Bernice Stafford
Bernice Stafford has been a classroom teacher, administrator and international consultant. She left a senior executive position with PLATO Learning in 2006 to become an educational technology industry consultant. Her principal clients are the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration and the Knowledgeworks Foundation. At PLATO, she was Vice President of School Strategies and Evaluation, a company she joined in November 2003 at the time of the Lightspan, Inc. merger where she was a Co-founder and Senior Vice President in charge of Business Development/Government Relations and Chief Education Officer. She serves on a number of education related boards and advisory committees.
Lightspan Achieve Now: A Concept Document Discussing Learning through Game Play used to Guide the Development Process
The work described in this document was undertaken by a group of educational entrepreneurs who came together at the San Diego based Lightspan, Inc., founded, September 10, 1993 and merged with PLATO Learning, Inc., a Minneapolis-based company, November 17, 2003. What this team accomplished in the ten year history of the company was an un-paralleled, first of its kind endeavor that we believe led the way to a multitude of successor companies.
Our goal was to develop a system for learning that would support the teaching and student mastery of basic skills, developing higher-order thinking skills, increasing personal creativity and flexibility, and creating a thirst for lifelong learning. The company’s business plan called for the development of a comprehensive series of 100 CD’s of educational games that would run on the consumer video game player – the Sony PlayStation. Indeed, the Lightspan Achieve Now curriculum was the first comprehensive curriculum developed specifically for teaching and learning that utilized full-screen, full-motion video in a standards-based learning environment and supported the K–6 mathematics and reading/language arts curriculum.
Why develop games rather than the more traditional computer assisted lessons or activities being developed by more established educational software companies such as PLATO Learning, Scholastic, et. al? The founders believed, and research confirmed, that by their very nature, games would help facilitate the four (4) essential components of an optimal learning environment: motivation, reinforcement, retention, and transfer briefly discussed below.
Motivation
"The secret to education is to motivate the student—give him or her a compelling reason to want to absorb the information" (Brody, 1993). But what motivates us? The premise of game play is that we are naturally motivated to do and learn that which gives us intrinsic enjoyment. The six essential components of intrinsic enjoyment or motivation appear to be unrelated to age, gender, culture, and social class (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Game play is a perfect source for these components.
The first component of intrinsic enjoyment or motivation is the opportunity to complete successfully what we start. Games are designed to be played repeatedly until success is achieved. Clear goals compose the next component of intrinsic enjoyment. Games are designed around game goals and challenges that, once mastered, allow the player to win. The third and fourth components are immediate feedback and a sense of control. In a game, the player is always in control, and immediate feedback is always available.
The fifth component of intrinsic motivation is the ability to concentrate, and the sixth component is a release from the cares of everyday life—from an awareness of self and from a sense of time such as that experienced by a reader who gets lost in the story being told and forget existing time restraints. In games, the story and character create a fantasy environment that engages the player and allows deep concentration and transcendence of self and time. Games provide an intrinsically motivating influence that continues throughout game play because of the unique blend of technology, sensory framework, story, and character. Motivation is further enhanced because game play takes advantage of the learner’s natural curiosity from start to finish.
Reinforcement and Retention
Reinforcement and retention are necessary for a learner to gain the foundations for knowledge and skills. In a traditional learning situation, the teacher presents instruction and then, through drill and practice, projects, worksheets, and other assignments, seeks to reinforce what has been taught so that students will retain the instruction. Various types of games present instruction in a variety of ways. Exploratory games allow the student to slowly discover through immersion in playing the game the instructional content. Games in which the goals and sub-goals are more explicit provide instruction through specific rules or procedures or through deductive reasoning.
Immediately after instruction at each game level, games provide immediate and constant opportunities for reinforcement and retention. Games create an educational environment that “can lead a child to build large, complicated processes from smaller ones by laying out sequences of steps” (Minsky, 1986). How do games accomplish this? There are four key factors. First, games provide goals. These goals have variable difficulty levels, multiple levels, hidden information, and randomness. Second, games provide immediate performance feedback. This allows a learner to self-assess and then try again. Third, games help to facilitate a sense of self-esteem, which encourages the learner to continue with more game play.
Finally, well designed and thought out games provide personal relevance, which enables learners to remember what was learned. Games provide many types of relevance: social (help a learner deal with others and with difficult situations), functional (teach a learner how to do something he or she wants or needs to do), or fantasy (appeal to unlimited experimental and imaginative possibilities). Learning is reinforced and retained when a student has control over the learning situation. Games allow a learner to affect each outcome through an interaction. Through choice of levels, characters, rewards, and responses, games force learners to take responsibility for learning, which in turn bolsters self-esteem and the sense that the student is the actor and not the receptor in the learning process.
Transfer
One of the most difficult challenges of education is to promote the transfer of learning not just from one learning situation to the next, but to real-life applications. Games create fantasy worlds that allow a student to transcend self-doubts, self-fulfilling prophecies, and real or imagined physical and mental limitations. The student enters a playing field that allows ultimate equity and ultimate time to succeed.
In a world where few heroes are provided, the student can engage with characters with which he or she can identify—characters who model positive attitudes about learning, living, and acting in a productive, creative, benign way. Through imagination, games allow a student to dream impossibilities, to live in someone else’s mind, to experience challenge and success that the outside world does not allow. Games also allow the student to apply knowledge of the real world to the fantasy world through common sense, critical thinking, and creative thinking.
"Education is a human endeavor. It is first and foremost an interaction between people" (Kelman, 1990). One has only to wander into a video game store to observe that games, whether designed to be competitive or not, are essentially collaborative, cooperative endeavors. Transfer of learning is assured when a student can mentor another student. Games by their very nature, encourage mentoring. Mitchell Resnick, an MIT professor states, "This ability to articulate a complex strategy is a very high-level skill in and of itself" (Brody, 1993).
Family Involvement
Family involvement is one of our best predictors of a student's success in school. Games throughout time have served as natural vehicles for family involvement. A study of twenty families using home-game sets in 1981 showed that family interactivity "increased in nearly all families as adults and children played with each other" (Mitchell, 1984). In this study, it was also found that families that played games together watched two-thirds less regular television than families that did not play games together. While the games used in the study were not educational, many parents and children reported "faster reflexes, better eye-hand coordination, increased reading speed, improved perceptual judgment in outdoor sports...some reported improvement in schoolwork."
Educational games encourage active involvement of families in the education of children. Now this power can be tapped for inviting the school into the home through Lightspan. Early studies by RMC Research Corporation have demonstrated that family involvement has dramatically improved when families use the Lightspan educational games. Eighty percent of parents reported that they spent one-half hour or more each day with their children using Lightspan. Twenty-seven percent of parents reported that total time spent with their child on schoolwork increased significantly, and another forty percent reported that it increased somewhat significantly with Lightspan in the home. Moreover, thirty-six percent of parents reported that their knowledge of what their children were doing in school increased significantly, and another thirty-seven percent reported that it increased somewhat significantly. When asked if they would recommend that Lightspan remain in their children’s schools, ninety-five percent of families responded positively. One family stated, "It allowed our children to open their minds."
Games and the Evolution of the Teacher's Role
The role of the teacher in the learning equation is changing. As the amount of information that has to be taught expands, the teacher has had to take on more of the role of mentor and guide. "The role of the teacher is not to stand back and watch, but to mediate as he or she would in a wide variety of learning situations" (Lawry, et al., 1994). Game play allows the teacher to introduce a subject or theme and then to guide the student into specific games. Then, the teacher can help the student evaluate his or her performance and work with projects and applications in the classroom. Because Lightspan games are available for home play, the teacher can enable the student to demonstrate what he or she has learned, to practice problem areas, and to extend knowledge and skills, while accomplishing the larger goal of family involvement.
In the RMC Self-Evaluation Report, eighty-one percent of teachers reported that Lightspan was very useful in motivating students. Eighty percent of teachers reported that Lightspan improved student understanding. Ninety percent reported that it provided practice and reinforcement of instruction. In addition, eighty-four percent stated that Lightspan encourages cooperative learning, that it addressed various learning styles, and that it challenged students. Eighty-seven percent reported that Lightspan rewarded students. One teacher stated, "Lightspan benefits everyone from the students, whom it is designed for; to the parents, who can see firsthand what and how their children are learning; to the teachers, who not only can enjoy the programs themselves but have found a true friend in the learning process."
References
Brody, H. (1993). Video games that teach? Technology Review, 96, no. 8, 50-58.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Enjoyment and the quality of life. Chapter. 3 and
The conditions of flow. Chapter 4 in Flow: The psychology of optimal
experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Kelman, P. (1990). “Alternatives to Integrated Instructional Systems.” The
Integrated Instructional Systems Report, 371-377.
Lawry, J., R. Upitis, M. Klawe, A. Anderson, K. Inkpen, N. Mutinidi, D. Hsu, S.
Leroux, and K. Sedighian. (1994). “Exploring Common Conceptions About
Boys and Electronic Games.” Technical Report. Department of Computer
Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.
Lightspan, Inc. (2002) 2001-2002 Lightspan Achieve Now self evaluation results.
San Diego, CA: Author.
Minsky, M. (1986). The society of mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Mitchell, E. (1984). Home Video Games: Children and Parents Learn to Play and
Play to Learn. Presented at the American Educational Research Association
Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA.
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