Minecraft Pixel Map by Andrew Mason

We negotiated the project in that I asked him not to play the single-player campaign in class so it wouldn’t be spoiled for me. Relationships come first in the games-based classroom.

The student wrote his design document about what he would do, how he would do it, why he wanted to undertake this project, and what he expected to learn from it. The second piece of writing produced from the project will be his review, modeled after online video-game reviews from the publications he reads when deciding whether or not to buy a game. On the way towards that project, he’s playing through the co-op campaign with different classmates as they complete their own work and have some time to sacrifice for games-based learning.

In watching students play Portal 2, and in looking back at our work with the Wii, iCivics, Minecraft, and experiments with works like Civilization IV, I’m beginning to think about somewhat formalized ways to use games to assess students’ learning and social behaviors.

I think it would be great to use games to help develop a learning profile for each student willing to play them.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• Take any first person console or PC game using a controller with dual analog sticks – or take the Wiimote and connect it to the off-hand nunchuck peripheral. Watch a student play with the controller. Is he or she able to use both sticks effectively to look around while moving, or does he or she primarily use one stick at a time? If he or she uses one stick at a time, which is it? Does it match up to the students’ right- or left-handedness? Does the student look at the controller or at the screen while looking and moving? How can this observation be used to assess hand-eye coordination and right/left independence? Can you find a student with musical or sculptural aptitude by observing their hands on a controller? Can you set up physical education activities and light occupation therapy practice for kid who experiences developmentally inappropriate difficulty handling a controller?

• Drop a gamer into Minecraft, or any sandbox game that doesn’t intimidate the player with its complexity (I’m thinking of the Civilization, Sim City, and Sims franchises here). Observe the student’s play. Does he or she immediately start exploring? Does he or she immediately set some kind of goal and begin working toward it? Does he or she ask for help with the rules or purpose of the game? Does he or she balk or become defensive or critical of the game when he or she finds out that there is no purpose or traditional rule set? Can you determine kids’ comfort levels with project-based learning and self-directed learning from observing them at play in sandbox games? Can you assess a student’s level of intrinsic motivation and/or dependence on extrinsic motivation based on his or her reaction to a game-like environment without traditional rules or score-keeping? As an aside, can you identify students with systems and architecture aptitudes from sandbox games?

• In some kind of level-based platformer or puzzler, pair up a student playing with purpose and a student playing just to play or to hang out with a friend. Observe how the two players negotiate their relationship. Who leads? Who influence the other’s play style? Who coöpts whom to play with or without purpose? How do the players resolve their differences in motivation and purpose? How do they problem-solve? Whose ideas are tried in what order and balance? Can you assess students’ aptitudes for leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving from observing such pairings?

I also have some slowly coalescing thoughts about hacking, which in this case means running or installing a program that lets the player assign his or her avatar resources and characteristics that are normally achieved through gameplay or not enabled in the game proper. My students routinely hack Minecraft to build what they want to build. Some run hacks to pad their inventories with the tools and materials they want to use. However, I’m most interested in the work of students running hacks to change the game’s texture packs and to make the game into something else. Using a hack called MCEdit, several students are now loading their Minecraft saves into MCEdit, which is essentially an AutoCad environment that lets players terraform their world and build large-scale structures.

One student wrote a design document and listed to audio copies of Greek myths and the Iliad while building a model of the Parthenon at a 1′ to 1 bock ratio inside MCEdit.

There’s a golden creeper statue inside.

But what happens when the best way to accomplish your self-directed goal inside a sandbox game is to hack the game? Is the future of game-based learning – and problem-solving and collaboration – in helping one another change the rules of a game to suit our goals? Has that always been the game for the elite at school and in society? How do we help students hack the right things? How do we agree on the right things to hack, because isn’t the Internet a hack for the way school is right now?

Hacking contributes to transparency, wider access to success, and a wider definition of what’s permissible in a system. It can also obfuscate, limit, and constrain.

Why aren’t we teaching it? What does a kindergarten hack look like? How can boys hack middle school? How can disadvantaged schools hack resources? How can we constructively, ethically, and legally hack testing, scheduling, and staffing? What other questions should we be hacking?

100 Cupcakes Game by Z Andrei

Over the past few months as I’ve planned and read for this #engchat, my understanding of how to talk about and use games for learning has most certainly benefitted from discussions with many friends and colleagues. Thank you all.

Here are the four questions I come back to regarding games-based learning and gamification in the classroom:

1. Which games should go on our reading lists? Why do the belong there?
2. What is gaming literacy and how does it overlap with the design elements of writing, inquiry, and project-based work?
3. How should our protocols look for curating and using games in media centers and classrooms?
4. Which elements of game design, gameplay, and user experience should we use in the language arts classroom?

I hope you’ll join us on the 21st in sharing your responses to those questions and in posing new questions to the community.

Game industry visionary Jesse Schell (@jesseschell) will be joining us, as will Bethesda Softworks’s Shane Liesegang (@OptimistPanda) – if he can get time away from his project. A few more invitations are pending.

If you’re looking for background knowledge on games-based learning, I wholeheartedly recommend Jane McGonigal’s (@avantgame) Reality is Broken. You can find past posts about our gaming #engchat here.

Before I head off to teach this morning, let me pass along two more links shared with me by Cindy Minnich.

• A WSJ article on using SMART goals in schools and sports.
• The Great Gatsby for NES.

Happy teaching, learning, and gaming.

• Are my kids collaborating on anything, let alone a multi-media project?
• Am I acknowledging and asking kids to use their non-print talents in my classroom?
• Am I admitting in my teaching that print speaks to other media? To the heart?
• Am I allowing students to specialize?
• Am I teaching my kids anything about programming or the problem-solving habits that go along with it?
• Am I balancing chunked instruction with lasting, uninterrupted time for discovery and self-expression?
• What amount of time do my students spend on print-based screen activities versus non-print ones? On replicative versus creative activities? On passive versus active ones?
• Will my students make anything that makes me cry or stare on wonder?
• Will the best three minutes of our time together be any kind of masterpiece?
• Am I caving again to what I think are the expectations others have of me?

I want to know....by mod as hell

Another way to put it:

What is digital literacy and what will it teach me about teaching?

Game designers concern themselves with fun in ways that educators do not; however, the primary aims of both public education in the United States and the game industry are exactly the same:

• Both industries want their consumers to adopt new behaviors. Games teach through gameplay and feedback; schools teach through teaching and feedback. While games depend on the player to learn from them, schools are largely set-up to depend on teachers to teach.
• Both industries want repeat business. Game designers want their games to sell so that they have the resources and justification to make new games to sell to their fan base; schools want their graduates to excel so that they are given the resources and vindication to educate the next generation like the last.

While I can see the game industry slowing down console development to speed up game development and maximize profits through the synergy of new peripherals with old hardware, for now the game industry clearly has the edge in what I consider to be one of the single most powerful learning innovations of our time:

Fun.

How powerful is fun? I think about my students who struggle to memorize the times tables, but master new games in moments. I think about my students who still don’t routinely or accurately capitalize, but have no problem with the grammar and syntax of button sequences. I think about my students who struggle with reading comprehension, but deliver encyclopedic summaries of games’ plots, systems, and characterizations. I think about my students who have resisted self-starting school work for year, but who embrace new challenges in games and routinely teach others the strategies and tricks they have discovered. I think about my students who rush through writing, but spend hours tweaking the characters and levels they create with in-game tools.

We could argue that games appeal to students because they are auditory, visual and kinesthetic, but we’ve all tried auditory, visual and kinesthetic activities that have fallen flat because we stopped designing at that modal level of differentiation, relying on novelty to carry the day. Game designers go a step further and ask how the auditory, visual and kinetic (and sometimes textual) can be made fun, especially when games rely on players to find novel applications for a finite set of sounds, pictures, and gameplay mechanics.

On March 21st, 2011, I’ll host an #engchat on gamification – or perhaps “applied gaming” – in the language arts classroom. Gamification is the application of gameplay mechanics to real world tasks in an effort to change human behavior by taking advantage of our need for fun. Companies use gamification to change consumer behavior through fun. I’d like to ask how teachers can do the same.

I recognize and acknowledge the extrinsic ends of gamification, and I hope that we discuss how to reconcile the use of gamification in schools with the intrinsic motivation that we know drives the most personally meaningful learning. For what it’s worth, I see my students initially attracted to games by ads and word-of-mouth, but I see them stick with games and game culture out of a common, intrinsic drive to master games that they evaluate as worthy of their time. I’m really eager to talk about the ethics of fun and game-design in classroom design and management, as well as in unit- and lesson-planning. How different are achievements and badges from grades? How are they used differently? How is feedback delivered in-game different from that delivered in a traditional class? I think we’ll find that beneath some rather superficial similarities, the how and why of game-based assessment and motivation differ greatly from traditional practices in public schools.

What we do is not fun. Why is that? What can we learn from games if we decide that our work should be fun? Should school be no fun, not ever? What about the language arts classroom? What’s the difference between using games for learning, like using iCivics and Monopoly for a Civics & Economics class, and designing class and/or school to be more game-like? Are game-development and programming acceptable forms of authorship in school? Is playing a game an acceptable form of readership if the student produces response, review, and/or criticism? If so, how should schools curate games and/or resource their authorship?

Check back at Classroots.org for related posts over the next few months, check out this #ncte11 proposal on gamification, and join us on March 21st, 2011, for an #engchat on game design in the language arts classroom – no language arts jacket required.

For readers interested in learning more about gamification from the pros, check out these links, too:

• Avant Game: gaming for a better world with Jane McGonigal.
• Bruce on Games: Bruce Everiss’s industry-analysis blog, useful for thinking about how games are distributed all around, but seldom through, school.
• coding conduct: research and presentations on “persuasive design” and gamification from Sebastian Deterding.
• Design for Learning: Dean Groom’s blog on games, virtual environments, and learning.
• Epic Win and Mindbloom: two examples of gamified life-management apps.
• Foursquare and Gowalla: two examples of location-based gamification apps.
• Game Dev Story: a fun little app that captures a very rough sketch of the gaming industry, it’s decision-making, costs, and career paths.
• “Gamification Needs to Level Up — Here’s How”: an article about next steps in gamification (and maybe learning design).
• “Happy 2011: Celebrating frontiers in Game Design”: a great post from the awesome Lost Garden blog about where we are in gaming.
• Gamepocalypse Now: quick posts about gamification examples and resources from Jesse Schell.
• iCivics: an example of blended, game-based learning mixing civics games and traditional curriculum; Do I Have a Right? is a student favorite.
• Progress Wars: a satire of gaming – and role-playing games in particular – that sums up arguments against gaming.
• Tom Barrett’s games-based learning posts on his edte.ch blog.
• Wikipedia entries on Flow and Gamificiation

And here are a few app, game- and level-authoring resources:

• The Android Developer page.
• Atmosphir, an online 3D platform game maker.
• The iOS Development Center from Apple for mobile apps.
• Kodu from Microsoft
• Little Big Planet 2 homepage.
• Part 1 of Kevin Hodgson’s cool “Making a Video Game” series.
• Scratch from MIT.
• Wikipedia list of games with level editors.

For anyone interested in our experiments with gaming in the language arts classroom, you can read more about them here.

Have fun reading, learning, exploring, and making.

Please add your favorite games, examples of game-based learning, and gamificiation-in-the-classroom resources below, along with any questions, comments, and/or rebuttals you have!

Game Dev Story puts you in charge of a game development company. You develop games and fulfill contracts in pursuit of industry awards, as well as the cash and research points necessary to recruit and develop workers and to license and develop more games and consoles. I enjoyed the game immensely, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t completely portray the complexities and operations of the game industry. Nevertheless, Game Dev Story does at least introduce its players to the kinds of decisions developers make regarding game mechanics, genres, and consoles. Plus, it’s full of puns and malapropisms, just like me.

How would Lesson Planning Story or School Management Story play by comparison? Would anyone even want to make either of those games for an audience in the United States of America? Would either game be released in the United States as anything but a satire?

Would you produce such a game knowing that you would have to trade off accurately portraying the complexities of public schooling in America in return for introducing players to broad tensions we face in running schools and designing learning opportunities in classrooms? How far could a little gamer education go for public education in our country?

What can a funny little app teach our casual gaming citizenry about education?

If you’d like to explore making a school or lesson development story – if that last question excites you – let me know. I’d contribute art and/or writing pro bono. We could at least launch a development blog for some vaporware.

it’s easy to visualize a classroom overlay atop Game Dev Story. It’s hard to imagine players in the United States of America caring, but perhaps that’s a shame a popular iPhone app could address.

Here’s a before painting that I especially like; it makes me question my wisdom – and rights – in asking students to paint over their work for the sake of a lesson on colonization.

A lake and some light painted by a middle-schooler

Regarding games: at the beginning of the colonization unit, only a few students began playing Civilization IV: Colonization. Moreover, since only one student who started the game geeked out enough to enjoy it, it’s been shelved in favor of Minecraft. (Next time we paint Minecraft landscapes! FTW!)

I heart Minecraft more than any other game I’ve taught. It’s easy to learn and difficult to master, even on peaceful mode (no zombies at night means no lost student work). It lets students craft their own narratives along with their homes and tunnels and train tracks. It is intensely personal and sculptural and communicates in a visual vocabulary of consumption, crafting, and reuse that gives kids genuine feelings of exploration, economy, and accomplishment.

You have to play it. If you love it, you can buy an account – accounts are transferrable and allow simultaneous use on multiple machines. Use the wiki for help. Check out a tutorial video. Imagine what kids can do with the game, as well what they can learn and show through it. With a little more coding to increase the number of variables under user control, Minecraft could be a more ludic hybrid of Scratch and Second Life that puts students into the flow of learning-by-making more quickly than either of those other platforms.

So what are we doing with it?

First, we’re exploring. Every instance of the game builds a different world for its player that runs as deep underground as its mountains reach into the sky . One student gasped when he found this “Natural Bridge.”

A student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Here’s a view from the top:

Looking down from the top of a student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Second, we’re settling. The student who found the bridge is going to build his colony here. Students generated a list of buildings that they thought early colonists needed, and I asked them to build any five near spots in their worlds that were well resourced for human life and industry. Students suggested that they build homes, fences for defense, farms, blacksmith shops, lumber mills, barracks, ports, and town halls. It’s been cool to see students figure out how to make furnaces for their blacksmiths’ shops and crafting tables for their lumber mills.

My brilliant TA is busy figuring out how to set up a server on which all of our students can play and settle together. We’d like to host a world in which our kids can launch and record virtual expeditions and create New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies as part of our history classes; we’d also like to host a world of shared responsibility for a virtual economy in our civics class.

In language arts this week we’re working on topic, main idea, and supporting details – the sacrosanct trinity of standardized informational text reading comprehension questions. I’ve been attempting to differentiate for my boys by throwing in excerpts from passages about the new Tron movie and our invisible pal, dark Jupiter. Apparently I failed horribly because somehow today we wound up watching videos about volcanoes.

I figured, eh, what the hell? Reading, making, playing, and communicating matter more than my best guesses at engaging material.

We’ve decided to complete our own topic, main idea, and supporting details organizers on volcanoes and to use Minecraft to model what we learn. Each participating student is going to complete an organizer on one type of volcano – shield cone, cider cone, or stratovolcano. Then each boy is going to outfit his Minecraft avatar for an underground expedition with torches, ladders, blank signs, and brown floor tiles crafted by the students in-game. Each student will dig down to the magma layer, channel the magma to illustrate the inside of a volcano, lay down brown floor tile to model the outside of the volcano, and then post his topic, main idea, and supporting details on signs around the volcano. (If only they knew, “You shall not pass!”)

Descending to find magma in Minecraft

Outfitted for an underground inquiry adventure in Minecraft

We’re writing inquiry reports underground in a 3D engine and illustrating them with in-engine 2D volcano mosaics.

I love my job. I hope the vinegar and baking soda come next – and that the Skyping with volcanologists follows shortly thereafter.

We shouldn’t needlessly complicate instruction with technology, but we should definitely follow students’ learning underground when the stuff on the surface of schooling only amounts to so much dross.

Our own work in class to master Mario Kart as cooperative cycling teams has hit a kind of instructional equilibrium: everyone is happy to play, but the teams who have mastered the rotating 1-2-3-4 finish have mastered it, and the teams who have not mastered it have not. It’s clearly time to share before we play again. The meta-game might shift, though, from finishing 1-2-3-4 to coaching another team to do the same.

In other news, I’m adopting a US History I class this week filled with 6th and 7th graders. So far this year, I’ve only taught our 8th graders, so I’m thrilled with – and grateful for – the chance to work with all of our students.

I’ve decided to pick up with a re-framing of settlement, exploration, and colonization as a series of human decisions rather than a textual set of records.

To do so, I’m using two games – Civilization IV: Colonization and Minecraft – to present kids with the opportunities and conflicts inherent in trying to claim land from other people and nature.

The two games have a radically different amount of text. Civilization IV: Colonization is text- and infographic-heavy on the user-end. Minecraft is virtually without printed language, apart from its menu and code.

Together the games are like a picture-book/novel pairing from a language arts class, the former useful for scaffolding the themes in the latter. I didn’t think of teaching them this way until now, but maybe I’ll try that approach with another group later this year.

This week I’m going to invite students to pair up and pick the game each pair wants to play. The shared goal between games is to create a settlement that can sustain itself independently from the games’ variables in geography, resources, and competing AI. I’ve worked with my TA, an avid gamer, to develop before, during, and after questions about natural resources, conflict, justice, colonization, and the opportunity costs of students’ decisions.

Maybe I’ll even bust out Settlers of Catan for the table-top set.

I’ll post more later after students have a chance to learn from and reflect on the games.

I’m kind of sad that I downloaded the games. I want boxes or cases to put on our bookshelves next to our history books or atlases. I wonder how far we are from 1:1 consoles, game-design labs and spaces in media centers, and video games shelved with books. I could put our copies of Settlers of Catan on the shelves and see if any kids dare me to accept playing time as reading.

If you’re teaching history with other games, I’d love to hear from you, especially regarding games that independently problematize colonization and provide opportunities to play from indigenous points of view.

Moreover, if you have some suggestions for high quality, less complex colonial simulations, please pass them on to us. I worry about early rage-quits with the learning curves in these games; nevertheless, I expect us to have fun together learning how to play them.

What should we go and do in the real world in response to our learning about colonization?

When you check-in, you can leave a comment and/or post a photo with a comment. You get a stamp on your virtual passport for checking in, and you get pins for various accomplishment like taking a certain number of pictures or checking in for the first time in a new state. At some locations you can get items left there by other users or by Gowalla or its partners.

You can drop your collected items for others to find at the same spot. You can vault your collected items into your permanent collection and then carry around extras to trade or drop when you create locations.

Gowalla also lets you create trips of up to 20 locations for others to follow. Gowalla’s partners have also made trips and left items redeemable for real world rewards.

The app lets you friend your friends and it sends out push notifications to them whenever you check in at a new location.

It’s a fun app. I also think it’s a great tool for education.

Imagine a school full of friended users checking-in at the end of each class with an observation or question about the lesson. Imagine if they took snap-shots of themselves smiling, stone-faced, or frowning to give their teachers visual feedback about their understanding of the day’s learning objective, or if they took a picture of their work for parents following the class.

Imagine delivering – or co-developing with students – schedules via Gowalla. Imagining analyzing student check-ins to find emergent schedules.

Imagine an inquiry-based school with decentralized apprenticeships. Imagine community partners setting up trips for apprentices to follow in completing their hours. Imagine those partners leaving pins and items for students finishing their apprenticeships in good standing. Imagine those partners giving students items for redeemable for real world services that students could share with folks in need through service organizations. Imagine students creating their own trips recording their inquiry learning and leaving those trips on the Gowalla servers for like-minded students to follow in later years. Imagine items redeemable for gifted texts and projects that help learning along the way. Imagine a cohort of mentors and friends watching one another learn and sharing the locations of powerful learning opportunities outside the classroom before, during, and after school. Imagine Gowalla as a mobile, social, student-sourced course content container, albeit one that needs some voice and sketching functionality.

Gowalla is about community and place and how a networked community overlays and interacts within a virtual geography vaster than any territory that “belongs” to an individual member. This is a powerful model for teaching and learning – for sharing ourselves over time and space with people we can help, as well as for leaving a record of how we learned. These curricula of place can serve as gifts to others and as a testament to how hard we tried to move learning out of the factories.

Friend me at chadsansing. Let’s start cacheing our learning outside the classroom.

There are several ways to help uncover students’ talents at making games.

1. First, we can let students play widely. Just as you get better at writing by reading, you get better at designing by playing.
2. Second, we can provide students with an authentic outlet for their writing. Game design and programming require students to show depth in thinking not only about what they want to make, but also about how it will work. It takes iteration, feedback, and reflection to finish alpha, beta, and gold builds of games. It takes the writing process to make a game, and it takes the writing process further than a teacher-described genre or multiple choice question about what comes after prewriting.
3. Third, we can remake our classrooms to feel more like information age workplaces. These workplaces clearly value their workers in ways that classrooms value neither students nor teachers. I’m imagining a place with a lot of natural light, mobile furniture, individual work stations, and a collaborative space filled with inspiration and materials for “reading” and prototyping. There would be several types of tools available for several types of tasks, including maintaining developers’ diaries. It would be okay to eat and drink there. It would be okay to communicate with the outside world there. It would be okay to bring friends and family there to play-test. A GBL space/lab/library space/school-within-a-school/charter would be a workshop that favored collaboration, communication, and spontaneous celebration of failure and success, rather than a classroom that favored competition, monologue, and looming consequence.

Here’s my take on a classroom for games-based learning (GBL). It would include

• Light, color, art: everywhere.
• Modular, mobile furniture.
• Mutable zoning by project.
• A commons area.
• A common multi-monitor screen for streaming and presenting student work, class backchannels, and relevant class texts.
• A dedicated play area.
• Individual work stations.
• A library of excellent texts, including books, films, and games.
• A library of toys.
• Mobile, kid-level planning surfaces.
• Multiple copies of class development platforms, games with authoring tools, and software development kits.
• Mobile communications tools available to every student or hardwired communications tools at every student work station.
• Permissions policies allowing the teacher to manage student communications and publications with relevant experts and entities
• Access to an outdoor campus for play, planning, and mobile computing.
• Differentiated seating.
• Refrigerators and pantries.
• 2D & 3D materials for prototyping and making games and asset models. (Has no one done the custom vinyl figure novel character visualization yet?)
• Architecture and wiring that created discrete sound zones.
• Rotating roles so every kid produces at least 2 design documents, 2 levels authored in other games, and 2 alpha builds of project in something like Scratch.

Teachers across the world would pitch content needs. Students would pitch back concepts and make alpha builds for feedback from their teacher clients, student play-testers, and outside experts. Kids could change projects in a fluid manner to produce the best products possible. Kids from a poorly reviewed alpha could contribute to the beta build of a project favorited by more peers, clients, and experts, improving its quality and/or shortening its development time.

There would be embedded art, engineering, math, workplace readiness and roles, reading, and writing standards in an open-ended curriculum of iterative development in service to others’ learning needs and students’ communities.

Imagine an Urgent Evoke-like game for a kid’s town through a Gowalla-like AR interface.

Who wants to play? What are the bugs?

“Games are not fun because they’re games, but when they are well designed.”
- Sebastian Deterding, “Pawned”

Games futurist Jesse Schell of Gamepocalypse Now recently pointed towards two presentations by “gamification” researcher Sebastian Deterding: “Just add points?” and “Pawned.” Taken together Deterding’s presentations offer useful insight into contemporary game design and the elements, like fun, that we can take advantage of in teaching and learning. [NB: given some of the jokes and screenshots in Deterding's work, you might want to review the presentations at home rather than at school.]

For example, to paraphrase Deterding, school is not fun because it’s school, but when it is well designed.

When was the last time a bus ride was fun? A class? A school year? A school division? What would happen if all of those things were designed to be fun? If only there were arguments in support of learning that could somehow appease our guilt about letting kids having fun.

About twenty slides into “Just add points?” Deterding quotes Jane McGonigal of Urgent Evoke and “Gaming can make a better world” fame:

“Reality is broken. Games work better.”

I get it. When I’m playing a game, I want to finish the quest. I know there is a way to finish it. I’m willing to fail repeatedly in pursuit of the fun that comes from mastering the quest.

How many kids can say the same about school? How many teachers can say the same about students?

I don’t think McGonigal’s statement is an absolute. I do think that we have two problems as educators:

First, school reflects neither the reality of students’ lives nor the reality of their future.

Second, what we package as instruction is only fun to those students who can take advantage of the paths to mastery that our biases, hidden and otherwise, embed into the design of teaching and learning.

It’s difficult to make school seem better than games without somehow solving these problems. I don’t think any program or policy will provide a simple fix.

But let’s admit that school is fun for some kids. Let’s say that school is like a role-playing game filled with endless fetch quests and that it is entirely free of the irony of, say, Progress Wars. Hell, let’s say it’s also a Japanese RPG with poor localization. You have to like this kind of game to master it. You have to master it to have fun. If you aren’t mastering it or having fun, you get frustrated, you feel bad, and ultimately you walk away, like a student dropping out of school.

How then, as teachers, do we hack our school’s programming so that our classrooms feel like more multi-faceted games that offer more fun to more players?

Maybe we start assessing for fun. Is there anyone willing to be me that achievement will go down when students are having fun?

I can hear the naysayers now: “You can’t measure fun.”

Nonsense. Do we really think that Halo: Reach is a happy accident? Game designers – and app designers to a growing extent – know how to measure fun. They research it to make their games better. They beta test. They give feedback through the game and ask players if that feedback is fun to receive so that the designers can improve their own work. How often do we ask our kids if getting feedback from us is fun? Why does public education, as a system, rely on such limited metrics as end-of-course texts? Given our rhetorical aims to innovate, why do we settle for such an impoverished data set?

All teacherly concerns about business aside, I’d partner with the gaming sector in a heartbeat.

Triple A games offer players multiple ways to have fun. They incorporate different mission structures and/or game modes. They offer customization and adapt to players’ skills and styles. They allow for collaboration. They let players safely explore different roles, appearances, and identities, and they don’t keep players in situations that feel unsafe or frustrating.

Take a look at our current definition of literacy in American public education. Just how narrow is it? You, treasured child, must read a test, silently, alone, and pick the answers we educators think best to questions we educators think important as formatted by vendors whose work we educators say is valid. You won’t get any feedback for weeks until we mail you your state-sanctioned printout, but even then we aren’t allowed to talk with you about the test at all. I’m not even sure I should say I’m sorry that you didn’t pass.

Fail.

Here are some of my current thoughts on gaming in the classroom. I offer them up as prompts for thinking and action.

1. There are educational games that we can use to try to make content fun. Many fail. Some might succeed.
2. There are gaming platforms like Atmosphir, Gamestar Mechanic, and Scratch that we can employ to teach content and provide performance opportunities for student learning.
3. There also exist games that include modding and sandbox tools for users. We can use these games to provide avenues for student performances in content and design. In fact, there’s big money is using games like Little Big Planet and Spore in STEM education right now.
4. Finally, there are fun games that we can use to teach content and inspire student reflection in the same way we use compelling novels, primary documents, and works of art. Why not teach financial literacy with The Sims 3 by asking students to balance a checkbook (too archaic?) or determine the opportunity cost of missing work to boost a skill needed for a promotion? Why not generate cause-and-effect hypotheses with the Angry Birds, or why not describe their parabolae? Why not play Farmville in another language?

My point really isn’t throw money at games to throw at kids (though that would be better than spending money on most textbooks). What I mean to say is this:

Text is a technology that has served us well, but story-telling is the medium it serves. Our students lives are increasingly vocal, social, and visual. Text is good for relaying specific information in a reliable manner, but all alone no stack of reading tests is going to save us or our planet. Games offer a better model of problem-solving than does reading alone. School can be more game-like. Teaching with games is teaching with stories that involve students directly – the same way The Neverending Story involved Bastian.

If we’re primarily concerned with passing tests, then games are going to seem like frivolous rewards reserved for students too far ahead of us to be easily taught while we attend to the middle and to those students struggling even to make it that far in our estimation.

If we’re primarily concerned with story-telling, with passing on the soul of our species, its worth, and its claim on a future that is not entirely devoid of hope, then games will seem like something more to us than a means to coerce an end.

Fun should matter more than it does in all our lives. If we’re not willing to offer it to our kids – if we’re not willing to value and make use of the fun they have – then we shouldn’t expect students to graduate from our neuroses and conflicts.

The next time you have the opportunity to serve on a textbook adoption committee – or the next time you get to commandeer some PATSO funds for your classroom – or the next time you’re thinking about letting students play games because there’s nothing else to do – consider looking around for something fun for students to do together. It can be real. It can feel like a game, but matter “more.” Make it fit your kids. Make it fit each kid. Make it about student choice. Make it about teamwork. Make it about failing to succeed. Make your feedback fun. Just please don’t settle for teaching and learning devoid of hope. Design something fun. Fun doesn’t preclude worth.

The games kids play without us are waiting for us to figure out how we can use them to teach, learn, tell stories, and solve problems together.

What else is school for?