their taonga and were given time to share part of who they are. Students in my classes immediately opened up during this time and were far quicker to ask questions about the learning after this experience. They were given a chance to speak and a chance to be heard. The opportunity to speak and share, not only strengthened our whanaungatanga within the class, but also allowed students to apply learning to their personal context.

Malie/Humour

My students are funny. Transcribing our talanoa throughout this research project was a pleasure. Our conversations were punctuated with laughter, the humour allowing us to be real and authentic, as we felt comfortable making jokes. In digital spaces, I’ve seen people use humour to liven up meetings, with challenges, funky backgrounds, and silly digs at one another in the chat. I always come away feeling more engaged after I’ve had a good laugh.

Mafana/Warmth

Both Ofa and Malie help build Mafana in our conversations. Talanoa needs to be warm and unthreatening to the parties involved. Lemanu makes the salient observation that “at times, teachers just want to get to the point and then move on.” This was my experience in both digital and kanohi-ki-te-kanohi class talanoa. Active listening, taking the time to build rapport, and developing a connection is something that did not come naturally. I’m often quick to try to get to the point but I’ve learnt that talanoa is as much about journeying through conversation together as it is the destination.

Faka’apa’apa/Respect

Respect is overarching in talanoa conversations. Mutual respect involves actively listening and allowing students to make authentic contributions. It is about the purpose. We need to give students a platform; recognising that everyone has a voice and a contribution to make. I keep seeing this phrase at the start of webinars and teachers’ classrooms: “Mute your mic please”. It makes me question how often education spaces are instruction heavy and dominated by a single voice. Instead of asking students to mute their microphones, we should be providing opportunities for rich ‘unmuted’ learning conversations to take space.
When reflecting on the first digital hui for our eFellows, I shared that the moments I found most valuable were those where I was able to bounce ideas off other people. Where I was heard, where I was able to joke, where I didn’t feel afraid to share my potentially half-baked ideas.

Conclusion

What became clear is what works for teachers, works for students. We are a reflection of one another and so are our best learning experiences. What if we took all our boring Zoom chats, instructional meetings and webinars and compared them to both our live and digital classrooms. Would we see much difference?

I wonder what the education sphere might look like if we embodied Talanoa in everything we do? In our teaching, meetings, and professional development. Technology will always be an amplifier but what if we changed the practice it was amplifying?
The irony of this is that a blog post can often feel like a one-sided conversation. You’ve heard my thoughts; I’d love to hear yours and in doing so, maybe we can start a conversation.

Find out more about the Dr Vince Ham eFellowship and read Kit’s research report

Further readings

References

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning & teaching. Ministry of Education.
Juuti, K., Loukomies, A., & Lavonen, J. (2019). Interest in Dialogic and Non-Dialogic Teacher Talk Situations in Middle School Science Classroom. International Journal Of Science And Mathematics Education, 18(8), 1531-1546. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-019-10031-2
Lemanu, T. (2014). Creating the ‘talanoa’ conversation is all it takes… [Blog]. Retrieved 20 April 2021, from http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2014/12/creating-the-talanoa-conversation-is-all-it-takes.html.
Vaioleti, T. (2016). Talanoa Research Methodology: A Developing Position on Pacific Research. Waikato Journal Of Education, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v12i1.296

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Learning through play and assessment

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“We need a teacher who is sometimes the director, sometimes the set designer, curtain and backdrop, and sometimes the prompter. A teacher who is both sweet and stern, who is the electrician, who dispenses the points, and who is even the audience – the audience who watches, sometimes claps, sometimes remains silent, full of motion, who sometimes judges with scepticism, and at other times applauds with enthusiasm.”

Loris Malaguzzi, cited in Rinaldi, 2006, p.89

How can we use Malaguzzi‘s quote to understand the learning in a play-based environment where assessment is an essential and natural way of the process of teaching and learning? This was my focus as a Dr Vince Ham eFellow in 2020.

In a play-based learning environment, the teacher has many roles and responsibilities, including that of one who interferes/interacts with children’s play to support learning. This can often direct (and misdirect) children’s play towards specific goals or intentions. However by performing what Malaguzzi mentions in his quote we can see that in order to scaffold children’s learning through play, the teacher draws on a set of skills. These include:

  • Developing a sense (and habit) of listening and observing closely to the processes of children’s play and inquiry.
  • Reflecting, revisiting and investigating children’s actions, conversations, interactions, urges so as to be able to assess knowledge, sustain interest, and plan future actions.
  • Planning meaningful and playful provocations or adding to the existing environment in order to enrich exploration and learning, enabling children to test out their developing theories as related to their play and inquiry.
  • Finding ways to stay close to the children’s ideas, resisting the adult agenda.
  • Teaching skills as and when required at meaningful stages in the project.
  • Researching, participating, and offering information as a means of aiding and scaffolding discovery and exploration.
  • Documenting the process of projects of play and inquiry, revising with children, looking forward to more information and details so the children can build on new knowledge and experiences.
  • Engaging in dialogue with students; scaffolding their meaning of play and inquiry.

Assessment and play

Each of the bullet points above are not just the skills needed to facilitate play, they are also the skills needed to assess play. Just like play is hard to define, so too is assessment, especially with very young children. In my classroom for 5 and 6 year olds, I use play as the medium for learning and teaching. However, the notion of play doesn’t always sit well with the implications of the word “assessment” in school settings.

As teachers place themselves as observers, they notice the engagement, interests, knowledge, learning, children’s urges, skills. Teachers are able to adjust to a situation where children explore and learn, so being able to make appropriate choices on how to act next. After some consideration I realised that assessment is basically a cycle and the diagram below represents the process of assessment in a learning through play environment where teachers observe (1) and analyse the children’s play/experiences they gather information/data (e.g. children’s interests, urges, physical, emotional and behavioural, developmental stages, etc.) that will help the teacher to know each child and prepare future strategies for teaching. To have a good understanding of each child’s interest and learning stages, it is important to keep track (2) of their interests, learning, needs, etc. This information will give the teacher the necessary data to apply assessments (3) accordingly, responding (4) appropriately to each need and stages. This cycle suggests a constant and continuous opportunity to assess as children play. It shows the support necessary to the system of learning and teaching in the play-based learning environment.

Diagram by Patty Barbosa
Diagram by Patty Barbosa

So are play and assessment happily married?

Play and assessment can indeed work together happily in a creative and informed relationship that is responsive to the children’s interests and needs. We want to support play-based, dynamic environments which are safe and challenging for learners and teachers (Kangas, 2010), creating brave and meaningful learning.

To illustrate how to marry assessment and play, I reflected on one example of a group of children exploring the arts learning area of the curriculum. Alex (name changed), a five year old boy, created an army of knights by making some puppets. He engaged in many different imaginative experiences with his army by role playing with the puppets. Through his enthusiasm and constant creation of new stories with his puppets, he gathered a new army of friends who joined him through this journey.

puppets-sml

This journey lasted one term (sadly interrupted by the Covid-19 lockdown). During this time Alex and his friends discovered new ways to communicate their ideas, to write texts and record dialogue. They came to understand that there are different purposes for texts as they collaborated to write a play. During their writing sessions, they worked on understanding some basic grammatical rules like punctuation and text structures, which are examples of academic learning.

Alex and friends had many opportunities to work on the five key competencies from the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2006):

  • Thinking
  • Relating to others
  • Using language, symbols, and texts
  • Managing self
  • Participating and contributing

Alex and his army of friends were engaged in deep learning as they experienced learning through their own interests. As well as developing their writing skills, they conquered the fear of speaking in front of an audience as they worked on the common goal of preparing a puppet show.

Left: Play curtains prepared by the children for the puppet show. Right: Crew collecting the audience tickets.
Left: Play curtains prepared by the children for the puppet show. Right: Crew collecting the audience tickets.

As the project evolved, other skills were required such as mathematics and marketing, which gave other children the opportunity to participate with their individual and more specific skills. They created tickets, invites, [representative] money, scenarios and even a videographer was requested. Throughout this journey, many learning opportunities happened and the outcomes were varied, exceeding curriculum expectations.

Show tickets prepared by the children.
Show tickets prepared by the children.

The children took ownership of their learning and trusted their choices during the journey. They succeeded in every way. When the interest waned new interests arose, new adventures began, carrying and implementing the learning from previous experiences. The cycle of observing and analysing, tracking, assessing and responding continued.

The role of the teacher

The role of the teacher in this journey was as Malaguzzi suggests. In this case, because the teacher observed attentively, she was able to scaffold and enhance the learning. The teacher needed to learn the right time to intervene so she would not interfere with the process of creation. She followed children’s lead as they imagined their own story lines, and encouraged them to ask questions, and to look for answers. She observed how her suggestions and gentle questions supported the children to set new goals and create new strategies based on their prior knowledge. This intentional teaching encouraged their progress, supporting them in a respectful and trustful relationship. Student agency is prime in this environment, and the teacher’s role is to understand (through close attention); respect the children’s ideas; and then decide when and how to act. These are the elements of assessment in a play-based learning.

Understanding how teachers work to assess learning through play is continuously evolving. I hope that this journey continues to grow through research in New Zealand and that the desire to find simple and practical ways of marrying assessment and play as learning continues to grow. As teachers engage in this brave, responsive, complicated and yet beautiful journey of seeing through the process, I hope we continue learning how to merge assessment into the play-based learning environments in ways that are respectful, responsive, valuable, meaningful and fun.

The CORE Education Dr Vince Ham eFellowship gave me the opportunity to notice the importance of the Malaguzzi quote, which empowers myself as a teacher as the scaffolder who does not say to the students what and how to do things, but instead, as one who places herself in a watching mode, observing the right time and way to act and participate in their knowledge building process. As a teacher in the play-based learning environment, I want to be this adjustable, flexible teacher, capable of directing, watching, applauding, guiding, assessing all the way through.

Left: Race track. Right: child explores addition by classifying pretending food and planning ‘a meal’ in the family area
Left: Race track. Right: child explores addition by classifying pretending food and planning ‘a meal’ in the family area
Left: Children hide in the bushes for hunting animals in the wild. This was part of a children's project about guns, from the boys’ interest in playing guns. Right: play in the doctor’s area where the doctor checks baby’s heartbeat
Left: Children hide in the bushes for hunting animals in the wild. This was part of a children’s project about guns, from the boys’ interest in playing guns. Right: play in the doctor’s area where the doctor checks baby’s heartbeat.
Two children reflect after flipping through the book The Stick Man. They drew the stick man and supported each other with writing the sentence.
Two children reflect after flipping through the book The Stick Man. They drew the stick man and supported each other with writing the sentence.

Find out more about the Dr Vince Ham eFellowship and read Patty’s research report

References

Kangas, M. (2010). Finnish children’s views on the ideal school and learning environment. Learning Environments Research, 13(3), 205-223. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-010-9075-6
Ministry of Education. (2006). The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media.
Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. Routledge.

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