Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.10.10 | Last spring, in her classroom at 150th Street and Amsterdam in Manhattan, Danielle Ongart watched her 6th-grade math students as they grew increasingly excited. They were learning concepts and skills, such as spatial relations, that would help them in geometry and on standardized tests.

But there was something else as well.  Some of the students who were usually her worst performers were doing the best, and the kids were teaching one another, all while making and playing videogames.

It’s been nearly five years in the making, and it nearly died a handful of deaths, but “Gamestar Mechanic,” was released in September by E-Line Media.

The story starts in early 2006 when game designer Eric Zimmerman had an idea. Why not design a game where the game play is people designing their own games?

At the time, Zimmerman was cofounder with Peter Lee of New York-based Gamelab. He got in touch with digital literacy scholar Jim Gee, then a professor in the School of Education at University of Wisconsin. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, they set to work designing a game to teach systems thinking, iterative design, collaboration, problem solving and digital literacy—skills that Gee and others have identified as the toolkit kids will need in a new economy and increasingly digital world.

Cut to 2009. Everything with the game was great – but Gamelab was going out of business and all involved were realizing that funding and researching a product was one thing, but getting it to market was another.

“Gamestar Mechanic” was more than just a game; it was a service. Who was going to run the back end for users? How was it going to survive financially once the grant was spent?

“The project taught me, and I think MacArthur, that one needed a business plan for sustainability at the outset of a grant-funded project like this one, not when it was finishing,” said Gee.

Enter Alan Gershenfeld and E-Line Media.

Gershenfeld, a former vice president at Activision, was interested in serious games and had started E-Line Media to serve as an angel investor for games and other forms of pop culture that served a social purpose. But Gershenfeld was realizing the same thing those involved with “Gamestar Mechanic” had realized. There was a gaping hole between the funding and creation of new products and getting them out to people.

“I realized it wasn’t angel funding people needed, it was a publisher,” Gershenfeld said.

So E-Line Media signed on to publish “Gamestar Mechanic.” 

Which brings us back to Danielle Ongart and her 6th graders at New Heights Academy in Manhattan. “The students were completely engrossed in the game,” Ongart said, “both boys and girls and even the kids who don’t play videogames at home.”

“Gamestar Mechanic” takes kids on narrative quests that have them fixing broken games and making their own. Game schools reside in this virtual universe where players learn about action games, adventure games, indie games and others. After playing some games, they begin to fix and then design them. They ultimately publish their games in “Game Alley” on the “Gamestar Mechanic” website, where others play and review them.

Warren Buckleitner, editor of “Children’s Technology Review,” says that fixing games is a great way of “shoe horning kids into higher order thinking.”

To fix a jumping game, for example, a student first must evaluate the problem. If the avatar isn’t jumping high enough to reach the platform with the reward on it, then students must use serious critical thinking skills to look at the whole of the game and arrive at a conclusion on how to rectify the situation. How can you make the avatar jump higher? To do that, a student must synthesize information about how the game works and its ultimate goal. Finally, the student is problem-solving by figuring out that the solution involves changing the gravity levels.

“Bloom would be thrilled with the amount of synthesis and evaluation, or higher order thinking, in a game like ‘Gamestar Mechanic,’” Buckleitner said, referring to Benjamin Bloom, a scholar in the 1950s who created a taxonomy of the building blocks of learning.

Ongart said the game required “reasoning”; playing and making games in “Gamestar Mechanic” seemed to be fostering hypothesis-building and the use of trial and error – just what game and learning experts such as Gee and Zimmerman had been saying for years.

“Reasoning is really, really important for students to learn, but it’s actually really hard to teach,” Ongart said.

She was also struck by the amount of spatial relation skills required. In any game, you’re creating a space for players to play in, and you build representations of things like walls and platforms for them to maneuver around. Ongart said this kind of thinking is good preparation for geometry and also is something that state tests are including.

And then there was the fact that the kids who usually were the lowest performers in the class were suddenly surpassing those at the top of the class.

“I think some of my students who aren’t so verbally inclined are more visually inclined,” Ongart said. “I think those students felt more comfortable – they felt freer – and were able to excel.”

Ongart didn’t have access to the computers she needed this semester to integrate “Gamestar Mechanic” into her curriculum, but she plans to as soon as they’re available in December or January. She doesn’t know, however, if the school administration will swing for the premium service.

E-Line Media has released the game for free online, but to be self-sustaining, the game needs revenue. The compromise is a monthly subscription fee for additional features. It’s been tough, says Gershenfeld, because E-Line wants to make the basic skills available to anyone who wants to play, but the company also needs to make money.

Buckleitner took issue with E-Line’s premium subscription-based model.

“Here’s what I’m worried about,” Buckleitner said.  “Let’s say I go to school and my 4th-grade teacher goes, ‘hey, I have this great thing. Our school has a subscription to ‘Gamestar Mechanic’ And I get my laptop and I start making this awesome videogame.”

The student works on the game all year long, but then at the end, the school’s subscription lapses, and she can no longer access her “sprites.” In “Gamestar Mechanic” students earn “sprites” during the quests and then get to use the sprites to make their own games once they advance.

“Well, that’s kind of cruel,” Bucklienter said. “I don’t have the answer, but I think this is something that has to be brought up and thought over very carefully.”

Over at E-Line, they are thinking about it.

“There’s a tension there,” Gershenfeld admitted. “We need people to convert to premium, but we really want the core learning to be free.”

One solution is to ensure that whenever there’s a competition within the game – like the Obama Administration’s National STEM Video Game Challenge, which E-Line is partnering on – everything needed to compete will be free.

For now,  Gershenfeld is mainly concerned with meeting demand. Hundreds of users are signing up every day, and the team has yet to advertise in the commercial sector or in game portals. Already 100 schools have signed up for the premium service, and another 700 have requested it.

Ongart, for one, wants it back in her classroom, whether it’s the premium service or just the free version. It was the level of engagement she can’t get over – from her 11-year-olds and from the 14-year-olds who’d been held back. She remembers them in the spring, helping one another solve proto-geometry and physics problems in the guise of platform and adventure games.

“I just stood back and watched them,” she said.