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What's In an Educational Game?
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a non-profit whose mandate is to increase science literacy and awareness. One of the methods that we've started exploring is in making free, online educational games. Our target demographic for the games is kids aged 8-12, but there is no reason the games could not also appeal to a broader age range. What would you look for in an educational game? Does length and depth of gameplay matter to you, or would you rather play a trivial game with subconscious educational value?"
Its possible to have fun, and be educational whilst disconnected from the real world. I give you Droid Works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Droid_Works. I bought this game years ago, didn't even know it was educational, I just saw making your own droids and decided I must have it. I enjoyed the game too, its only recently when I found the box buried away somewhere did I see on the box that was an educational game. Teaches you about pulleys, weights, gears and thinking ahead. Im tempted to re-install it now...
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
It's too bad that you could only bring 200 pounds of alien meat back to your space-wagon.
Just to tack onto the above point, I agree overtly educational games are a waste of energy. Puzzles and resource management games, like Oregon Trail, have a much better chance at successfully completing your requirements.
I think an intellectual hero as the players avatar would be a nice touch. A Susan Calvin or Hari Seldon character that uses knowledge and wisdom (a Tom Swift without the natural genius) to solve problems. Instead of the absent minded professor and his beautiful-yet-intelligent-and-spunky daughter needing rescuing, have the scientist do the rescuing. Or better yet, have the absent minded professor's hard working apprentice do the rescuing. You know, a young man or woman that your target demographic can relate to.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Age of Empires 2 was great for history. I didn't even hear the words "Holy Roman Empire" in class until World History at the end of high school, but I was already familiar with it from the missions and the history background info provided on the History tab. When you're 12 years old you have a lot of time and patience to play your favorite games over and over.
Even if you don't know the names and dates, it's still immensely useful to have a general idea of what happened. At Agincourt a few English archers were able to shoot down from a hilltop and defeated the French army who got stuck in mud in their heavy armor. I don't know anything else about it but it's more than most people know.
You can't help but learn from those kind of games. I haven't played Rise of Nations in 5 years but I still remember that the Terracotta Army was Chinese. I know what Angkor Wat and Versailles look like. These are all things that I first learned from that game.
I highly recommend "Mindrover." In this game, you build and program a little robot that goes through obstacle courses, fights other robots, etc. It's got an intuitive graphical programming language (though you can edit the files directly for a more advanced, hands-on approach). You get to program the robot's default behavior, define how it responds to threats, program "hunting" strategies, etc.
The main website appears to be down, but here's the community site with a demo for free download. If someone had given me this game when I was a kid, I'd definitely be a better programmer today.
One has only to look at Oregon Trail to get your answers.
The thing that made Orgeon Trail a success IMO is that little information was forced upon the user. Anything information that was trying to be taught, was presented either in a place that the user had to go and ask for the information, or was a part of the actual game itself. Talking with townsfolk would reveal historic facts. The player did not have to talk with the townsfolk to play the game. However, the key was how much information was stuffed into the game itself. Nearly everybody these days knows the options one has to get a wagon across a river: ford the river, caulk the wagon and float it, or pay for the ferry. It was an integral part of the game and choosing was simple: just select one option and go. Since there were consequences from every decision, players grew to understand that fording a river that is 5 feet high was likely a bad idea and would cut the game short due to drowning.
What one can get from all of this is that the key to making an educational game is to incorporate what you are trying to teach into the game, while still letting the player bypass most of it.
This brings to mind the discussions in the commentary mode in Half Life 2 and company. A big issue with testing was keeping the players focus on something without forcing them to look a certain way, usually by some obvious event in a direction not encumbered with dull scenery.
Another focus, and I've seen this in a lot of games, is never to tell you what to do but make figuring out that the solution easy the first time in a simple form, then being given a much more complex form of it to work with sometime later. Throughout the game, you're given more 'tools' for solutions and they stack up into greater puzzles but never anything so incredibly complicated it'll piss the player off.
Research is the most important part of these massive efforts and contenders like Valve put a Hell of a lot of money into it. In this case I would suggest some of your own research applied to the already improved methods.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Forgoing game play and resorting to strictly to trivia is an easy way to create a game fast and expand it easily but in my opinion it doesn't keep you coming back. When I was a kid I practically wore out the pocket atlas that came with Carmen Sandiego not only was I learning about geography I was playing a fun game. Even after I had seen all of the different questions I continued to play because it was fun and therefore continued to reinforce what I learned.
The length of the game should be short but engaging because you don't want it to be a tedious experience. If it is a short but intense experience you can always play a second round but if it takes too long or it becomes boring then the game will be abandoned and the point of it is lost. I my opinion is that 5 to 10 minute rounds of game play are best. It is short enough that a teacher might be able to sneak it in at the end of a class or depending on the platform a child can play quickly on a mobile device.
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A group of people with deeper expereince than here will have some thoughts on it.
I've always thought that Darwin Pond was a cool piece of free (beer) software that could be used to teach evolution. It's a simulation game with swimming organisms that compete for food and mates. There's even assortative mating built in.
What's great about it is there's no fixed goal, it's completely up to the player--maybe you want to try to breed fast swimmers or cool moving swimmers. You can watch the abundance of types change through time, try out your own "designed" types or introduce random mutations into the population.
I would recommend games like this.
If i just look at resent games I have played for entertainment, I would have to say I found Valve's Portal to be quite educational. It forces to you really think and problem solve. I feel problem solving is crucial to an educational game. Portal was entertaining enough to keep my attention and forced me to use problem solving skills. win/win
A game with emphasis on beauty and immersion could teach me a lot of things. Like the Myst games; immersive enough to have me decipher an alien number system. Could as well have taught me hexadecimals or binary numbers.
It kinda makes me wonder though if at that point it's really an educational game, or just a fun RTS that's just vaguely historically themed.
E.g., at Agincourt,
- it wasn't on a hill, it was on flat ground. The hill was at Crecy.
- it wasn't just archers. About 1/5 of the English army were dismounted knights functioning as a heavy pikemen in front of the archers. The hail of arrows and the mud were one factor, but without that wall of pikes the French heavy cavalry would have reached the archers and cut them down. With heavy losses, but they would have.
In effect, what really happened was more of a "the knights lost to combined arms" case than "the knights lost to archers."
- the terrain played a more massive part than just the mud. There also was the fact that it was flanked on both sides by heavy woods, which was as good as impenetrable during a battle. (Anyone trying to make their way through it, would have arrived the next day at best.) Which allowed the relatively small number of pikemen to form a phalanx 4 rows deep and still completely prevent access to the archers, as well as be immune to flanking. (When facing lots of cavalry, flanking is your #1 worry. That's what the cavalry is there for.)
Plus, it severely limited how many french could actually get into melee with the English. Even on foot and packed shoulder to shoulder, there seems to have been room for a little over 200 in a line. Which severely blunted the whole numbers advantage of the French. By contemporary French accounts, those in the third row of the attack wave already couldn't use their swords against the English.
Worse yet, the French ended up packed in a tight formation, which is the worst possible kind against missile fire.
On an open hilltop, the story would have been very different.
- the french heavy armour played a much lesser role in their delay. The heaviest armour (chain or plate alike) at the time was about 40 pounds, and it would be almost another 200 years before plate got to be 60 pounds. Compared to the weight of the human and the horse, that was peanuts.
The terrain there was freshly ploughed earth and literally soaked in water. Some people have actually drowned in that mud, which gives an idea of how liquid it was. Even without armour, marching through it would have been a pain.
On the whole, probably the armour still actually helped. Otherwise they'd be dead even sooner.
- it wasn't really "a few" archers. It was 5000 archers, raining a total of 1000 arrows per second upon the enemy. To give you a comparison, it's the equivalent of over a hundred M-60 machineguns on full auto, non-stop. It wasn't just missile fire, it was concentrated missile fire, the kind that would not be seen again until WW1.
Etc.
So basically did that game really teach you much history, or was it just a game? I just have to wonder.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My wife is a middle school science teacher. I suggested she should tell the kids that learning science is like learning the cheat codes to the universe.
How about making that a bit more literal. Maybe concepts could be adapted to be "cheat codes" or "upgrades" in actual games. Think of how much time is spent in games trying to improve and optimize character, weapon, or vehicle abilities. What if you had a game that let you upgrade your weapons by applying new concepts. For example, complete a task and you are taught f=ma. You get to modify your weapon by choosing m. Next task and you are given more information, such as how a is a function of m. Start introducing more variables. Every variable and every interaction is a teachable concept.
Heck, eventually you could have some kid working on differential equations for orbital mechanics so that he can kick his buddy's ass during 5th period math. The kid discovers Holman transfers so that he has maximum weapons payload to dump on his friend.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
My oldest is still younger than your target group, but I can tell you a bit about what he finds entertaining and educational.
First of all, he's pre-literate. Computer games have been a real motivator for his literacy and numeracy, though. While our generation's first sight words were things like dog, cat, boy, girl... he recognizes start, next, exit, off, on, and his own name, as well as our names (he started picking those up when we were all playing Peggle a whole lot, and we didn't want him playing under our names!).
So, games that don't require a ton of literacy to play, but where it's going to be easier to do things if you can read prompts or buttons, can encourage sight-reading in younger kids. I wouldn't be surprised if instructions or useful background information that scrolls by at a slow speed might improve reading speed and accuracy in older kids.
Numeracy has been an even bigger thing for our son, though. One day he was watching me play Bubble Spinner. He read off my score: "You have 83 points!" then I shot a ball and got three more points. "86!" I made another shot and got six points. "89-- er... 92 points!" he had intuitively assumed that 89 was next in the series, without being aware he was identifying a pattern or doing math. He can also read off five digit numbers correctly, and thanks to various iterations of Desktop Tower Defense, is learning how "money" works.
So, you can teach a lot about math and numbers just by having a semi-complicated scoring system, such as one where you earn points that you can then spend on upgrades, which cost different amounts of money, have different ammunition requirements, can kill different numbers of creatures (or pop different numbers of balloons, or stun different numbers of monkeys, or whatever) per shot, and so on.
The hardest part is to balance the relatively low tolerance for frustration that most kids have, with the need to be persistently engaging and somewhat challenging so they don't get bored. Something that you can have fun with at first, but can do MORE with as you learn more about it, is ideal.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
learn about projectile motion, angles, and parabolas..