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Questing: a modern approach to learning design

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How might Game Artificial Intelligence (AI) inform and influence learning experience design in the future?

What learning design used to be… and, sometimes, still is

To begin to answer that far-reaching question, let us consider what learning design or instructional design was, and in many cases still is. Before the days of learner agency, when didactic dinosaurs roamed the school corridors, lesson plans would map what had to be learned, how it would be taught, what resources would be required, and what time would be allowed. And those were the good ones; half of them didn’t even have a lesson plan. Mathematics had to be acquired in three-quarters of an hour fitted in between Geography, Gym, and lunch. A bell marked the intervals between chunks of teaching. Note: I don’t say between chunks of learning, because, in my case at least, learning didn’t happen.

Formative assessment was applied in the form of exercises and repetition, and summative assessment was made at the end with an examination. Punishment and ridicule were associated with failure as motivators. Prize giving in front of the parents distributed pride and shame in equal measure.

AI in modern learning

The game designer’s mindset — a growth mindset

To a game designer, this system seems a little odd. In games, success is rewarded by levelling up to face ever bigger challenges, and failure immediately presents other opportunities to succeed. If at first you don’t succeed explore the landscape for ways to try and try again. Players are not shown how to do that. Instead, they are presented with challenges, and the fun is in finding out for themselves how to overcome all the obstacles. Games tell you what needs to be done, they don’t tell you how. This approach ensures a high level of engagement. Challenges are often presented in the form of quests, and that in itself — like Jason and his Argonauts — suggests a big journey. If you reach Game Over, this is not the end, it’s just an opportunity to eat vegetarian pizza, drink sugar-free coke, and start over.

This is growth mindset (Carol Dweck article in Education Week), not yet-ness, and there really is no end, only opportunities for the future.

The future of learning design

To see into the future of learning design, one must see learning as a landscape. Distributed with a certain granularity in that landscape are nodes. At each node, there is a puzzle. Solving the puzzle rewards the student-player with an artefact, tool, or power that will be useful in the next part of their quest. These things they collect have value, and a collection of them is a student-player’s wealth. The quest — within the scope of the landscape — is of their choosing, but is stated at the setting forth, at the start: “Together we will travel to Mordor and destroy the One Ring”. The student-players know the objective, but they do not know how to get there, nor the struggles they will have to face along the way. They must find their way and they must find ways to defeat the bad guys, traverse the deserts, and span the canyons.

I am speaking metaphorically. I am not suggesting that the future of all e-learning is reduced to a video game. I am saying that under the hood of e-learning there will be an e-learning engine very similar to a game engine. This engine will be designed and built using Game AI techniques.

The relevance of game artificial intelligence and the future of education

Game AI is subject to various interpretations: Bartle, when he uses the term AI, means mobiles or non-playing-characters, fairies in the forest that help or taunt the traveller; Buckland describes Game AI as “the illusion of intelligence”; in its simplest form Game AI involves accessing a large database of options using if-else statements. In Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Braitenberg shows how apparently complex animal and human behaviours arise out of the interaction of very simple internal structures.

Game AI also consists of several simple internal structures: databases; conditional statements; pathways, and configurable parameters. It is the putting together and the interaction between these structures that generates the underpinning intelligence commonly known as the game engine. Game engines can then support any number of modifications such as storylines, scenes, characters, graphics, music, and effects provided they remain in the genre and within the scope of the game engine. This has clear relevance to games-in-education as future teachers pour curriculum into the mixer.

Tools for the learning experience designer of the future

The learning experience designer of the future needs a tool very different to the old lesson plan. One such tool is graphing theory.

Buckman (Programming Game AI by Example) writes: “When developing the AI for games, one of the most common uses for graphs is to represent a network of paths an agent can use to navigate around its environment.” Each node has value, and each node is connected by one or more edges that have a cost. The value of the nodes along a narrative arc must eventually exceed the cost of the edges, or motivation will be lost. As the agentic student-player leaves a node, that fact is recorded in a learning record store (LRS). They solved a puzzle here, so the system knows they learned something. They proceeded along one of the edges to the next node, and they picked up embedded artefacts along the way.

Those embedded artefacts are what the didactic dinosaurs of the past used to call content. Games designers probably think more in terms of clues, tools, and powers for how to solve the next puzzle or overcome the next micro-challenge. The system records every incremental step along the way, forever. The system knows for example, that the student-player has acquired a certain tool and used it to solve a certain type of puzzle. Correctly analysed, interpreted, and presented, this data tells us a lot about the development and current state of the student-player. The system and its associated LRS is both omniscient and pervasive.

The immutable laws of nature don’t change. But the language we use to describe them, and the way in which we approach them do. The lesson plan of the past, the template, is a simplistic thing seen against a game engine. But the complexity is handled by a computer, and once built, the game engine is just a given thing. Now, the subject matter experts and the learning designers feed challenges, puzzles, and artefacts into the engine and crank her up. Employers no longer admire a candidate’s certificates, they go and look at the dashboard of the LRS and they see what strategies for effective gameplay that person has developed, and contemplate how they might apply them to new contexts of design, manufacture, distribution, retail, service, policy making, or administration.

The times are a changing — fast

The challenge for learning designers, in fact, for all educators, is to keep up with the pace of change. Noting the copyright dates of the suggested reading list (below) points up the true nature of this challenge, that time is ticking. Games-in-education conversations tend to be focused on educational value, or the lack of it, and fears around excessive screen time and isolation. The conversations learning designers need to be having are probably around theoretical underpinnings, and how they can be put into practice to create virtual world engines, incremental accreditation, and student-player profiles.

 

Suggested reading:

Bartle, R. (2004) Designing Virtual Worlds New Riders.

Braitenberg, V. (1984) Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. A Bradford Book.

Buckland, M. (2005) Programming Game AI By Example (Wordware Game Developers Library). Wordware.

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Places in memory

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Samsung vr headsetIt is mooted that the only reason we have a brain is so we can find our way around, and remember where to go. Back in the day before cars, it helped us strike the essential balance of energy: we could find food before we ran out of steam to keep looking. It was about survival. So, the way the argument goes, memory is inextricably linked to our sense of place and the paths we follow to get there.

There’s a fair bit of evidence to support this, for example, the findings of brain researcher Eleanor Maguire (Foy, p.34). Focusing her attention on the place cells that remember landmarks and the grid cells that remember margins and pathways, her work demonstrates our allocentric and egocentric ways of viewing the world. Allocentric is when we know where we are in the landscape, can identify a place where we want to go, and in which direction to move to get there. These are our abilities (or in some people a lack of them) to read a map; to navigate. Egocentric is when we know where we are by recognising a view, and by remembering that, if we turn right when we get to the river and follow along its course, we will come to another view we remember and can picture in our mind’s eye. This is the way the ancients got along down song lines and along burial paths, handing down the waypoints orally. Many sea shanties, too, listed headlands, rocks, and safe harbours remembered in the verses of songs that were sung repeatedly.

Do some exercises in your mind’s eye to cement these ideas.

Shut your eyes and sniff an open jar of Vegemite. Does that take you back to a place and time? Can you see the people who were there? Can you remember their names?

Going back to the place where you were born, do your eyes quickly scan for familiar landmarks? Do you notice small changes? Do you know that feeling of well-being like all your molecules just fell into place?

Walk through the Christchurch CBD. Did you know the city before the earthquake? Have you experienced the deeply disturbing feeling when landmarks you knew are gone? In my own hometown of Timaru, historic buildings were demolished to make way for a Mitre 10, completely changing the cityscape. Senior citizens especially felt real stress.

We are blessed, or cursed depending on how you see it, with a brain that can do so much more than just act as a navigation system. We can do abstract things, like appreciate music and encode it on paper, like explain phenomena using mathematical models. We might have lost some of our navigational powers compared, say, to homing pigeons, but essentially our brain remains, at least in part, a built-in Tom-Tom.

The latest craze is VR. Virtual reality struggled for years with bizarre helmets, visual lag, and low resolutions. Then two things changed all that: Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard. In Maguire’s terms, VR plays on an egocentric view of the world. It gives us landmarks and pathways we have not actually experienced, but, which we can experience vicariously in a computer-generated environment. Five years ago, Ayumu, a 7-year old chimpanzee was getting to grips with a touch screen and surpassing human capability, and parents were struggling with the concept that their children needed an iPad just to do their regular schoolwork. Now, VR, Google Cardboard, Google Expeditions, and Samsung Gear are being heralded as the new essentials for the modern learning experience.

OK, I have set the scene. Now it’s time to get to the guts of the matter. Is learning about memory? Is it about recall?

I think it is, but then I admit to being old school. I, like you, maybe, learned my times tables, and have found mental arithmetic a really useful life skill. I do not need to reach for my calculator to work out journey times or the likely cost of the fuel. I have enough French to travel independently in Africa. I have domain knowledge and skills that I can draw on in an instant: in the rain, in the dark, when I’m feeling ill. These are things I would say I have learnt; that I have internalised.

I believe the younger generations — not to discount the value of Wikipedia and Google — need this too. Some knowledge really has to be learnt if we are to use it to think with. There are extrinsic motivators too: for many professions closed-book examinations are not going away any time soon; you can’t jam if you don’t know your chord progressions; you can’t present convincingly unless you really know your stuff and can speak from the heart. An expression you hear used less these days: knowing it by heart.

The memory palace will be a technique known to many. Think of a house you know. In your mind’s eye, put the things you need to remember in the rooms. Picture yourself walking through the house retrieving the things. Do you see how memory is linked to place?

My challenge to educators is to use VR to give students places where they can put memories, and to give them pathways along which they go. By all means use the Wow factor to grab their initial attention, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that that is enough. Instead, aim to engage them at a much deeper level. Use it to deliver rich learning narratives, and attach those stories to vivid imagery, and an immersive sense of location.

Don’t let us allow this exciting new technology, VR, to get hijacked by the big players for edutainment. As educators, let’s get creative to use it as a tool to embed powerful learning in the minds of our students. Oh, and let’s have heaps of fun doing it!

References

Foy, G.M. (2016) Finding North: How navigation makes us human. Kindle Edition.

Image source:

Nan Palmero from San Antonio, TX, USA, from Wikipemedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

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Space invaders is not a video game

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working environment

A simple fundamental shift in approach can have a huge impact on the accessibility, inclusiveness, and efficacy of e-learning. That’s my opinion, born of personal experience, and the premise of this article.

The shift that I am proposing is from page (or screen) to space (or environment). If the e-learning designer will stop thinking in terms of a page, and start thinking in terms of a virtual space, then many beneficial things will start to fall into place automagically.

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Can e-learning be better learning?

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Cave tour

Photo: John Scott under CC

Every now and again something comes along that really excites you. For me that’s usually the discovery of a new connection. It’s like life is a jigsaw puzzle, and you push the pieces around on the table, and then, suddenly, about seven pieces go together all at once. That’s what happened for me this week.

You know, e-learning has its own design protocols: keep it short and to the point; make it work well on mobile devices; hook it into social media; be sure to tell a story; and, always create links to further reading. There are more, depending who you talk to.

But there are higher-level questions I always ask up front:

  • Why are we doing this?
  • Is this about better access to learning?
  • Or, is this about better learning?
  • Or, are we going to attempt both?

Almost by default, e-learning creates better access to learning. Assuming the learner has a smartphone (by 2018, New Zealand will have 90% smartphone ownership, Frost & Sullivan) then you are putting the learning materials into the learner’s hand; whether they are sitting in the classroom, riding on the bus, or lying on their bed bored on a wet Sunday.

The added value comes when you can also make it better learning.

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Playing to learn

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Playing games at uLearn

The pre-conference theme at this year's uLearn was titled "Permission to Play". As the day unfolded, and during my own session in the afternoon, I noted how apt that title was. We were giving delegates permission to get out of their chairs and have fun. The learning, and for the meta cognitives, the learning about learning, was sneaked in under the radar.

I had smashed four books together. Two were about learning design, and two were about games design. Essentially, we set up a learning environment based on well-established principles of constructivism, and then we overlaid a symbolic games language. These sources came from recognised authors listed at the bottom of this article. Then we created and played a sample game within this framework, and at the end, asked each other how it went. For me, it was a way to get peer feedback about my incubator project, and for the delegates, it was an introduction to how easy it is to make games that can be played out in an environment wider than the classroom and augmented using near zero cost tech. All you need, really, is the light scaffold of ARGEF (Alternate Reality Games in Education Framework) that I have just described, and a free mind.

First failure, but try again…

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the spectacular failure of my first analog mission. It was a puzzle game in which a wooden puzzle called the Locked Cross was disassembled, and each piece was packed into a luscious and mysterious blue purse with a gold cord for hanging it around a player's neck. Then the purses were hidden around the venue, which served as the game environment. The first mission failed because we were playing in a sprawling venue and relying on Twitter for communication, but there was a no-Tweeting policy in place. Oops. This time, we played the game in one room, and I facilitated by good old-fashioned unmediated voice and gesture. Success! Serious fun was had, and the players cooperated to solve the puzzle. Step up you geeks, you Meta Cognitives!

The type of game that fits with learning

What were we doing here? We were playing a teeny, tiny pretotype of a cooperative pervasive game — the very type of game I believe is a tight fit with learning. While an air of healthy competition exists at one level, it is only when the players start to cooperate that they will beat the game. Pervasive, because it can be played over an hour, for the duration of a lesson, over a day, a week, or a whole school year. It scales. It can scale from the six players in one room that we had, to thirty players in the school grounds, and potentially beyond to national champs.

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