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Thursday 26th July 2007 6:37 pm

Robert Torres: Games and Learning Spaces

This March in New York City, workshops began with 5th and 6th graders on Gamestar Mechanic. In this post, Robert summarizes some key student observations and concludes by asking how the process can help educators re-imagine learning.

In mid March, Katie and I began running Gamestar Mechanic workshops with 15 fifth and sixth graders at a new charter school in lower Manhattan.  The students were selected through a lottery process facilitated by the school’s staff.  The school serves predominately low-income Black and Latino youth and has a particular interest in using innovative curricular methods for instruction that are infused with technology.  Katie has led each workshop while I have served primarily as a researcher, observing and video recording sessions.  Each week since the workshops began, we’ve met with the Madison team via conference calls to discuss emerging findings and to continually fine-tune the workshops at each site. 

Similar to the ones in Madison, the workshops in NYC, which will go on through December, have focused on three things: (1) testing the Gamestar Mechanic game prototype, (2) developing curriculum, and (3) beginning to gain an understanding of the learning potential the game affords.  My posts will comment on the latter two foci. 

Developing a Curriculum of Becoming

As of May 29, we had run seven two hour-long workshop sessions.  From the start, Katie, created a learning space within which game design was situated.  We didn’t begin by giving textbooks or a talk on the history of games or game design, but instead, on the first day, Katie started by explaining briefly the meta-narrative of the game.  The narrative is designed to invite players from the start to step in to the game as a game mechanic, one who will contribute to (and play key roles within) the game world.  As if used to taking on role-playing identities in games or imagining alternate worlds, they seemed to transition quickly to inhabiting this virtual one.  In this instance, they were asking:
Can we make any game?
Will we be able to upload music to the game?
Is [the master mechanic real] real?
Can other people play your game?
Can we video chat with [the master mechanic]?
Can we chat with other people in the game? 

Later in this first session, the kids played the game Musical Chairs then “modded” it, adding elements they thought would correct problems with the existing game.  Within the first session, two critical things appeared to happen:  participants embodied (see Gee, 2007) some of the behaviors of game designers (by iteratively playing, taking apart, and redesigning Musical Chairs) and, perhaps most importantly, a culture of game design began to emerge.  Katie was careful to use every activity in the workshop sessions to instantiate the domain (or the cultural space) of game design.  For example, even snack time became opportunities to think through design issues.  Before snack, kids were often asked to come up with a game that would somehow facilitate the way it should be distributed.  By the second and third sessions, kids were asked to experiment with the game tool by designing games, playing with models of games within the tool, and coming up with criteria for good games.  Within the first few sessions, Katie had not only led the students into a universe of game design, but had asked them to sharpen their just emerging game design skills by challenging them to break down the design elements of games. 

Cooperative Learning

A key and defining feature of the workshops has been their highly social nature.  In his second post Alex mentioned how excited the Madison kids became when they received feedback from their New York peers.  This was true among the NYC kids as well.  Our workshops have been marked by our participants’ tremendous desire to share and receive feedback from each other.  Much of our curriculum was designed around a set of challenges.  For one of them (during session four), Katie asked kids (in pairs) to design a game based on their partners’ aesthetic wishes (in terms of gameplay, look and feel).  As we had begun to experience during prior sessions, this activity demonstrated again students’ immense capacity for sustained focus.  For about an hour, while Katie moved around to work with each pair, the kids (most of whom are 10 years old) built games according their partners specifications, gave feedback and continually play-tested their designs. 

Nothing here, of course, is conclusive.  But most of us know that places that explicitly design the conditions for students to step in to embody and sustain the behaviors of historians, chemists or architects are rare.  Like Betty said in her post, part of the ambition of this project is to help re-imagine how our society conceives of learning and schooling.  As Jim has written about (see “Game and learning:  Issues, perils and potentials” in Good Video Games + Good Learning, 2007), at the core of this quest is a need to consider how the very design of immersive good games can help to inform the design of “deep” learning spaces. 

Category: Ecology-of-Games

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