Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

2.15.10 | In the summer of 2009, a group of fifth-graders took part in a week long game-design camp in New York City. Led by Katie Salen and the Institute of Play, the students used smart phones to design games about the city for their peers and to discuss about what it means to collect pictures, texts and other information on their phones. I talked with Salen about the project.

Spotlight: You said in the camp’s promotional materials the kids were exploring three key questions:  1) What does it means to collect pictures, texts and other information on their phones? 2) Whose information is it? 3) Where does the information go?  So what did the students discover?

KS: One of the big learning goals we had for the kids was to help them explore the idea of mobile phones as systems that collect, share, broadcast and track data. Kids often think of phones as cool devices to play games on, text their friends, or listen to music on. What they don’t often think about is the kinds of data that a phone transmits and receives in doing each of these activities, or how this data moves from their phone to another location in the network.

Understanding that mobile phones are just one part of a whole infrastructure designed to connect people, information and media is really important for kids so that they can begin to make choices about their participation in these networks.

At the same time, we wanted to help kids uncover the inner workings of smartphones from a data perspective, so that they could design games that took advantage of the phones’ various features. They worked with GPS, Bluetooth and QVR codes (visual barcodes captured and translated through camera phones) as part of this work.

I think they discovered several things: First, data is everywhere, and it is important to make choices about the kinds of data they send out in the world. The kids designed games that used Bluetooth to exchange image inventories, and they quickly learned they had to think about the kinds of images they had in their galleries to share.

Second, they discovered that text can be a very powerful form of information, both in the design of games but also in creating a record of activity—who they texted with, what they texted about, etc. I think they began to see how interesting it can be to look at data as a record of exchange between people over time.

Third, I think they learned that making games using smartphones is not that easy and the simpler the ideas, the better the games.

Spotlight: What is the literacy they need when using their phones in this way?

KS: This is a literacy both around analyzing and judging information as well as one related to what we call “intelligent resourcing;” the ability to seek and find resources within networks.

Spotlight: Why did the camp organizers want to focus on games?

KS: The Mobile Learning Institute, which is run by the Pearson Foundation, has been doing work focused primarily on digital storytelling using mobile phones. They were interested in expanding that focus to include game design.

Spotlight: What about games can help kids learn in this instance?

KS: We like to have kids design games as a core learning strategy. So kids at camp both played games as a way to get at the core learning objectives of the camp, but they also designed many games to make explicit their own understandings of these ideas.

We have found that when kids design games, they go deep into content. If they don’t really understand the topic of their game, it can be incredibly difficult to make a game about it. So games become a lens through which kids explore content they are interested in.

The smartphones added an element of a specific tool they had to understand in order to incorporate into their game. So there were quite a few things going on, but the kids made some remarkably thoughtful games.

The games and the camp are all documented on this blog: http://mobilequest.wordpress.com

Image courtesy of Katie Salen.