Playing a Different Game

Games of all kinds (video games, card games, board games) are increasingly becoming a part of the educator's toolbox of ways to engage students in learning.  Providing a context for learning that is closer to what the student finds at home can be invaluable.  As we've discussed in my classes this semester, learning is a cultural activity, and we already bring our lives and our culture into any learning opportunity.  Games can make the educational setting more conducive to learning, as they are part of our non-school cultural environment. 

Given my obvious penchant for games in an educational context, then, it may surprise you to know that I do not agree with Pacific Standard correspondent Alex Berezow, who believes that kids should be required to learn chess in school.  Why, if games are so valuable to the learning experience would I not want the ancient, grand game of chess taught to our students?  I'm so glad I asked on your behalf.

There was a time when it was believed that a set of core principles should be taught in schools to prepare students for life outside of school.  This included not only the "3 Rs", but also courses like Latin.  Latin was believed to be a noble language, used by great classical philosophers and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  It was believed that for a student to learn the language would sharpen the mind, making it more rigorously logical.  Berezow points at a study that indicates a possible link between chess and greater cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills.  However, as he notes, there could be other factors besides chess, or it could be a group of higher-IQ students inclined towards chess in the first place.  Still, chess is popular around the world, and Armenia has made chess a required subject for its purported cognitive enhancement.

Well, that sounds great, but basically, this is the same "exercising the brain as a muscle" strategy that underlies things like brain-training games.  The idea being that by using the brain to process information, that somehow makes it more capable of processing information in the future.  But Latin isn't something we use every day.  Nor is chess.  For kids today, these things are cognitively inert, something to learn long enough to get through class, and then more than likely never used again.  Hmm...that sounds familiar.  Oh wait, I know, it's basically the same argument used against teaching to maximize test scores. 

Another aspect of the "teach chess to everyone" idea is that chess isn't FOR everyone.  If everything we learn is learned in the context of the culture in which its learned, then chess just isn't going to fit in every situation.  Oh, I'm not saying there are groups who CAN'T learn chess.  Berezow correctly points out that chess is popular around the globe.  Anyone can learn the rules.  But it's not part of most people's everyday lives, and would make an awkward fit for some.  So you get the dubious brain training, but even that is applied scattershot amongst the people who actually take to chess. 

Personally, I'm not good at chess.  I can play it.  I know the rules.  But man, I suck at it.  I'm just not good at the planning many steps ahead that's required.  I can rip through video games (though even there, I lag behind kids who've grown up in this era's video game culture), I'm a wiz at logic puzzles, and I'm reasonably creative.  But chess?  Not so much.  Maybe I'm just projecting my own questionable abilities on the rest of the world.  But I'd rather have kids playing games they actually like, because they're way more likely to actually learn from it.  If we could teach GAMES in school, well, I'd be all for it.  Because there are nearly as many ways to learn and things to learn as there are people to learn them.

Homework of the Dead: "Zombie-Based Learning"

If there's one thing I like more than video games, it's zombies.  I've been a horror movie junkie for as long as I can remember, and so I've just about grown up with the living dead.  And today, zombies are "in".  Between TV shows like "The Walking Dead" and movies like the upcoming Brad Pitt zombie thriller "World War Z" (itself based upon the vastly superior book by Max Brooks) and Twilightesque "Warm Bodies", zombies are enjoying a popularity boom not seen since the 1970s.

So, what does that have to do with education, you ask?  Well, as it happens, someone has managed to squash the two together into one great gooey grey gob of learning.  David Hunter, a teacher in Seattle, Washington, designed a comprehensive, standards-based course that uses a zombie apocalypse as a framework for teaching geography, and launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds to develop it.  Over 350 backers donated nearly $12000 for Hunter to build the course, with an accompanying graphic novel.  Since then, Hunter has launched "Zombie-Based Learning" website, where for $9.95 a month, teachers have access to the course materials needed to teach geography in a whole new way.

"Zombie-Based Learning" teaches skills like map reading (for mapping out the progress of the zombies), mental mapping (used to consider strategies for supply gathering), and community planning (for rebuilding civilization once the threat is over.)  With teachers constantly looking for new ways to engage their students, I think it's fantastic to see a teacher really going outside of the box to infect kids with knowledge.

Re-humanizing Information Processing

 “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ― Anaïs Nin

There's an interesting article on Slate today called "Explain It to Me Again, Computer," written by author Samuel Arbesman, an "applied mathematician and network scientist."  Those aren't sarcasm quotes, by the way; it's how he describes himself.  But I have to say, this article makes me wonder if he isn't too focused on computer networks, overlooking the human informational networks that lead to the discoveries he talks about.

"I'm sorry, Dave.  I can't let you read that."

Basically, Arbesman states that computers can do calculations, data mine for associations, and combine vast amounts of information in far greater complexity than any human is able.  Given the enormous quantities of scientific research, it can be extremely difficult for people to make connections between disparate pieces of research.  Theoretically, a computer might assemble a piece of scientific truth that combines research that no one has thought to combine before.  As such, it may find a truth that no one person comprehends.  From there, one assumes, it's merely a few steps to sentience and world domination, and we'll never even know it happened.  I, for one, welcome our new machine scientist overlords.

My disagreement with Arbesman is that this constitutes something we "can't understand."  Knowledge isn't binary, locked in a single head.  Knowledge, especially as expressed in science, is a collective experience.  So while no one person might understand the whole of this new scientific truth, perhaps humanity as a whole can, and eventually that will get synthesized down into something more easily understood by (extremely knowledgeable expert) individuals.  The principle of collaborative learning is based on this very idea, that a group can construct a model of understanding, using the variety of existing knowledge and experience, that is greater than any individual can manage.

To digress momentarily from the subject of this evening's symposium (with apologies to Tom Lehrer for nicking his joke), how does this have anything to do with pop culture?  I suppose I could blame collaborative "learning" (and those ARE sarcasm quotes this time) on the acceptance of really awful music making it more likely to occur, but that's not quite what I have in mind.  Actually, as I'm typing this, I'm not really sure what I DO have in mind, so this will be an adventure for all of us.

This one is 103% true.

Okay, got it.  Movies.  We love them, right?  Sure we do.  However, I'm guessing some of you teachers feel a bit of dread whenever you see the words "based on a true story" in the titles.  Especially if it's something of actual historical or cultural significance.  Take, for example, the recent Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln."  Most people seemed pleased overall with the film, but the Connecticut Representative Jim Courtney took issue with its incorrect depiction of the Connecticut congressmen voting against the 13th Amendment, essentially supporting slavery.  Whether you see it as an insult, or simply write it off as storytelling license, in either case it's factually incorrect.  There are numerous depictions of Lincoln in movies about his life, or about the Civil War.  It would be a labor of lunacy for one person to try to watch every movie with Lincoln in it and cross reference them for factual and non-factual claims.  But a class of students, taking them on either individually or in small groups, could compile that list much easier.  Once that's done, you have them share what they've found, both true and false-but-believed-true, thereby building a collective portrait of your subject.

The range of historical events and persons depicted in books, comics, movies, video/board games is expansive, so you  can be teaching most any subject and still be able to do this.  Yes, even Math.  Maybe our kids will use that collaborative learning to learn not only about their topic, but maybe a bit of critical thinking savvy when it comes to learning from the movies.  If I can stop just one book report from talking about Mozart's second career as a rock star in 80s, I'll consider it a rousing success.

Games Without Frontiers

"Just one game," they said, and started to play – that was yesterday.  –  Chinese proverb

In my everyday life, I'm a gamer.  To a lot of people, especially the younger folks, a "game" means a video game, or maybe a Facebook game, and a "gamer" is someone who plays a lot of video games.  There's been a fair amount of research on video games and their use in education, and at some point I'm sure I'll be talking about using video games, but that's not what this is about.

For me, being a gamer is also about other types of gaming: card games, board games, and role-playing games (RPG).  Everyone is familiar on some level with board games and card games, if only the more popular board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Life, or the standard 52-card deck of playing cards.  "Role-playing games" may seem confusing until I mention arguably the most famous of them: Dungeons and Dragons.  Which is good, though it can present some challenges in the overcoming of stereotypes.

We almost never sell our souls to Satan these days.

That games can be used in an educational manner is nothing particularly new.  Monopoly, for example, got its start as "The Landlord's Game", and was meant to show players the dangers in the tenant/landlord dynamic.  The rise of the "Euro game" has opened up the possibilities even further. 

"Settlers of Catan", a popular Euro game

The Euro game, as opposed to the more traditionally American "thematic games", tends to be more abstract, requiring a fair amount of strategy and critical thinking in order to be successful.  Luck (in the form of dice rolling or card selection) is still present, but tends to be minimized.  Katrin Becker, in discussing the way video games balance luck and user interaction, says "One of the key aspects of successful games is how well they balance between randomness and predictability – a game that is too predictable quickly becomes boring, yet one that is too unpredictable appears random, and players do not feel in control." (p.3)  By focusing on player strategies, Euro games tend to be pretty good at striking that balance.

Brenda Brathwaite is primarily a video game programmer.  She's worked on the seminal RPG video game Wizardry 8, and currently works on reclaiming Facebook games from the horrors of farming and clicking-as-gameplay.  In 2008, however, she decided to delve into the world of physical board games as a way of abstractly explaining and engaging with emotionally heavy historical concepts.  In her Ted talk in 2011, Brathwaite describes using game play as a way of explaining the Middle Passage slave trade route to her daughter, then 7 years old.  The daughter describes what she had learned, then asks "Can I play a game?"

And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house. So I said, "Yeah, you can play a game," and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families. ... So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat. ... And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things." And she says, "They want to go." And I said, "Honey, no they don't want to go. This is the Middle Passage. Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage." So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother, and as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, "We're not going to make it." And she realizes, you know, we don't have enough food, and so she asks what to do, and I say, "Well, we can either" -- Remember, she's seven -- "We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick and we make it to the other side." And she -- just the look on her face came over and she said -- now mind you this is after a month of -- this is Black History Month, right? After a month she says to me, "Did this really happen?" And I said, "Yes." And so she said, "So, if I came out of the woods" — this is her brother and sister — "If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone." "Yes." "But I'd get to see them in America." "No." "But what if I saw them? You know, couldn't we stay together?" "No." "So Daddy could be gone." "Yes." And she was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, and I started to cry, and her father started to cry, and now we're all crying. He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes.

Gaming, any kind of gaming, is about connections.  You're not actually killing orcs or fighting a fire, one assumes, but if you can't IMAGINE that you are, then the game fails.  (Assuming you're playing a game that involves killing orcs or fighting fires, of course.)  You're not really building a farm, being a pirate, or making your enemies sleep with the fishes.  Games allow you to simulate situations that you will never find yourself acting out in life, and can allow you to make connections to difficult concepts in a safe environment. What impressed me most about Brathwaite's game concept, apart from just being envious that she was able to come up with it on the fly, is that she didn't have to didactically spell out anything.  She allowed the game conceit, and her daughter's decisions, lead her daughter to an understanding of the larger context at work.

Another game she designed, mentioned briefly in her Ted talk, is called Train.  This isn't a commercial game, nor could it ever be.  The eponymous trains are meant to be loaded with people, and the destination of those people, well, I think you can see how that game ends.  Blogger Tracy Wilson had an opportunity to play Train, and as the players realized early on that they were loading trains in Nazi Germany, she empathized with these virtual victims to the point where she attempted to derail another player's train, and refused to move her own out of the station.

I should stress here that this is one of those areas where parents may have more ability to explore than teachers.  Most games have a social component to them, but they are generally designed for 2-6 players.  Many of them, due to the somewhat complex concepts which they're simulating, can take more time to play than is possible in a single class period.  Some of them can wrap up in less than an hour, it's true, but there are games that require several hours to play to completion, and that only goes up the more players there are.  I think this is one of the ways in which Brathwaite's game is particularly ingenious, in that her daughter didn't have to play it to completion to understand the concepts that were being played out.  Other more traditionally-designed games can not only teach concepts, but also teamwork.  A game like Pandemic, for instance, introduces cooperative play as a prerequisite for success.  The players are fighting disease outbreaks, and each player has a particular role to play.  If they don't work together, they can't succeed.  And either everybody wins, or nobody wins. 

I'm trying very hard not to turn this into a "cool games Brian likes" post.  Part of what makes a good game is in details that are very difficult to explain in a blog post.  A game like Settlers of Catan isn't fun because collecting resources and building settlements is inherently exciting.   It's the strategy and interaction with the other players, the mechanics of the game, which fuel the "action" of the game.  But the thematic elements provide an emotional hook that, when it works, can provide the teachable moments.  The interaction between players, and between the players and the game, allows the exchange of information and skills that they can then take out of the game and into the real world.  As Brathwaite says, "We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so."

Buy the ticket, take the ride: An Introduction.

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

Greetings.  My name is Brian McDonald, and I want to talk to you about pop culture, and (hopefully) how you can use it to build links between schoolwork and the larger world.  When we talk about "pop culture", there is frequently a sort of sneering quality to the discussion.  Pop culture is "Twilight", freakshow reality television, and grotesquely violent video games.  What could it possibly have of value in an educational setting?  I will explain over the coming weeks.  Let me begin by telling you a bit about me.

First off, I will throw out this caveat that I am not, in any sense, an educational authority.  I am currently a month into a Master of Educational Technology program, and this blog is, in fact, part of my coursework.  I have worked on the periphery of the educational system, first as a designer and prototyper for the parent company of the University of Phoenix, and now as a content production specialist for Pearson, the book publishing company, moving and installing digital content for K-12 online textbooks.  My goal with the Masters program is to move into instructional design.

Second, I am a huge pop culture geek.  I have referred to myself as an "input junkie", and my tastes are as broad as my attention span is sometimes short.  I wouldn't necessarily call myself an EXPERT in popular culture, but that is mainly because the subject is so diverse that global expertise is largely impossible.  I might be able to win at a game show, though.  Qualification enough for a blog, I should think.

So, who are you?  Well, some of you are my classmates, and hopefully you'll find this blog something more than merely an obligation to read.  Some of you, I hope, are teachers.  Teachers who are always looking for new ways to connect with their students, and not afraid to do a little out-of-the-box thinking to do it.  And last, but certainly not least, I hope some of you are parents.  A teacher can pull any number of tricks out of his or her hat to teach a child, and if the parents are engaged as well as the student, it becomes easier for that teaching to succeed.  I hope that as you read my strange ideas some of them resonate, and you may find yourself talking with your kids about some of them. 

Given the drubbing that pop culture frequently takes, you might be asking yourself what possible value it could have in a child's education.  What possible connection could you find between social studies and "Survivor", between math and "Monopoly"?  Well, I'm not going to tell you right now.  What, you want me to ruin all of the surprises?

I will, however, tell you a couple of stories:

I played trumpet back in high school.  I was in marching band, symphonic band, and the jazz band. While I had natural talent, I wasn't especially motivated.  I don't know if that was common among students in my school, or if I was just a terrible student.  I suspect a little of both. The band director, Mr. D, was a good guy, who really wanted his students to not only engage with the music we were playing, but music in general.  One day, during symphonic band, he set up a record player at the front of the class, and played the entire 17-minte epic, Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida".

As it went on, Mr. D picked out various parts of the song, explaining the musical tricks, trying to impart the COOL of the piece.  He didn't really have to convince us much.  It was a bit longer than our MTV-addled brains would normally have handled, but I don't recall anyone complaining much.

Another time, in Jazz band, he played for us Maynard Ferguson's neo-big-band cover of Herbie Hancock's song "Chameleon".  Again, the sheer brashness of the music had us riveted, in a way I wouldn't have expected at the time.  Jazz band aside, my tastes ran more to Electric Light Orchestra and Thomas Dolby, but this was just undeniably electric for me.

While songs from 1968 and 1974 weren't exactly "pop culture" at the time, a decade after "Chameleon" came out, they were part of a broader musical landscape that Mr. D was trying to bring into the classroom.  His efforts to get us to connect with the music, not just play it, changed the course of MY life, certainly.  There's a pernicious tendency in many people to just keep listening to whatever music they liked in high school or college, and decry anything after that as inherently inferior.  By bringing in a psychedelic rock epic into the symphonic music class, and by bringing a rock/funk/big band piece into jazz band (and then having us play it, which if you just listened to it you know is crazy talk), I firmly believe that Mr. D short-circuited that musical apathy in me, and gave me a much better, broader appreciation for music as a whole.

Much later, I would become the step-parent of a daughter, Kyla, who is on the high-functioning end of the Autism spectrum, and it is her that my second story concerns.  One of the challenges that a person with Autism can face is a difficulty, or even inability, to recognize facial expressions and non-verbal cues.  As you probably know, non-verbal communication makes up a huge percentage of any face-to-face communication, so this can be a serious problem.

Our household has always had a high geek quotient.  I refer to us as "Casa de los Weirdos".  Kyla is no exception to this.  From an early age, Kyla was into Japanese animation, or "anime".  For the uninitiated, anime in Japan is a huge industry, and the storylines can cover nearly anything.  There are series with giant robots, schoolgirl romance, basketball; there's even an anime about the game Go.  Kyla's anime of choice in the early days was called "Cardcaptor Sakura", a magical schoolgirl anime, though we watched a variety of them.  Now, anime tends to be very stylized in some ways.  Facial expressions are frequently exaggerated.

We discovered fairly early on that Kyla was able to follow the anime in part because the facial expressions were made easy to read.  With this in mind, we encouraged her to see if she could spot similar expressions on regular American television shows.  I won't kid you and say it happened overnight, but gradually, Kyla became better and better at recognizing facial expressions after having that foundation established by watching the anime.  And here's why the parental engagement is so crucial.  My wife Cinder helped create a non-profit that helped teens and young adults on the spectrum, as well as their parents or caregivers, deal with the issues that arise out of transitioning, either from high school to college, or out into the "real world."  We've dealt with dozens of parents over the years, and I've told this story of Kyla and the anime several times.  More than once I've been met with a blank look, or an outright scoffing that "that anime crap" could have any redeeming qualities.  Whether it's because it's just too outside the norm for some people, or whether the parents equate anime with it's more adult forms (and there are VERY adult animes), they were resolutely resistant to the idea, even after being told of its therapeutic value.

Kids respond better to learning when it relates in some way to their outside interests.  This seems to me to be so mind-bogglingly obvious, and yet a study was published recently in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that determined "incorporating the student with [Autism Spectrum Disorder's] special interests into activities may help improve their socialization with typical peers." (Kogel, Kim, Kogel, Schwartzmann 2013).  Can I get a "duh"?  What's that?  I should be more professional?  Well, okay, if you insist.

I am in no way suggesting that we replace text books with comic books, or teachers with televisions.  The traditional methods of learning aren't going to be displaced by pop culture any time soon, nor would I want them to be.  But if you can form solid positive associations between what children are learning at school and what they're doing for fun, that's going to be the knowledge that sticks.

In the days to come, I'm going to be talking about how you can use television, the internet, video games, and even tabletop games as teaching tools for your kids.  While I may have some fanciful notions as to how these things might be accomplished, when it comes down to it, I'm not a teacher.  I may be talking about something that is no way relevant to your classroom situation.  If that's the case, I hope that you'll comment, and set me straight.  Or if you think that something COULD work, I'd like to hear about that too.  This isn't a manifesto; it's a dialogue.  Hopefully we'll all learn something.

Be seeing you.

Hello World

Coming soon...