Playing to learn

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playing to learn

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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Brave new world

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Applying radical new thinking to learning design

learning design

I have been working on a technique to bring about innovation in learning design. It's not entirely my own idea, and the most powerful influence probably comes from an article written by Seymour Papert in the 1998 June Edition of Game Developer magazine and titled, Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning.

Anyway, I have been experimenting with the idea of designing learning using the language of game designers. I base the idea on the premise that the language in which you say something shapes, or at least colours, the reality. For example: English people say, "Life is what you make it". For my Mancunian grandparents that meant walking to the cotton mill in the dark, clocking in, clocking out, staying sober, clothing and feeding the family, and once each year taking them on holiday to the seaside. Contrast this with the French expression, "La vie, c'est bricolage." Now this suggests to me that you can craft your life, that it's a creative process, that it's sensitive, and may even be fun.

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The business of learning

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Stephen in thought

As a learning designer, I've still got a lot to learn. Not about learning, but about the business of learning. 

Changing times

Back in the day, when teachers wore gowns and boys had short haircuts, the teacher was a superior being who dictated what the lesson would be, and how the outcomes would be judged.
Learning was like school dinners: there it is, if you don't like it, go hungry. Or, in the tougher establishments like the ones I attended: there it is, eat every last bit of it, even if it is disgusting, it's good for you, and you can't leave the dining room until you've made a clean plate. Homework and detention were very much the same thing but went by a different name. But now the student and her parents are the customer and the learning spaces, methods, and materials are our product.

Now we've swung our thinking around and most people subscribe to the environments and principles of modern learning. The expectation in this new learning environment is for continuous pedagogical and technical innovation. Unchanged for hundreds of years, the rate of change of learning is now a power curve. Consequently, we find ourselves in need of some professional development in the area of innovation and business start-up. I say start-up because the change from old school to new school is so radical it's an entirely different world.

Learner focus

The learning designers on the Instructional Design team at CORE Education are totally committed to taking a learner focus, as opposed to a curriculum focus, or worse, a teacher focus. However, old habits die hard. As the oldest member of the team I sometimes need to be reminded to focus on the learner, their motivations, and their needs. That may be a narrow profile that we can target with pinpoint accuracy, more often the learners fit into a broad spectrum of people and then the task is harder. 

The principles of Universal Design for Learning and the tenets of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines act as our guide and underpin our work, but really it boils down to giving the learner ownership and offering them choice. Especially with adult learners, but with younger learners too, it's like asking: what do you want to be able to do; what do you need to learn to do that; how do you want to learn it; and how do you want to demonstrate that you can now do that thing you identified at the start? So, what we really design and build these days is not learning, but a framework for learning.

Fiscal challenge

CORE Education is not for profit, but we still need to make money just to survive. To this end, we have established an internal incubator, not unlike Google Labs, but on a more modest scale. Our learning designers are among those who have put forward project ideas. It's burned into our psyche to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations? But now we need to think: How can my idea improve the quality of our learning designs and implementations, and be productised, and be monetised?

Virtual challenge

Productise and monetise are not words that come easily to our lips. We don't like to dirty our hands with the filthy lucre. So it's a challenge, and show me a learning designer who does not rise to a challenge! One popular innovation process that we take to like ducks to water is Design Thinking. We workshop the learning problem. The workshop unfolds in stages: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. At its best Design Thinking is high-energy fun, iterative, productive, and ultimately points to one or more candidate solutions. While you can do it at four tables pushed together in your nearest cafe, ideally it takes place in a specially designed collaborative space with aids like portable whiteboards, projection screens, configurable furniture, and soundproof pods. Either way, that's face-to-face. So, here's the Challenge for our team, because we are a virtual team, and we rarely meet face-to-face. How do we innovate effectively in a virtual incubator?

Risk taking

I don't have the answer, but I'm looking for it. For years, I sat on a domain name, virtualincubator.co.nz, but recently I let it go. I keep having ideas for learning frameworks, most recently, an alternate reality games in education framework (ARGEF). But I continue to stare at the wall, racking my brains for how to productize and monetize it. Such is the life of the budding entrepreneur. What gives me hope are the experiences of most start-ups today: the business model is elusive; there is usually a long freeware phase; the freeware phase often morphs into a freemium model; and, the sun has set on the boxed product. Risk taking and failure are wholly acceptable in this brave new world. Success stories usually reference several preceding failed attempts. Perseverance seems to be the key.

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Failing to learn

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The analog mission

If I measure the success of the analog mission in terms of meeting my expectations, then it was a failure. A right-royal failure. But, this is the life of a games designer. You have to learn to live with your mistakes. You have to learn to dance in the rain. You need to harden up. I’m talking about being a games designer in the context of education. I’m not professing to be any kind of expert. I’m a newbie, but already I’m learning a few things, and that was the purpose of the analog mission.

So, what is an analog mission? I have stolen the term from NASA. Because you want to learn from your mistakes before you go into space, rather than while in space, NASA runs complex missions underwater and in the desert. These analog missions are designed to test people and equipment in harsh conditions akin to the extremes of heat, cold, and isolation that will be experienced on real missions in space.

My analog mission was a puzzle game that used digital technology for communications, but not to define or enhance the game. I chose Twitter as the communications channel, but the game itself was old school and real world. 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 players neck. Then the purses were hidden around the venue which served as the game environment. A player who had followed the clues via a Twitter hashtag would know another player by their unusual and similar attire. The queen (the senior female present) held the key (a clue to be found in Robert Bly’s title Iron John mysteriously left lying around for players to find). This game was designed to test the concept for a fully blown augmented and alternate reality game called Fragmented, where the wooden puzzle pieces will be replaced with fragments of a narrative embedded (electronically) in a real-world learning environment. Up to now, everything was going to plan.

Then a bombshell dropped — no-one was tweeting.

 

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Anatomy of an ARG

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Stephen at lighthouse

I haven't been to the lighthouse for years. There's no road to it; you have to walk. You drive the car to a spot the locals call Jack's Point. It's named after Bloody Jack, a hard man who, by his name, you might think was a fierce warlord. Turns out he got his nickname from his colourful language. His real name he gave to the headland half a mile to the south, Tuhawaiki Point. It's marked with a white octagonal light tower. On my right is a rolling paddock of wheat, on my left a sharp drop to the shingle beach fifty feet below. The dog is in a state of high excitement, new scents abound. I am having a ball, and I wouldn't be here if I wasn't playing Ingress.

So if your opinion is that computer games promote a disconnect from the planet, obesity, and a taste for violence, then you may have to rethink it; if only by acknowledging that there are games you can play on your feet, in the open air, in loosely knit teams of like-minded, peace-loving people your own age. These games go by many names: alternate reality game, augmented reality game, urban gaming, location-enabled game, pervasive game, street game, and probably more. I'll use just the one term in this article: alternate reality game (ARG). Imagine a world in which things are slightly different. Allow yourself to buy into that idea, and temporarily re-invent yourself. In your real life you'll be whoever you are, but in this other world you are effective, pro-active, insightful, and above all resilient. Put that other life on hold. See if this new effective self transforms your old self. Maybe even transcends your old self. That's why ARGs come under the broad mantle of reality hacks.

Typically these games are played on mobile devices, most likely your phone. They are "multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments" [Wikipedia], but I'd say that there is plenty of evidence and rationale for Ingress to push out into the wider landscape, and even to really remote locations. Ingress is a game from Niantic Labs, a startup within Google led by John Hanke, the man who, with others, invented Google Earth. You think it's a game, but it's not a game, the authors say. Every time you long tap an empty space on the Ingress map and choose New Portal, you are sending Google a little tiny piece of their stock in trade. That's not a bad thing, nor is it a conspiracy theory; it's just crowd-sourcing.

Exotic Matter (XM) is entering the world through portals. These portals are statues, monuments, porticos, churches, football stadiums, murals; any object of interest openly available to the public. The players are divided into factions: the Enlightened, and the Resistance. I chose to play on the side of the Resistance, because I don't want the world filled up with this Exotic Matter, whatever it is. I like the old world, the way it was before. You can defend a portal of your own, and you can attack a portal of the other faction and try to take it over. You must physically approach a portal to play it, you have to move in the real world to engage. The gameplay is deliciously complex, rich in rewards, inventory and powers. It's played out on Levels 1 to 8 and beyond. I heard of a Level 15 player the other day, a demi-god. There are frequent bulletins, videos posted on YouTube called the Ingress Report, and Ingress News. There are communities, both official and unofficial. There are around 7 million players worldwide.

So, why am I doing this? For the good of my health? At one level, yes. I need the exercise. But at another level, I am trying to understand the anatomy of an ARG. There's a whole new pedagogy here. It's constructionist, connectivist, and game-based. I have a strong feeling that students and their teachers should be doing this in some way. Designing, building and playing alternate reality games folded around curriculum. Just how I don't pretend to know yet. I'm looking for that now. That's why I'm at the lighthouse with my dog.

I’m keen to hear from any educator who is following a similar pathway, and may have experience of alternate reality or augmented reality games used in an educational context. I’d like to join any existing community, else I’ll start one and we can begin sharing!

***

Just as Niantic Labs is a start-up within Google, so is Stephen's project a start-up within CORE Education. Towards the end of last year CORE established their internal incubator. ARG-EF, The Alternate Reality Games in Education Framework, is one of the projects supported by the CORE Incubator, and is scheduled to deliver its first demonstration game in June of this year.

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