Albert Einstein famously said, "I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they can learn". This learner-centric approach has become more significant now than ever due to the fast-changing world that demands empowering the learner to learn new things continuously, possibly fail, and relearn. However, the opposite is happening on the ground. Today, every school student goes through the grind to achieve the targets of classwork, homework, and grades which leaves little space for them to explore, discover, and relish the gems of knowledge hidden around. Unfortunately, learning has moved away from being learner centric. The current system might be causing potential risks to children, as they get into adulthood, in the shape of early fatigue in their careers, as well as opting for status quo than innovation due to fear of failure.
Yet, students do find ways to relieve curricular fatigue. Some do so by indulging in productive avenues such as sports and art, but most navigate towards non-productive avenues such as consuming wasteful content online including feeds, reels, videos, and games. This online content delivery is designed with very high engagement levers including rewards for progress, social approvals, adaptation to short attention spans, competition, curiosity, scarcity, instant gratification, etc. In recent research published by Pew in USA [1], a major concern for parents is their teens spending unproductive time online. The educational content needs to keep up with this engagement bar to recapture the mindshare of the youngster.
While the present situation is anxiety-inducing, innovative approaches can convert the challenges into interesting possibilities. How about using the potential of games to engage the learner in learning? Imagine a popular mobile game Clash of Clans [2] is repurposed for learning middle school geography. In this game, players build their kingdoms by constructing castles, walls, armies, and artillery, using them to defend, collaborate with, or attack other kingdoms to expand. The same mechanics and the world that engages players can be used to learn about the topic of ‘Rocks and soil’ wherein the learner-players still build castles and kingdoms. But the resources in this game are drawn from rocks of various kinds – the igneous, the sedimentary, and so on. In such a design, the act of playing and learning are inseparable, leading to better engagement.
Educational games can provide a structured, playful, welcoming, and bidirectional environment, where the learner-player can explore, fail, retry, and learn without getting intimidated.
Games are nature’s time-tested vehicle for learning. Puppies and kittens learn by playing, they don’t read books. They learn through interactions and experiments in a fail-friendly environment. In fact, parts of our textbooks were gamified from the early days. Matching the pairs, sorting the jumbled sequences, connecting the dots, and solving puzzles have always been part of assessments as ‘exercises’ at the end of the book. Parents can recollect how they enjoyed these parts. Even today that would be the case.
Despite the claimed potential of games, a genuine counterargument can be the lack of impact caused by the plethora of educational games available today. Can this be attributed to the competing media? YouTube videos are a very popular learning avenue allowing students to choose content with appropriate filters for the duration, complexity, relevance, authenticity, and popularity. Video-based learning certainly has a significant place in the future of education, but it is largely one-way and lacks experimental space. There is very little agency with the learner other than quitting or forwarding. Educational games overcome these limitations.
The lukewarm adoption of educational games can also be attributed to the lack of compelling design and inappropriate positioning. Educational games cannot be like chocolate-coated broccoli [3] where the user can neither enjoy the chocolate nor overcome the taste of broccoli. Unfortunately, prevalent games follow such an approach, namely ‘Exogenous designs’, wherein, the educational content is wrapped inside a game layer. The key to solving this problem would be rewiring the educational content to make itself interesting through endogenous design [4]. While this can address the ‘design’ problem, there is a larger problem of positioning. Games need to be positioned as mainstream instruments of learning.
How do we then systematically address the problem of making learning interesting? There can be several angles of attack in the solution space such as using AI tools as personal educational assistants, or bringing up restrictions on social media consumption, or encouraging hybrid schooling where the onus shifts on individuals and parents than the provider, are some of the possible approaches. However, the scope of this article is bound by game-based solutions. Therefore, we rephrase the question as: How do we then systematically address the problem space from a game-based solution standpoint?
The game-based solution space can be unpacked into following dimensions:
1. Creating awareness of games-based education amongst students, teachers, and parents: In the past few decades, games have been considered a taboo or distraction in education. However, that view needs to change. Games are now used even for scientific studies. Hence, academicians and administrators should actively pursue the use of games in education (of course through scrutiny and selection).
2. Making games available: Ed-games need to be created for not only several curricular topics but also for additional topics such promoting healthy, sustainable, socially desirable behaviors. Games are needed to develop higher order thinking skills of students. This requires a factory approach to churn games at a fast rate and make them available for consumption through an ecosystem/hub that encompasses schools, testing agencies and curriculum developers.
3. Designing games that are fun to play: It is a non-trivial task to design games that are fun. It requires using appropriate design knowledge, techniques (such as endogenous design) and user centric approaches. Games predominantly focus on practice and assessments today, but they need to foray further into acquisition and application of knowledge. This is a significant effort and investment. It can be driven partly by industry, and partly through crowdsourcing of games from students by providing them a platform and incentive to develop games.
4. Mainstreaming of games for learning and assessments: Keeping games as an optional avenue will be considered an add-on effort by students and teachers and hence kept aside. Assignments and assessments provided through games should be directly considered for evaluation. In fact, the industry is moving partly towards game-based profiling and selection of applicants since that is unbiased and rich and provides rich simulated environments.
5. Demonstrating advantage: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The outcomes of game-based learning need to be monitored and assessed through short-term measures such as performance in the specific subject or grade and longitudinal aspects such as how the students fared in their careers.
6. Inculcating Learning habits: Our article began by presenting the wasteful consumption of online content as a prevalent challenge. We argued that game mechanisms can be a solution – a mechanism that can transition youngsters into active learning. Reliable game mechanics such as social recognition, making curiosity, discovery and surprise as core part of learning journey, rewarding through collectibles, and embedding purposeful missions, to name a few.
7. Bite sized learning: Imagine a way where students need not spend long screen time but only 15-20 mins of screen use at one time to revise what was taught in the day. Bite size educational games can be a game changer to engage with an increasing number of learners who have short attention spans.
The agents of the change will begin with the mindset change of the learner. Of Course, the government will make policies and industry will create new offerings that solve problems, and the teachers will keep finding new ways to teach. Parents/teachers (along with the learners) can also set some creative challenges e.g. making a movie on the subject being learned. It might also involve developing a habit to correlate learning elements to the entertainment sought on YouTube, Instagram, or OTT.
Industry will also play a big part. Appreciating the complexity of this problem space and the need for a well-designed, holistic solution, TCS iON [5] is launching Ed-Games Hub. Ed-Games Hub is an innovative educational product that gives an immersive and engaging experience for the students to play and learn starting with gamified assessments. The bite-sized gamified assessment makes learning fun and effective at home. Ed-Games Hub covers subjects like Math, Science, Social Science, English, cognitive games and virtual “Science Ed-labs”. It also has educational games on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Hub also provides an immersive experience through its premium capabilities like AR, VR, 360VR, and 3D.
Transforming education is a complex problem having social, behavioral, and technological dimensions. The solutions for the same cannot be trivialized though one-dimensional point solutions. This blog series is an attempt to unpack these dimensions for deliberation and deliverance of change for the better future of education. This first episode gives a perspective of problem space and a game-based solution approach. Upcoming episodes will delve into specific problems that games can solve – for example developing higher order thinking skills through games, or it can be about dealing with uncertainty through games or new age assessments and recruits through games as well as details about specific offerings from TCS iON. Allow us to surprise you with what exactly will be next. In the meanwhile, keep learning and keep evolving.
References:
- https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/07/28/parenting-children-in-the-age-of-screens/
- Clash of Clans is a 2012 free-to-play mobile strategy video game developed and published by Finnish game developer Supercell. More details at https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistics/#:~:text=Clash%20of%20Clans%20is%20one,with%20less%20than%201%2C000%20employees.
- Bruckman, A., 1999, March. ‘Can educational be fun’. In Game developers conference (Vol. 99, pp. 75-79).
- Athavale, S., & Dalvi, G. (2019, January). Strategies for endogenous design of educational games. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2019 Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix.
- https://www.tcsion.com/ - ION is a business unit of TCS offering a platform (for conducting national exams such as JEE) as well as a learning hub
Credits: Dr Sandeep Athavale, Chief Mentor TCS iON GameLab; Adjunct Professor, Design School, IIT Bombay