Technologies For Learning Magazine

Spring 2019 issue

Technologies For Learning

32 min readMay 17, 2019

A Fireside chat on Gaming for Learning at Ubisoft by Valerie Pierre and Claudia Medina
VR For Learning by Thomas William Kauer
Design Thinking by Justin Willow
Educational Games and Alternative Learning by Catherine Zhao
Innovation requires Fiction to get Outside the Box of Science. It’s Time to put the ‘F’ in STEM by Robert Clegg
Lacuna — an Annotation based Reading Platform by Fyza Parviz
Conference report — Learning Analytics in the SF Bay Area by Valerie Pierre
Making eLearning Stick by Claudia Medina

A Fireside chat on Gaming for Learning at Ubisoft

by Valerie Pierre and Claudia Medina

Are games powerful tools for learning?

Innovative Technologies for Learning Meetup event at Ubisoft on February 19, 2019.

“Video games are about gaming, and gaming is not about entertainment, it’s about learning. When you learn, you have fun.” Ubisoft Chief Creative Officer Serge Hascoët.

Why are games powerful tools for learning? Vincent Minoué and Eddie Melcer, learning experts from Ubisoft and UCSF, respectively, shared their insights into how games can empower learning at a fireside chat led by Jen Helms and hosted by the Innovative Technologies for Learning Meetup on February 19th, 2019.

What is the difference between gamification and games? Eddie Melcer explained: “Gamification means taking game elements such as rewards, and putting them into another non-game context.” Eddie gave Skinner Box as an example of gamification, where the player essentially trains a pigeon to do certain things. The game uses gamification tactics by leveraging emotions and encouraging “try to learn.” He added that games provide three essential elements to support learning experiences: immediate feedback, interactivity, and opportunities to learn by trying without penalties for failing. Games encourage trial and error, which are essential for problem-solving.

Eddie gave some examples to illustrate his point. His first example was DragonBox, an Algebra educational game, where the player tries to match shapes to objects. Dragonbox gamifies algebra concepts, so that understanding complex mathematical notions becomes very intuitive and effective for children. Another great example of a game that provides immediate feedback is Poly Bridge. This game provides you with a sandbox that embodies different scenarios. For example, one scenario is an environment for how to build a bridge. Once you design a bridge, you hit play, and you see what happens. Initially, your bridge may collapse. As you play more, you start to gain expertise in better design approaches.

Vincent Minoué views gamification as a layer on top of the game that increases engagement and promotes greater game-play. He said that “Some of the reasons why Rocksmith has been successful is that you don’t need to think, you just look at it, and act. As it is typical in video games, you start as a beginner and then as you play more, you get into the next levels. In Rocksmith we implemented a dynamic challenge: the more you succeed in hitting the right note at the right time, the more songs you get to play.”

How do games leverage input devices and physical interaction? Eddie Melcer elaborated on his research focus, i.e., how manipulating physical objects helps learners to retain more information. Learners remember spatial metaphors better because of the way humans interact with their physical environment. Spatial metaphors include both the notion of embodiment, which refers to situating a person into a different body, and social interactions such as using peers to guide a player in a digital space. Talking about the power of affordances, he cited effective approaches such as games that display a handle telling a player that he can grab it and use it as in the real world. Osmo, his example, harnesses spatial mental models to teach programming.

Eddie Melcer also talked about alternate input devices. “Usually the inputs come from a mouse, touchpad or keyboard. In one of my projects I researched the impact of non-standard inputs.” He illustrated his point with Cho Chabudai Gaeshi, an arcade game developed in Japan. The name of the game means “violently upending the tea table.” Essentially players need to do as much damage as they can. By interacting physically, players can learn content in a fun and engaging way.

Vincent Minoué elaborated on this topic as well by adding, “Rocksmith is the perfect illustration of marrying the physical with the learning. Since Rocksmith relies on a physical guitar. One of the challenges, when designing the game, was how to choose the best representation for the guitar. We decided to represent it as if you’re looking at it. With the guitar in your hand, you get to act, and interact within the representation of what you are trying to learn or to understand.”

Are educational games relevant to adults? Are educational games more popular and suitable for very young learners? Surprisingly, both panelists indicated that the average player of the most popular games is 34 years old, which shows the high potential of educational games for adult learners. Vincent pointed out that games, such as Rocksmith, are attracting many older players, who are not gamers. Games such as PokemonGo or Wii, for example, are becoming mainstream.

What kind of future could be envisioned for educational games? How will technology and design support those new learning experiences? Vincent Minoué pointed out that with Virtual Reality, players will be even more immersed in games, and thus, the emotional reaction to the learning experience would be much greater. Eddie Mercer added that in the near future games will leverage even more our physical interactions with all the sensors that we carry around all day long in our mobile devices. Currently, there is a significant focus on inputs, e.g., keyboard, but in the next 5–10 years the focus will shift to outputs, e.g., fabrications via sewing machines, 3d printers, and so forth.

More about our speakers: Vincent Minoué is the Creative Director at Ubisoft San Francisco, Eddie Melcer is an Assistant Professor at the UCSC Department of Computational Media, where he helps run their Professional Masters in Serious Games. Eddie is also the director of the Alternative Learning Technologies and Games (ALT Games) Lab, where he researches, designs, and builds a multitude of educational and alternative controller video game experiences. His recent research studying tangibles in the design of educational games has similarly received the best paper and honorable mention awards at major academic venues. Jen Helms is the Founder and Chair of the Intentional Play Summit, a conference exploring games and emerging technologies for learning and social impact. She started the conference out of a desire to bring the community together for a day to learn, grow, and be inspired to take more significant strides toward making better games for learning and meaningful play. Jen also works as a consultant helping companies that do good expand their impact.

Valerie Pierre is a co-organizer of the Innovative Technologies for Learning Meetup. She specializes in implementation of B2B software and cross-discipline collaboration. She currently works for Appsembler whose mission is to empower trainers and educators to create delightful online learning experiences. A French native, she is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Claudia Medina is a co-organizer of the Innovative Technologies for Learning Meetup. She is an eLearning expert focused on education for the enterprise. Customized and Engaging learning solutions. Full-project life cycle across diagnostic, solution design and delivery: Competence and Organizational Analysis (Needs Assessment), eLearning and Mobile Learning Design and Development, Assessment/Evaluations.Currently she works as an Instructional Designer/Trainer at Gilead Sciences.

VR For Learning

4 Ways to Fail and 4 Ways to Win

by Thomas William Kauer

As I passed through the hallowed gates of Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a facility nestled in a modest corner of Stanford’s communications department, I was delicately herded with a small troupe of fellow nerds to the VR “sanctuary” itself (a space made famous by VR legend Jeremy Bailenson). The simulations began. A room with a pit that physically made you sweat here, an earthquake that caused you to dive under tables there, some NHL goalie saves for luck, a fully haptic floor (complete with helicopter), and some empathy training that addressed deep, racial biases later, and we were done. It was underwhelming, overwhelming, and everything in between.

So here I was, at the apex of VR and application, and it still happened during our debrief of these incredible experiences: the thing. The thing content area experts (and just…people) do when they encounter a new thing. The thing where they apply their thing to that thing and assume the rules they know and understand apply to everything, but specifically the thing they think their thing fits into so well.

It usually sounds like this:

· “Why don’t you just make it a 360 video? That way people can just walk through, and they’ll learn just by seeing everything!” said the producer who has never taken kids on a field trip.

· “I could train surgeons in the African bush without any cadavers — it would scale and help so many people!” said the surgeon not versed in how students using laparoscopic box kits outperform student using VR pretty overwhelmingly.

· “Man, what if we shrunk you down and had kids learn about atoms. Kids won’t be bored of school anymore — I mean — all those atoms, right?!” says the physicist who doesn’t realize kids sitting in microscopic ether, though enthralled at first, suddenly realize that they are just sitting there…in microscopic ether.

And my favorite…

· “Wow, this is so innovative! What if we made a VR classroom…that looks just like a regular classroom…and then used it like a regular classroom…that will fix school for sure!” said a surprising number of really smart software engineers and a not a surprising number of investors.

The Problem

The problem is this: VR is still on the same track as web-based learning, but a little bit behind. Circa a famous TED talk by Daphne Koller (another Stanford legend and co-founder of Coursera) it was all the rage to invest in, take, or teach a MOOC. Universities and schools would quickly be relegated to dusty corners of the Smithsonian, education inequality and race would be all but obliterated, all rural children would have access to education, and finally the crème de la crème of good teachers would rise to the top!

Except that wasn’t the case. It turns out that watching lectures, even good ones, is even more boring in video than in person. It turns out that the largest users of MOOCs are educated men and that in order to watch web-based videos in rural areas, you actually need the internet. It turns out that even though people report wanting to work “anywhere, anytime, and independently” — they actually are more likely to complete the course, retain more, and rate it higher if there is synchronous learning and group work.

The correction came when people started realizing that “Learning Management Systems” (LMS’s) were just “Learning Monotony Systems” if you just threw some homework on them. Now, however, blended learning balance is starting to occur: people have teams, real-world projects, and even simulations, all enhancing the experience and grounding the content. The focus has moved from content curation to user interaction, from the video centered classroom, to the user-centered classroom (constructivism).

But VR is living where online learning was, and many of the problems of perspective are the same. Simply throwing something into VR isn’t going to change outcomes, and in some cases, it will make them worse. A boring classroom in the real world will be the same in VR. Great, the video is in 360, now learners can be distracted in even more places to look versus having a centered, framed focus. I’m glad that surgery is going well (until you start developing bad habits that are no longer corrected by haptic feedback — flesh haptic feedback — not your vibrating controller). Great. You are surrounded by a huge data set…that you understand just as little as you did when you were looking at it on paper.

The 4 Ways to Fail and the 4 Ways to Win in the Design and Use of VR for Learning

Now hear me out: I love VR and I want to live in your strange, 360 atom world. However, I also want you to see past my awe and measure if I actually learned or retained anything. I want you to move beyond focusing on being in VR and move into doing in VR. Here are the 4 ways to fail and the 4 ways to win in the design and use of VR for learning and training:

1: Focus only on immersion (Fail) instead of learning (Win)

Wow. This experience is just so experiential. It’s like I’m really here… I am delighted (truly) that you took some points from Mel Slater on how to induce presence and make someone feel like they are actually “there”. But how do I know someone is learning? How am I going to measure if people understand the content in a deeper way (or at all)? These questions are not whimsical philosophies. They will ground you very quickly. Some examples:

· Bad Example: I watch someone changing a tire in VR (but man is that tire realistic!) — I probably have some advantage when I change the tire myself.

· Better Example: I am taught how to change a tire in VR, then I change the tire in VR — now I have embodied the process.

· Best Example: All of the above, and then I get feedback on how I did, I get to do it again, and data is continuously taken on my progress and reported to me AND other, meaningful stakeholders (learn, do, measure/reflect, learn, do, measure/reflect)

As a point of caution that is distinctly my opinion (whereas the much of this article has a strong research backing): VR can execute presence in such an intense way, that users almost can’t help but propose that they have learned better when compared to a non-VR training. Therefore, finding a less bias way measure learning is incredibly important.

2: Focus only on learning (Fail) instead of transfer (Win)

Learning is important, but the transfer of learning to the real world is really important. Transfer is about what it sounds: can the user or student, after going through your learning experience, actually execute the skill in the intended environment for which the experience was built (when they work independently, in their jobs, in their homes, when they go to college, etc). To borrow a quote from Ernest Cline’s best-seller “Ready Player One,” “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal”, meaning that flipping a pancake in VR may or may not transfer to reality.

For example, the climax of the tire changing simulation would be: “All of the above, AND the learner now changes a real tire in real life to measure transfer.” If transfer is not occurring consistently, your simulation still has a way to go. An iterative, narrative example:

· Bad Example: a chemistry company develops 360 video training where they watch safety procedures because it is more immersive and engaging. The employees report higher levels of engagement and rate the experience favorably. However, when you test whether they can execute the procedures better than those who went through the physical process, they perform lower. (Note: I am assuming failure, but it could also succeed — I am just noting a possible)

· Better Example: All of the above, but the designers of the simulation have users actually interact with content (digital assets, performing and repeating action with high congruency to the real-world experience). Transfer occurs consistently from the simulation to the real world.

· Best Example: All of the above, but now do something dangerous your training couldn’t cover before: what happens when the whole lab explodes? (Check out this article on “VR Training Ideal for Dangerous or Impossible Experiences”)

3: Focus on watching (Fail) instead of building/doing (Win)

I’m going to absolutely die if I have to see another anatomy demo in VR where you see a body…and then the muscle…and then the nerves…and then everything…all labeled…all a million and one parts. Would you learn with that much text and tissue just flying by? I’m certain this will transfer to my new job as a people exploder.

What if, instead, the user learned a little, and then built or assembled the parts? Show the bones connect, now make the user connect the bones, now make the user command the bones (by name, out loud) to connect in certain ways, then have them build and label as they go in small chunks until they work up to larger systems. Doctors note: the irony that I am now applying my thing to your thing is not lost on me — but you get the idea.

But what about geology? You learned about typical riparian erosion patterns. Now you need to build the type of river that is going to create an oxbow lake from memory. Hit play and watch 1,000 years of erosion happen in 1 minute. Were you right? Reflect. Build it again.

You learned about the social failure of ghettos. Now build a city that is more racially and ethnically isolated, and one that is less isolated. Hit play and watch your Sim City-esque decisions unfold.

4: Focus only on the “physical” space (Fail) instead of the context (Win)

Though it might seem counterintuitive, it turns out that in some instances embedding a concept within a more complicated (but real-world) context actual helps learners retain and transfer information. For example, if you are learning about the effects of purchasing in volume, have the user play the role of a supply chain manager ordering a certain amount of concrete. If you are learning about physics, why not learn about aerodynamics by designing a car and then competing against your friends (a real-world and social context)? Instead of playing with digital vocabulary flashcards, have the user order coffee at a VR café while having your speaking metrics captured and recorded for teacher review. Context is endless.

In Summary

If there is one phrase I will always remember from my time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the TIE program, it is this: “Technology is the means, not the mission.” — and that is the bread and butter of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab — but a weakness of those of the the things. Your (and my) good ideas are not enough, immersive graphics are not enough, great UI/UX is not enough, and value propositions are not enough.

So, what is enough? Enough is when learners who use VR actually learn, retain and apply information to the real world as evidenced by being able to perform better than the person next to them who did a different, excellently built, alternative. If this comparison is not done, the terrifying prospect of “the means, not the mission” being ignored is not failure, but success. The success of a viral simulation or company training that achieves rave reviews that ultimately equates to wasted time, effort, and money.

Fortunately for you and I, we share a tempered, thoughtful hope in the future of VR for learning: that VR is a medium that makes life better, not a medium that supplants it, and that although VR in and of itself is not enough, people like you will design it to be so, all in good time.

Let the building begin!

Thomas Kauer grew up on a dead-end road in northern Wisconsin and is now an XR tech nerd. He was a teacher for 7 years, has a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is currently employed at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and has a wife and two small children.

Design Thinking at Stanford

by Justin Willow

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we teach Design Thinking as a very practical set of processes for solving real world issues. One of the principal courses in the subject is called “Startup Garage,” since the emphasis is on quickly formulating new product ideas and launching them as businesses.

This means that course exercises are not just useful as assessments, but are also good guidelines for actual workplace projects. This is especially true in LEAD, our online Executive Education certificate program; assignments let participants try out ideas in nearly real time.

Design is a complex activity, touching on many skills, and the deliverables and activities in the class vary widely. After several iterations of the course, we found that learners wanted a way to synthesize their learning for future projects — a concise, modular reference

We use an online publishing tool called Inkling, which allows us to quickly embed a variety of static and interactive media in a responsive website that learners can acesss even after the course has ended. We decided to use a different site to showcase the learning from each course module. Each “Design Thinking To-Go” site contains:

Exemplars — Completed model assignments

Templates — Structured Google Documents that can be duplicated and filled in depending on the project

Ideas — Inspirations and interim work

Demos — Videos and 3D interactives explaining activities

We collected links to each site in a single pdf, which also lays out the phases of design. We’ve found that learners can quickly refer to these sites in their professional projects, using the templates for workplace deliverables. We hope to continue development of these sites for other courses that would benefit from workplace references.

Justin works at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as Innovation Catalyst. He brings new ideas to learning and teaching, online and on campus. He is especially interested in making complex concepts and processes clearer to learners.

Educational Games and Alternative Learning

by Catherine Zhao

At the Games for Learning meetup, Eddie Melcer, Assistant Professor at the UCSC Department of Computational Media, talked about educational games, with two other guest speakers. After the talk, I interviewed Melcer at his Alternative Learning Technologies and Games Lab to have a deeper understanding of educational games and alternative learning.

Educational games have been around for thousands of years. Plato praised a game that allowed rural children to master farming skills. In the 6th century B.C., Chaturanga, the first multiplayer, military strategy simulation game appeared in ancient India. Today’s most successful educational video games update this ancient tradition by adding the element of fun.

Video games first appeared after World War II with the advent of devices such as transistors and electronic computers. By the 1970s game creators began to combine fun and learning in games that are also known as serious games or functional games. They also teach players to work as a team.

The world’s first education-oriented programming game Logo (not Lego) was born in 1970. Game designer Seymour Papert and Wally Feurzeig incorporated math and programming into the game. Children would learn basic programming knowledge by drawing lines with icons that were shaped like turtles. Later, with the advent of CD players in 1982 and the emergence of networks in the late 1990s, educational video games have evolved with video games.

One glaring weakness in many of these games is that they miss the element of fun, according to Eddie Melcer, Assistant Professor at U.C. Santa Cruz, one of the top computer game development programs in the country. “Not all games with educational purpose are educational games. Many of the so-called educational games are actually chocolate covered broccoli,” Melcer told me when I visited him at his lab. The chocolate is sweet, but the children will still be very disgusted with the broccoli.

Another problem is that many games claim to teach higher skills, but are really just a computer version of basic drills. For example, in recent years, a “play + learn” mathematics learning platform became popular with parents in China. It claims to teach children the basics of mathematical logic. On this platform, instead of a spreadsheet, you will find colorful background and animal cartoons, helping children do arithmetic problems one after another.

And is it fun? Will the children believe that they are playing games? Will, the children, say to their mothers: Mom, let me play math for a while? Probably not.

“Educational elements must be internalized into the game so that everyone can learn the knowledge and skills without knowing it while having the fun of the game,” Melcer explained.

Then how can we make real educational games? Melcer showed me his models at the Alternative Learning Technologies and Games Lab (ALT Game Lab).

What is Alternative Learning? In a narrow sense, alternative education is to teach students with special needs outside the middle school classroom. In a broad sense, it refers to education different from the mainstream, with alternative methods, such as alternative schools, self-study at home, apprenticeship, etc.

“If you think about it, many of the scenes in our lives are based on individuals who are moving, says Melcer. For example, we have to study a door, we have to go over and turn it, and as a researcher, we have to move the body. This door can be studied more thoroughly in the state of contact with the door. However, we may sit in front of the computer for more than ten hours a day, and we need to change that.”

To emphasize physicality, Melcer uses the example of how to construct a building model in a computer game. Many of us have the experience of building a model: sitting at the table, facing the drawings, build it, and complete!

So how does Eddie think of building a model in an alternative way? Eddie puts the built model on the “earthquake table,” which continuously shake the building, so it falls down again and again! Really? Is this to build or destroy a model?

However, in Eddie’s view, this game of “failure” is the best way to learn civil engineering skills. The participant has to explore from which angle the building falls, why it falls, and how to improve it next time. Learning how to fail and learn from it is our goal. And games are the best way to do that.

In Eddie’s ALT Game Lab, there are many fun and educational games. One of the games is to use virtual reality devices to let two people do an experiment at the same time. However, this V.R. device is not ordinary. When you put it on, you see the world through your partner’s eyes. To finish your assignment, you have to ask your partner for help. For example, if you want to pour water into a cup, you need to rely on your partner’s “eyes” to instruct you where the container is, and how much water should be poured it. Most of the time, participants mess up the table as they cannot give clear instructions, or they fail to understand the guidelines with their special V.R. device. Recent research has decried the decline in empathy. Here is a game to teach empathy by seeing the world through other people’s eyes.

Will educational games replace traditional classes someday? Probably not. At this moment, we only supplement conventional courses with a few educational games to strengthen the knowledge and skills the children learned. It is also a challenge to integrate educational elements smoothly into the game. Creating games that are effective in different cultures around the world is one of the many challenges for those who believe gaming is a vital tool of teaching.

Catherine Zhao is an entrepreneur in technology education, as well as a journalist based in Silicon Valley for Chinese readers. She is passionate about talking with interesting and creative people, and volunteering for children. Please let her know if you have a good story of education: suiyucathy123ATgmail.com.

Innovation requires Fiction to get Outside the Box of Science. It’s Time to put the ‘F’ in STEM

By Robert Clegg

Science Fiction usually pops up in a storyline: we’re on another planet, our character time travelled to a past century for a history lesson, or we are exploring the body in a nano-submarine. Fiction is rarely introduced as actual science that the kids are supposed to be using or learning. Like the examples above, we all “know” what is fiction and reality. One really wouldn’t want to cross the line and contradict real science in the process. It would confuse kids. Think of all they would have to unlearn. It would be a disaster… or would it? The following account of the development of a fundamentally inaccurate biological simulation is true. The names have been changed to protect the pedagogically innocent.

It started simply enough. Gamify the immune system for 9th-grade biology. Almost immediately, inaccuracy blasts through the door in any number of shapes and forms. The scale is thrown out the window. The relative size of immune cells can’t be easily replicated on the screen in a game. Although if you think about it, textbooks put pictures in all kinds of scale factors, on the same and facing pages, that have little more than a caption for the scale. That goes for time as well of course. Kids have watched all kinds of slow motion and time elapsed video. Video games do the same. Color? There’s no color inside the body. But everyone is willing to let the color fiction go unquestioned. So, as we played with exciting shapes and designs for different cells represented in the game, it became more of a question of design, not reality, as to which direction we would pursue. But it wouldn’t be the art choices that proved hazardous.

The idea of representing the immune system as an RTS (Real Time Strategy) was our starting point. We presented the idea of making a simulation of the immune system that players could influence by taking control of any of the cells during the session; think Chess with fluid movement. There would be two teams: Pathogen vs. Immune. Our grand vision was to make this a multiplayer game so the whole classroom could work together or compete in real time. But the first iteration for this project was to be a single player. So far so good, right? Sounds cool. Next steps were to figure out game and curriculum objectives, cell features, player controls, and… player control? Nobody questioned it! It sounds perfectly fine. But that’s because you are an adult who knows how the biological system works not a player/gamer who doesn’t know how they are “supposed” to behave. Kids want to break things as much as they want to “explore.” At this point though, we had no idea how far things could be broken.

Most “edu-games” present highly controlled false choices that constrict outcomes. Hey, you “feel” like you are exploring with a lot of dead-end paths until you get the “right” answer, the answer the curriculum demands. Strange how everyone ends up learning precisely the same thing. That kind of game design is great for teaching facts, not creative or strategic thinking. This generation faces a world where innovation is required. But how do you teach innovation when there are particular curriculum objectives in the form of facts? The answer to this emerges from the how not the what.

Emergence is a phenomenon that describes complexity and innovation. It takes time, through iteration, to reveal new behaviors in a dynamic system. Even simple systems produce mixed results. Chess is an excellent example of how simple rules in a simply confined space, an 8x8 board, can create complexity. In fact, for centuries Chess was considered a measure of human intelligence. We now measure a computer’s ability to “think” by playing against Chess masters and Go players. So, we had loosely framed the simulation of the immune system as a fluid game of Chess. Real Time Strategy is a better-known name for this game genre. But the aspects of the game that laid the groundwork for the strange emergence to follow was based in our most fundamental and entirely accepted assumptions.

This was to be a 2d game in a browser with cells that we all just kind of assumed would act like squishy slow-motion bumper cars. Early in the game design, we just sort of let the curriculum team knows that we would base the collision of cells on the relative size of the objects. We were trying to simulate the feel of being in a fluid. So, every cell had a momentum. As we tuned the initial design, it looked and felt great! If you already knew how the body and cells worked, the game began to play beautifully. The only problem is, students, don’t know how the body is supposed to work. And many gleefully hack the system looking for any exploit to win. That brings us to our next strangely accepted fictional assumption: player control.

Player control? All of a sudden, cells have a mind, a will, a choice of where to go? Of course, that’s how the player will learn, accomplish cellular tasks, explore cellular features and purpose. The idea was to gently accelerate the simulation based on the action of the cells the player controlled. Let the player mutate earlier, move a little faster, get to destinations a little faster, defend and destroy a little faster too. As we added flocking behaviors to different classes of cells, the game became enjoyable. By taking control of one cell, you could bring a whole flock of similar cells to other areas that needed attention. It all looked so good and felt completely organic until the “wrong” things started happening.

Here’s what players were saying as I watched early testing: “Hey look! If you hide behind this huge thing, it takes all the damage, and you can totally wipe those other things out.” “Oh, watch this! Jump in this big one. Move out all those others and then switch control over to this other thing to make it through the opening.” “I just mutate everything over here and wait for all the enemy cells to leave this part unguarded.”

Yikes, we’ve been hacked! Players were using the physics of the cells to push other cells like ramrods, hide behind other cells like shields, and do a whole lot of stuff they weren’t supposed to be doing. Not to mention doing things that don’t really happen in the body. In fact, when we started balancing the game (making the teams even inability so you can play either side), we were coming up short with cells from the curriculum that could effectively combat the virus team. We suggested adding nanotechnologies as playable objects. These fictional items could be designed to meet our specific needs, like distributing mucous to slow down invaders. We got super excited about the ability to create barriers made of blobs. It added some fun and diversity of play. Here’s a piece of concept art for a mucous blobber that never made it into the game:

But wow, the push back was instant. No nano-tech. We can only guess this direction was rejected because it was fictional and outside the curriculum. Maybe they thought kids would be confused and think there were such things as mucous blobbers inside the body. So, we created a more industrial version so they wouldn’t be mistaken as organic:

But these versions were an immediate no-go as well. It was not within the bounds of the curriculum. Class units are usually meant to lead into the next unit. The focus is on facts. The goal is not to teach a new mindset, it is to hurry up and get through this “game” so you have learned all the features of the cells and can pass the quiz. There is no assessment for strategic or creative thinking while learning. We can’t grade that, report it, or reward it. In fact, we discourage it because it looks like fooling around. The more kids are laughing, having fun, and shouting about their tricky victories, the more we think they are off task. Strategic and creative thinking won’t be on the test.

But exploits and hacks aren’t the hallmarks of poor game design. They are actually essential for understanding and setting up more complex strategies. Even a game of Chess can be won in three or four moves by novices. You can also lose pieces on purpose to gain an advantage later. Advantage may be positional, not material. All kinds of strategies have evolved in chess. Poor play extinguishes over time as players learn and face tougher competition.
So, did this physics problem need fixing or is it an opening to expand the innovation mindset of young learners?

Well, from the classroom perspective, yes, it needs to be fixed. There’s not enough time to let kids play like this. Students need to learn real facts quicker and faster so we can get to the following units. It’s not even real science.
From the 21st century perspective, this kind of learning is way overdue. Students know what fictional aspects of games, textbooks, and simplified scientific models need to be cast aside as they learn more about the complexities of the systems they are studying. It’s the innovation mindset that needs to be developed through creative and strategic thinking. These students are the ones who will be finding the cures of tomorrow. It’s time to start fostering this mindset now as students learn.

As for the final game, we ended up striking a happy medium. We added a dashboard that tracked all the functions players used in the game. Completion required the player, “check all the boxes” by playing each cell and discovering all the features each cell had. This ensured the player learned the curriculum while also leading to more interesting play.

Time and budget did not allow us to create a multiplayer version. Just like Chess, that would have extinguished the clear winning strategies. But who knows, there might have emerged other “wrong” strategies as well; no doubt, complex and well thought out. That would have been amazing to emerge. Incidentally, just like player rankings in Chess, this is how you asses creative and strategic thinking. Players and teams who rise to the top have demonstrated the critical thinking skills required to defeat other humans.

Epilogue
As many in the edtech development world have seen, the Foundation that funded the project moved on to other priorities by the time development was finished; they couldn’t field a pitch for new and extended applications. The curriculum team moved on to full-time jobs in disparate places since their masters and doctoral research was finished. Senior management wouldn’t entertain a spin-off to develop the game into a world-class title fearing “brand confusion” with their other curriculum efforts. It appeared the development teams’ desire to push the boundaries of science and learning clashed with traditional pedagogy.

Years later, more teachers are aware of the sophistication of games. Perhaps now is the time for multiplayer biology, complete with virus AI and nano-technology. Below is a peek into our own vision for an advanced game based learning approach to biology that develops an innovation mindset, a petri dish of mutation, technology, and competition … and assessment.

Robert Clegg created the first action adventure video game and multiplayer network to teach algebra reaching over 5M students. He’s currently working on his next venture, the Virtual Robotics League, that will turn robotics education and tournaments into an eSport.

Lacuna — an Annotation based Reading Platform

By Fyza Parviz

Lacuna is an open-source annotation based reading platform developed by Stanford’s Poetic Media Lab. It allows students and instructors to annotate texts and images digitally and gives the students the ability to engage with the text socially. Lacuna’s features allow instructors to leverage the possibilities of digital social annotation and create innovative assignments, including a “sewing kit” feature that enables students to stitch together annotations as outlines for writing assignments. The instructors can assess the students’ work through the interactive dashboard, built using D3.js, which gives instructors a “bird’s-eye view” of the student’s annotations. Hence, Lacuna is a platform for students to socially read and annotate assigned course texts and for faculty members to monitor students progress to help their students develop critical thinking and writing skills.

Lacuna has been used in classrooms both at Universities and Community Colleges. Lacuna has been deployed at Stanford, Berkeley, University of Michigan, Los Positas, and Foothill College.

Lacuna provides an engaging reading platform for the students to pursue their intellectual ambitions. It brings to an online platform the classroom methods that instructors use to teach students, e.g., ability to collaborate, becoming passionate readers and critical thinkers. Lacuna’s annotation platform helps students immerse in scholarly discussions that result in intensive cultivation of their minds. By actively reading and annotating, students enter into dialogue with the texts: their voices live alongside that of the author. They negotiate and engage with multiple perspectives by viewing and replying to one another’s annotations. They can also share writing that links directly to their annotations. The instructors can also be involved in supervising the student to clarify and deepen their understanding of the texts. Through these activities, Lacuna seeks to create participatory communities of self-confident learners.

You can learn more about Lacuna by visiting https://www.lacunastories.com

Fyza Parviz is a co-organizer of the Innovative Technologies for Learning Meetup. She is currently a graduate student in the Humanties at Stanford. She is part of Stanford’s Poetic Media Lab and works as a Researcher on the Lacuna Project. Previously she worked as a Software Engineer at Apple.

She also likes to write about Tech and the Humanities on her Medium Blog.

Conference report — Learning Analytics in the SF Bay Area

By Valerie Pierre

Emma Brunskill, Assistant professor in Computer Science, Stanford University, presenting on “AI for Adaptive Curriculum”. Photo: Joshua Weiss

On March 2nd 2019, I went to the Bay Area Learning Analytics Conference (BayLAN). Researchers and industry professionals in the field of learning analytics local to the SF Bay Area shared their work and engaged in stimulating discussions.

This 4th edition of this spin-off of the Society of Learning Analytics and Research (SoLAR) network was held at Stanford Graduate School of Education. It featured presentations from renowned speakers from academia and the industry, parallel deep-dive sessions, and a panel discussion about best practices in efficacy research. I captured the following highlights from two of the speakers.

Mitchell Stevens, Director of the Center of Advanced Research through Online Learning (CAROL) at Stanford University opened the conference by providing context and raising ethical questions about the use of data in higher education.

Mitchell Stevens providing some context before diving into the topic of responsible use of student data
in higher education. Photo: Valerie Pierre

Compared to the traditional classroom, the web does not entail physical or temporal boundaries; it commingles multiple jurisdictions whose relations are now being negotiated; it implies no particular sovereignty over content and evaluation. Another fact, the academic record is being remade. With those in mind, Mitchell Stevens asked the following questions:

What data goes in the record, what does not, and who decides?
Do educators/researchers have a responsibility to use/not use student data in some ways?
Who owns the data (and the records)?
Do we have adequate language for talking about these things?

Mitchell Stevens raising the questions about privacy, property, anonymity, security, transcript,
informed consent. Photo: Valerie Pierre

Privacy, property, anonymity, security, transcript, informed consent, are these 6 words a fantasy? We should all reach a shared understanding. For further reading on this topic, read “Setting the Table: Responsible Use of Student Data in Higher Education” and check out ru.stanford.edu.

Shivani Rao, Senior Applied Researcher at LinkedIn Learning, gave an overview of the data-driven methods the platform uses in search and discovery (course recommendation, why/context, carousel). She talked about micro-content for micro learning and showcased ways of getting more content understanding (extracting topics, tags, and skills from content).

Shivani Rao giving an overview of AI problems applied to the domain of online learning. Photos: Valerie Pierre

Other experts in the field who presented that day were: Adam Blum, Senior Director Emerging Technologies at ACT, Zachary Pardos, Assistant professor of Education and Information at UC Berkeley and Emma Brunskill, Assistant professor in Computer Science at Stanford University.

If you want to dive deeper in those subjects or engage with the learning analytics community, go check out BayLAN and SOLAR websites, you’ll find more details about their next events and their past conferences. You can also check out the BayLAN19 conference presentations here and tweets here.

Making eLearning Stick

By Claudia Medina

Training a workforce to use skills at a rapid pace has led learning and development (L&D) practitioners to seek new ways to tackle old learning problems. Helping learners to overcome the forgetting curve is a pressing one.

Most of us forget on average 70 percent of what we learn within 24 hours of the learning experience. After that, forgetting begins to slow, and the last 30 percent diminishes gradually in about a week. A renew interest on strategies to tackle the forgetting curve emerged in the last five years. Experts on memory and learning such as Henry Roediger, Adam Putman and others published books and articles on actionable data on long term memory. The novel toolset includes technologies for learning.

Experts identified two powerful strategies to make learning stick: retrieval practice and spaced learning. Retrieval practice, or the testing effect, is the idea that taking a test enhances later retention because tests require a form of retrieving from memory. In other words, retrieving a memory make it easier to retrieve that memory in the future. Spacing means that repeated study over a period of time results in more effective learning.

How do instructional technologies empower learners to retain information for a longer time? How do they foster retrieval practice and spaced learning? An example for in-service training that helps with retrieval practice and spacing is Osmosis.org. Osmosis, for example, uses mobile and Web based software to provide learners access to thousands of crowdsourced practice questions and explanations. Osmosis combines the spaced quizzes and social networking to facilitate student-driven social learning. Qstream, another example, offers a platform that helps trainers by sending learners periodic quizzes via their mobile devices to strengthen learning through spaced retrieval practice. These two examples embody strategies that L&D practitioners can mimic to make training memorable.

To learn more about this topic, read Make it stick, The Science of Successful Learning and From the Laboratory to the Classroom, Translating Science of Learning for Teachers, Chapter 6, Improving Student Learning, Two Strategies to Make it Stick.

Thank You for reading our first zine. Please send us a message if you enjoyed our content and would like to submit an article for future editions. Our email address is: innovativetechlearning@gmail.com

Also check out our Meetup page to interact with fellow learning technology enthusiasts and also to keep up to date about our exciting upcoming events: https://www.meetup.com/Learning-Innovations-Meetups