Learning games that shine

It's a short, hilarious retrospective of an eventful 2011, including our breathless excitement at winning the first National STEM Challenge Developer's Prize, the human cost of our expanded HQ, and our newest BFFs.

Along with his look back at Filament's latest developments, Dan recorded a few words of inspiration for developers looking to enter the next STEM Challenge. You'll take a look if you know what's good for you.

The piece cuts between Washington's iCivics coordinators, speaking with clear enthusiasm about the program's promise, and an actual middle school student, walking the viewer through Do I Have a Right! with clear enthusiasm for the game. It's a short, snappy little show you can watch for free at TVW.org.

MM: I don’t really consider myself a “key figure” but I would say that I’m making a unique contribution to special education. For years students with special needs were taught in self-contained classrooms and excluded from general education courses. Now, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act stipulates that students with special education needs are included in general education classrooms to the greatest extent possible. This means that teachers need to consider instruction and assessment options for a diverse range of students including students with disabilities, struggling readers, English language learners, and students who are gifted.

My background is distinctive because I have a diverse range of teaching experiences ranging from alternative high school settings for students with special education needs to teaching general education science, technology, and social studies in an inclusive general education middle school. I also was a learning specialist for college students with disabilities and a professional development center coordinator at the University of Connecticut. Those experiences, combined with my degrees in special education, general education, and pre-veterinary animal science, give me a different perspective than the majority of my colleagues in special education.

EM: What's your history with video games, in and out of an educational context?

MM: Now you’re making me feel old. My first video game console was the Atari 2600 with the wood veneer finish. I was probably in 3^rd grade. Back in those days we had games like Pac-Man, Pitfall, and Space Invaders. I can remember my mom giving me a hard time because I used to break a lot of joysticks and we didn’t have the money to replace them… or maybe she just told me that to get me to stop playing! More recently, I’ve been playing Kinect Adventures with my daughter and Forza 3 with my wife. Red Dead Redemption is one of my favorites and I just started playing L.A. Noire.

As for games in education, throughout my career I found that technology-based learning experiences, especially video games, were extremely engaging for all students, including those with special needs. The problem was that most games did not include evidence-based instruction practices. The work I am doing with Filament Games is so exciting because we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop video games that meet the unique learning needs of ALL students both in and outside of the classroom.

EM: You're collaborating with Filament on a number of projects: the U.S. Department of Education-funded (and STEM Challenge-winning!) You Make Me Sick, the pilot game in our Game-enhanced Life Science (GILS) suite, and the National Science Foundation-supported Prisoner of Echo, which is the first in a series of Game-enhanced Physical Science (GIPS) games. Can you talk a little about your history with Filament and your essential role in developing these games?

MM: I met Dan Norton about two years ago and he introduced me to Dan White. There was a natural synergy among us and we decided to use our respective talents to put together some really cutting edge grant proposals. Apparently other people were as excited about the projects as we are since several of them were funded. I was responsible for articulating the need for the project, education design aspects of the games and the research design to determine their efficacy. It has been a ton of work but we’re getting closer to our objectives and always improving. Having a partnership like this really benefits everyone, especially students and teachers.

EM: We're building Universal Design for Learning concepts into each of these games in order to support and engage different kinds of learners. Can you explain UDL in a nutshell?

MM: UDL is a framework for designing educational environments that are accessible to a broad range of students. David Rose and Jenna Gravel presented a useful analogy that I’ll summarize here. UDL is the educational equivalent to a Global Positioning System. The GPS presents the user with navigation options like all highway travel, scenic byways, stop for a burger, find a hotel, etc. in order to reach the final destination in a way that is most meaningful and efficient to the traveler.

With UDL, the learning objectives are the final destination. We include a number of options in every video game so that the learner can choose their path to reach the learning goals. For example, we include narrative overlays of all of the text so that students who struggle with reading can hear complex vocabulary read to them. This minimizes the cognitive load students must expend decoding and comprehending text. Other students can disable the audio and read it for themselves. UDL is based on three core principles that are designed to stimulate different areas of the brain and enhance learning. You can learn more about it at http://cast.org/udl/index.html.

EM: I've been reading some statistics. 73% of students with disabilities score below basic in eighth grade science, and 64% score below basic in math, compared with 38% and 23% of their peers. It seems like there's really a wedge driven into the achievement gap between kids with disabilities and their fellow students in middle school, specifically. What causes this?

MM: I’ll address this by talking about students with specific learning disabilities because they represent the largest category of students who receive special education services. One of the problems we’ve had for the last 35 years in special education is what’s called the severe discrepancy model of eligibility determination. In many states students have to demonstrate a large difference between their cognitive ability, which is typically measured by an IQ test, and their academic performance, which is measured with one of a few common norm referenced or criteria referenced assessments. Essentially it is a “wait to fail” model. Once the students are significantly behind their peers we go through a process to determine if they should have an individual education program or IEP as it is called in the schools. This provides students with additional education resources. The problem is that once the students are that far behind their peers it is extremely difficult for them to catch up. We’ve begun to make changes to the severe discrepancy model with a technique called “Response to Intervention”. Unfortunately, we do not have enough data to know how to do it well or what the impact will be on special education.

Small achievement differences between students in the primary grades magnify as the students get older. In fourth grade, students go through a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Their books also change from narrative to expository texts. By sixth grade students are expected to be able to learn from extremely complex expository science texts where more new vocabulary is introduced in the one year than in the first year of a high school foreign language class. In middle school the achievement gap between students with disabilities and their peers increases substantially because the majority of the students with learning disabilities do not have the reading capacity to learn in the same way as their peers.

It’s important to note here that a learning disability, while invisible, is not a function of students being lazy or unable to learn. fMRI scans of students’ brain patterns during reading tasks provide clear evidence that students’ with learning disabilities process text in a manner that is remarkably different from their proficient reading peers. They can learn complex concepts and vocabulary. They just need to have it taught in a different way. Video games are a logical alternative approach.

Another reason for the dramatic differences in students’ performance on the assessments is the text-based nature of the tests. Think about it this way. If you have a student who struggles with reading and you give him or her a paragraph or two of complex science or mathematics vocabulary with intentionally distracting information followed by a complicated question about the reading, the chances are extremely high that the student will not do well. That’s because the assessment is measuring students’ abilities to decode, fluently read, and comprehend the text before they can think about the question. Another issue emerges in this scenario if the response requires the student to write an answer without the aid of a computer or speech-to-text software, which is common practice on large-scale assessments like the ones in the statistics you reference. Reading and writing abilities are correlated. If students’ struggle with one they are likely to struggle with the other. Again video games are a potential solution because problem solving and demonstrating mastery of the learning objectives is an integral part of the game that does not rely on students’ reading abilities.

EM: How are UDL-based games more inclusive of students with learning disabilities (or English language learners)? How can UDL give these kids a stronger foundation to build on with later science education?

MM: UDL-based games have a number of learning scaffolds that are built in specifically for students with disabilities and English language learners. During the design process we try to anticipate as many of the learning barriers as we can. We then provide in-game workarounds for the student. For example, lets say the student is struggling to complete a task in the game. We can include an in-game expert who provides audio hints or a visual dictionary to provide essential background knowledge or a video demonstration with narrative overlays of what the student is doing, why it isn’t working, and hints about what the student might want to do next. The student can then choose the type of “just in time” assistance they need to accomplish the objective.

This is what expert teachers do. The problem is that many teachers do not have the time, resources, or in some cases the expertise to curtail instruction for the students we are targeting. So in essence we are providing them with a learning environment that has supports for all students built in at the outset. During beta testing the students help us identify all of the supports we should have added. Then by gold the objective is to have a true UDL-based game. The games are designed to provide students with essential content knowledge that the students can build on during future learning activities. In essence it anchors or contextualizes other learning. Games have so much potential because they open an entire realm of learning experiences that are unobtainable in traditional classroom environments. For example in You Make Me Sick!, players can infect a host with highly virulent bacteria. I wish we had games like that when I was in middle school. I probably wouldn’t have been thrown out of science class so much!

EM: We've been talking about UDL as it relates to teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Do UDL concepts have potential in other areas of education? Why or why not?

MM: I would say it’s promising but we need more research. One of the core research questions from the Game-enhanced STEM projects we are working on relates to the types of learning scaffolds (e.g., an on-screen agent or narrative overlays of text) that are most beneficial to students. If we can identify the types of supports that lead to STEM learning, it seems reasonable that they would be transferrable to other content areas with similar cognitive demands. I’ve been really impressed with the social studies games that Filament has put together and think UDL is a natural fit for those, especially games that are geared toward secondary students and beyond.

Of course we need research to support that hypothesis. Empirical examination of the efficacy of both UDL-based video games and their effect on traditionally marginalized students is in preliminary stages. We’re probably 5-10 years from having an evidence base that will allow members of the scientific community to draw meaningful conclusions. Of course I would encourage students, their parents, and teachers to play the games and make their own decisions in the meantime. We’re making progress though and I feel fortunate to have Filament Games as a partner in this endeavor.

EM: Anything else you'd like to add/talk about?

MM: I like cheese and I always have Wisconsin teams going deep in the NCAA tournament because they are a cheese state… and that’s no joke. Play on!

A huge thanks to Dr. Matt Marino for taking the time to answer these questions.