How to Develop Educational Games with Insights from Fun Academy

Sanna Lukander comes from Finland. She is a Montessori Guide and works in Early Childhood Education. Her wish was that during our time together on the 8th of August 2020, we could see how to transfer concepts from her experience in Early Childhood Education into the gaming context.

As Textbook Publishers, they developed content for the Finish School System from little children to university students. While working for the Finish Text Book company, she noticed something that left her unsettled. There was a gap within the Text Book Publishing Industry as far as knowledge of what is happening in Technology and Digitization globally.

There was a need to start looking outside of Finland to see what they could learn from the rest of the World.

This is what inspired her to leap from Text Book Publishing to Rovio Entertainment, an Angry Birds Company, where she started their book publishing unit. It was then that she realized there were so many things that the Creative Industry could teach the Education Industry about the World. They had so many ideas, talents, and ongoing processes she thought could benefit the educational space.

The first idea of Developing a Learning Game at Rovio Entertainment

It started with the question How can the Creative Technology Industry support Education?

Sanna talked with people from Harvard, MIT, and Finnish Universities, discussing what a gaming company could do.

1. The first thought was they should develop a learning game.
2. The next thought was the need to solve the difficulty of finding a good game for a child to play. There was a need to organize games in a way that people could find age-appropriate games for children.
3. The third thought revolved around what gaming mechanisms keep people engaged and how they can be implemented in education. This is because parents and children look for motivating and engaging content, while the educational system is looking for content that supports their curriculum, their needs, and their narrative.
4. Finally, how could they use games to help learners do voluntary repetition? When we’re learning something, we need the opportunity and tools to keep repeating, and repeating for us to master certain skills or acquire certain knowledge.

It was therefore evident that there were many aspects in the Creative Technology Industry that could serve the Education Industry.

Problem Solving: Steps in Curating and Creating Learning Games at Fun Academy

In order to solve the challenge of finding age-appropriate content, they started by evaluating and assessing — then finally curating the content they found.

The next thing that they did in Fun Academy was to figure out their own approach to education and specific learning. They created their own fun learning approach through worded art.

Their approach stated seven main principles that they believed should be true for fun in learning to happen. And based on those fun learning principles, they started working on an early childhood education programme.

The other project that they then started working on was a solar system addition to the Angry Birds space game. And that ignited various sub-projects.

What they did was look at the Angry Birds space game from the perspective of could they use a casual game that was already out there in direct access by the general public? Could they then insert into that game certain learning elements, learning mechanisms, and gameplay that is based on research and experience of how learning actually works?

They were working together with NASA and people with expertise in the space industry.

And that is how they started creating the solar system content of that game.

They divided the learning opportunities into several like tidbits.

1. They began inserting certain learning components as stealth learning opportunities into the game. So for example, when there was a collision with a gas planet; the consequences were not worded, pointed out, or vocalized in any way. The idea was that when a person sees something happening continuously or repeatedly, they would in a way, automatically start understanding what the elements of this scientific truth were. They were placing scientific facts into the gameplay itself.
2. To cater to the teacher type of person who was looking at a game and considering whether it’s a learning opportunity or not, they started adding pop up boxes with small fun facts about what’s going on in space. They were animated and decorated with the characters and jokes that come from the fun Angry Birds narrative.Then came the idea of collecting these little boxes of information into a Bank of Information so that the player could collect their little portfolio, book or manual about space facts. That was another special component that they added. And they are currently looking at how that works.
3. The third bit was to try and use these components to inspire the player to also go out of the game and into the real world. They would get high-quality scientific information on the NASA site about what’s going on in space.

So it was a three-step approach to what happens and what could happen in learning. And it was exciting to test these different mechanisms. It gave them access to information about how people learn in games and what kind of learning like components could work.

What is the DragonBox game approach?

DragonBox is a game that was developed specifically for learning; it also stems from a fun learning approach where you look at what’s fun and already engaging to children. The game is built on helping children, for example, in their number game, understand number sense, what numbers are, and what numbers actually mean.

DragonBox is among the types of games that are built intentionally from the start with some facts that want to be taught. They are built so that the learner feels like they’re playing a game, but everyone at the same time knows that they are learning about algebra.

This is one of the amazing examples in young children’s learning context that has grown into quite a franchise with more games and more products around it. And in a way, proving that this type of learning approach also works.

What is the Toca Boca approach?

Toca Boca is not a game but it supports the learning and engagement of young children. It’s intention is not to teach at all but rather to let the children play freely with the apps. So these are in a sense, digital toys with which the children play.

This type of approach supports the Finnish Nordic approach to learning and education where free play, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving are at the core of effective learning, especially when the idea is to engage children in lifelong learning.

Although Toca Boca has never been a learning game itself, people constantly ask the team for learning content. This has made them look for a way to answer this need for learning and take steps into a more school-like learning way of developing this content.

The take away from these approaches is that there are many ways to look at education and learning in a game. The most important things are to decide on the approach, what it is we want to achieve, who our target audience is, and then look at what kind of steps need to be taken toward that kind of a solution that works for our audience.

Types of Learning

1. Personalized learning- This is something that we constantly look at. But what does personalised learning or my learning path in a game look like, and how is it connected to my lifelong learning journey or my learning outside the game? Should the personalised learning be something that’s connected to my bigger scheme in education? Or are we just looking at the game itself collecting data and supporting the progress that we have in the game as gamers? Personalization is an issue that we need to be looking at.
2. Microlearning- If a game has a bigger theme, like for example outer space, we can split the teachings into microlearning opportunities, and then let the player progress step by step toward the bigger objectives.
3. Dissecting real-life curriculum- In the education space, we can dissect the real-life curriculum into tidbits that would be learned one by one. They would be connected to the curricular progress learning and the diplomas that we might be striving for while playing a gamified game.

With gamification, we come to the actual end results that they had at Fun Academy when they tried to solve the problem of parents and teachers not finding the right kind of age-appropriate content for their children and their students.

In order to create a credible way of getting recommendations for users making choices in games, Fun Academy started working on a universal learning platform to collect the world’s best games.

The idea was to have a gamified layer on top of these sub-games that are games in their own right. When a child accesses this universe, the child would be pulled into this world of fun learning opportunities.

They would recommend certain games based on the child’s age needs and level of excellence. Unfortunately, it was quite difficult to gamify something that was not gamifiable by design, Some mistakes were made in the development of this programme and so they decided to pivot.

Educational Game Curation Requirements at Rovio Entertainment

The game curation requirements are as follows:

1. Game mechanics or how the games work is key.
2. The fun factor in the game is a very important component for them because it means that people are engaged voluntarily and a result addicted to learning.
3. Production value of the product so that it gives you the same kind of experience and feel-good factor as a casual game that’s made for entertainment purposes.
4. The pedagogical process of how the game is designed, so moving from a starting point to mastering this skill eventually.
5. How the content of the game is compatible with a curriculum and if it is mapped against a curriculum for some specific need in some specific area.
6. Challenges that get a player into the flow. Challenges that are not too difficult, but are not too easy either. Motivate the interest of the player but also have the player play the game in a state of flow, focusing and fully concentrating.
7. When dealing with rewards it’s one thing to collect badges or the rewards on the way, but when do these rewards become something that is truly intrinsic and not only just an extrinsic motivator? How could we connect this reward with intrinsic motivation or true interest in something? When should we use extrinsic motivation and when should we just rely on the satisfaction of learning a skill, acquiring the rewards for other deeper reasons than just collecting them?
8. How do the players go from online to offline learning? How do they use games and digital content as inspiration for real life? And how do educators and adults bridge learning from digital to physical? This is very important to take to account so that the child does not end up in a solely digital world.

The ideology at Rovio is that they help the child to access products and games that make her an active participant. The child has a role, and they are made to understand that they are creating the world. That, what they do matters, how they communicate with other people matters, and together they will be able to create a better world. They try to add life skills in everything they do.

To close her presentation Sanna said, “I’d love to learn more about what you guys are doing and developing. And on the final note, my hidden agenda here is, I’d love to eventually find a development team in Africa with whom we could start creating games for young audiences also in Africa with a Pan African curriculum in mind, and supporting the delivery and distribution of authentic content in the region and also sharing those with Finland. That will be a hopeful next step one day.”

And with that, she opened the floor for questions and further discussion. Min 37:44 of this sessions recording will lead you to the questions and discussions that attendees had after Sanna’s presentation.

I’d like to thank Sanna, for sharing her time on a Saturday morning with the Africa Game Developers Community and giving us so much insight from her decades of experience. This piece is full of wisdom that I’m certain will benefit those who take heed to it. Thank you too dear reader and seeker of this kind of information for reading up until this point. I hope that you found what you are looking for and that you will continue pursuing this noble path of finding fun learning solutions for future generations. Cheers!

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LudiqueWorks invests in nascent video game development studios on the continent through training and funding, as well as building a growing video gaming community through the Africa Game Developers network.

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