Last year we used a lives-lost-per-level ratio to determine which teams of players were most efficient at preserving one another’s lives. Teams with more fluent players were sometimes at an advantage (when they could manage their own lives well) and sometime at a disadvantage (when they were impatient to “win” and didn’t shepherd less fluent players). The best evidence of teamwork came during strategy-planning sessions midway through our experiment as students discovered they could converse and work well with one another before certain levels taxed their patience with the game and one another. We did have the game beaten by the end of the year – a collaborative effort of 22 students (and a few adults).

This year we’re going to play local multi-player Mario Kart. We’ll play for 25-minutes each Friday in groups of four as part of our normal class rotation through stations. We’re going to play like a cycling team dedicated to helping rotating captains win each race. We’re going to graph group members’ placement distributions to find out which teams are best at spreading out first place finishes amongst all group members. Students are already thinking about how to block the bots so less skilled players can win. I’m also thinking about what kind of controller would be best for each student. I need to invest in more Wii Wheels.

My hope is that students will learn to put others’ interests before their own – or even to see how putting others’ before themselves is sometimes in their best interest. I’d like us to work through a similar progression of lessons as we did last year:

• Week 1: Introduce the content and let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 2: Talk about how difficult it was to spread out the wins; ask what worked; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 3: Introduce a goal- and strategy-setting organizer; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 4 and onward: continue with goal- and strategy-setting, playing, and graphing; start analyzing graphs for trends, success stories, and strategies to share; maybe start an online strategy guide.

Last year, a small group of students hit a wall when they experienced how much work went into platformer level design and how much that work depended on collaboration between students who acted as researchers and artists. This year, however, we’re demonstrating on a daily basis remarkable pro-academic behaviors that we only inconsistently demonstrated last year. I wonder if we’re ready to stick with game design that integrates curriculum.

I have to figure out how to get kids like me – kids eager to spend hours in sandbox editors – to bridge school content into their worlds, or to draw “real-world” lessons from their design work. It’s a challenge. How do you help a kid move school into his or her quality world when you share a mistrust of what school has been, but don’t have a shared vision of what it could be? (And how can I get Little Big Planet 2 into the classroom?)

I’m hitting the wall separating what I saw and what I see. I need to pull an Inception and start dreaming the wall and walking on it instead of familiar ground.

I’m looping with our school’s inaugural class for the third straight year. I feel a desperate need to get it right. I feel a desperate need to decide what right is.

I’m reading tweets like this one and wondering about the fate of school choice in Virginia. I wish the law was flexible enough to let us spend Read 180 money (see page 6) on literacy coaches and arts teachers. I feel like we’ve given Toby to the Goblin King.

I’m reading posts like this one and wondering how to teach for the jobs that don’t exist from one that won’t exist. I’m imagining a lighter, mobile teaching force licensed to coffee shops and finding it still inadequate to the preservation of democracy and the widespread diffusion of community- and project-based learning and living for our kids.

I’m trying to figure out how to stop being such an outsider without going back inside.

More encouragingly, here’s what’s working:

• Kids who can count on one hand the number of books they’ve read should be finished reading and/or listening to The House of the Scorpion by Halloween after scripting conversations with their imaginary clones, drafting and debating clones’ rights bills, and drawing some conclusions about word choice on the way.
• By the end of October we also should have raised the money to start a class Kiva fund entirely through students’ self-directed service work in civics.
• And around that very same time we ought to have a gallery of portraits of citizen-artists including pieces about video game makers who have contributed to Child’s Play. I never would have learned about that charity without students’ inquiry into what makes an artist and how video game makers help their communities.

Given room to run, teaching and learning can always chase each other into the real world. We can all get better at getting out of the way.

Let me know if the materials scaffolding any of that learning would be useful to you.

Anyways, thanks for listening and for being polite.

Playing the Wii is not kind of silly. We play the Wii because of teamwork…. We’re a team what will stay alive and we don’t tell each other to say shut up or to get out of the game. Me and [another student] don’t get along all that well. We sometimes fight but when we are playing the Wii we are a team and a team sticks together. I don’t tell [the other student] to shut up. When we finish the level we [say things] like nice job and that was great. We give high 5s.

If someone came into our school and saw we were playing the Wii and they asked why, I would say, we get to because we finish our work.

It helps us learn because it teaches us teamwork. It’s important because it gives us something to look forward to at the end of the week. We haven’t been arguing as much in class.

I’d say that we are learning teamwork and we are making goals.

I asked all of our students to justify our Wii time as a persuasive writing exercise since they’ve come to value it. We have some elaboration and mechanics work to do, but I’m happy there’s a clear purpose for the Wii in each student’s mind.

Do you have any questions for the kids about their soft-skills work on the Wii? Please comment below!

LittleBigPlanet is a platformer.  A platformer is a game made up of levels that require  players to pass obstacles using timing, accuracy and  leaping.  Most Super Mario Bros games are platformers.  LittleBigPlanet provides players with a suite of level construction tools and the ability to upload player-created levels to the PlayStation Network (PSN) for other owners of the game to play.  Since the game’s release in 2008, players have uploaded over 2 million user-generated levels.

Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 400 million: the number of Facebook users worldwide.  Two million isn’t a big number compared to, say, 32 million: the number of PlayStation 3 owners worldwide (both figures found here).  However, LittleBigPlanet encourages player creativity and modding in ways collection games like Farm Life and proprietary hardware like the PS3 do not.  There are very few games that offer as robust and attractive a set of tools as LittleBigPlanet does for creating such varied levels.  To wit, check out these two user-generated levels. Everything in them was assembled by players from the tools and behaviors included in the game’s level design suite.

Museum levels in Little Big Planet typically show off the art and machines players have made for use in their other levels.  The PlayStation Eye, a peripheral camera for the PS3, also lets users take pictures of themselves or their own and-drawn art for use in museums-as-photo-albums.  The museums collect and share the resources with other players. Inside the museums players can use capture tools to grab images.  The museum’s creators can also make their displayed objects and machines available to visitors either as prize-bubbles in the museum or as rewards earned at the end of the level for visiting the museum.

So far, we’ve imagine making a level of captioned sculptures and art that provide the unit’s information, interspersed with short gameplay episodes that are meant to capture the points of view of people involved in the war in different ways.  As the girls move through the tutorials, and as I back out of the project, I’m really eager to see what they make to share their learning.  I’ll defnitely tweet out whatever safe account name we come up with when we’re finished so you can find the level on the PSN, and we’ll record a play-through video and post it online somehow.

I don’t know that every piece of authentic work will change the world, but I think this one might open up some students’ eyes to the possibilities of school and interdisciplinary work in gaming.  Even if we’re not changing the world, I’m eager to see what we learn by making our own little one. We should get a developers’ diary up on a blog so they girls can share their learning and ask for input about what to include in terms of content & gameplay, too.

What other tools are your students using to create “museums” of learning?  How much control do your student shave over those tools? How interactive are the finished products?  What do you think of investing class time into gaming for learning? How could we be doing this better?

PS: I am kind of falling for STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math learning. I would love to teach geometry, concepts like frequency and proportion, or simple machines using LittleBigPlanet. Anyone using off the shelf video games and/or consoles in STEM classrooms?  If you are, please comment below to share your work and/or provide a link to it!

Results of our strategizing were mixed with only half the groups improving from last week to this week. At this point I’m wishing I had taken a research-design course sometime in the past decade so I could present you with better conclusions from my too-small-a-sample action study. Regardless, here goes.

Group 1 stayed at 10:1. Group 1’s goal was “to not die a lot,” and their strategies included, “work together, not leave people behind, not trash talk, go fast…[and] not jump big jumps.” We need to write more specific goals next week – I’m not sure of the group thinks 10 lives per level is a little or a lot. However, the group did follow its strategies.

Repeat champs group 2 improved from 2:1 to 1:1. Group 2’s strategy was “beat 8 levels…lose less than 10 lives.” The group’s strategies were “bubble, [save] lives, and speed.” I don’t know either, but it worked. Group 2’s most effective strategy is to play levels it knows from past experience rather than to attempt brand new levels. I wonder why they didn’t list it.

Group 3 decided on these goals: “not to hit, or push people off ledges [and] not to leave people behind.” To meet its goals, the group adopted these strategies: “work together, share shrumes [sic & middle school], be nice.” The group followed its strategies and wound up turing in its best performance to date. Since the group began by spending 50 lives per level last month, I call this significant progress in teamwork.

Group 4 spent the same amount of lives per level this week as last despite meeting its goal and following its strategies. The group tried all new levels – the highest levels unlocked in the game so far, and I think it’s likely that this is what kept their ratio from decreasing. They spent their time sight-reading the levels like gaming musicians. However, as I said, they met their goal – “not killing or eating each other” – and they used their strategies – “not yelling and not telling each other that you suck[...] everybody agree on a level, don’t give attitude [and] don’t force people to do stuff that they don’t want to do.”

Group 5 wanted “to beat as many levels as possible.” That’s too nebulous a goal for us to measure and we need to work on setting more specific and attainable goals for our work together. Group 5 wound up with a higher lives lost to levels won ratio this week than last; however, group 5 did beat 2 levels after beating only 1 1/2 each of the previous 3 contests. Group 5’s strategies were “bubble up, try not to argue, help each other [and] try not to be competitive.” By my observation, the group used it’s strategies, but may or may not have reached it’s goal. We need to debrief next week.

Group 6 tried “to win as many levels as possible without losing any lives.” The group wound up spending 16 lives per level, and so it did not meet its goal. The group’s strategies were “try not to yell at each other, practice outside of school, try not to be jerks [and] wait for each other.” In this group, a student got a little bit bossy with the other group members. While this didn’t constitute yelling, it did frustrate the other players. I wonder if all group embers have the same conception of “yelling” or “jerks,” or if they could set a more attainable goal for the next contest with more positive steps to take in terms of pro-social behaviors and effective game-play.

I might change up the rules next week and require all groups to sight-read a series of levels unlocked and selected by me. I’m curious about whether or not groups will change their strategies to play brand new levels rather than levels they’ve seen before.

Look for student responses to these results next week after our debriefing. Please suggest any questions you’d like me to ask them or any games we could use to develop and transfer our soft skills in the classroom.

Or, really, do we? If we had a social network (or better used our existing Edmodo network) or virtual day set up, couldn’t student teams compete with one another on a FaceBook game? On a prompt or menu of activities left as a message on our class Google Voice line? I have to sit down and make a contingency plan for the next snow day, publish it, and distribute it to students, and I need to design it so we somehow have at least the opportunity to keep our classwork and cooperation rolling.

In contrast to the slide in cooperation several groups evidenced while playing together last Friday, students’ individual analyses of their group’s growth in cooperation continue to improve in quality – you know, qualitatively speaking. Here are some of our debriefing questions and students’ answers to them:

Wii by swannman

Question 1: How do you know your group’s cooperation has improved since we first started playing?

• “We have completed more levels.”
• “People are calmer.”
• “We are learning from each other.”
• “Now I enjoy playing with my group.”
• “We know what to do and say.”
• “We have a strategy.”
• “We won every time.”

Question 2: What have you learned about cooperation so far?

• “That you can’t yell at other players.”
• “Cooperation makes things go better.”
• “You need a lot of it to do work.”
• “You need a leader, but not everyone can be a leader.”
• “It’s not that hard and it helps you get further.”
• “It’s fun and frustrating to work together.”

Ambiguity rears it’s ugly head in schoolwork. Awesome.

Question 3: What is a strength that your group has that helps group members cooperate?

• “Confidence.”
• “We stay on task.”
• “We are nerds.”
• “Talking.”
• “Speed and communication.”

Question 4: What is an area of cooperation in which your group can improve?

• “Not cuss.”
• “Friendship.”
• “Helping one another.”
• “Strategy.”
• “Nerdiness.”

What else can we do to make school be a place where students feel confident, stay on-task, feel good about being nerds, and participate as equal partners in communication for learning?

I think it’s probably time to hand the small-group gaming commentary off to student guest bloggers or else have students create their own blogs ASAP so they can share their learning directly with you. I’m a bit behind the times this year on the student blogging front; this could be the impetus for getting back into the swing of it.

I’m thinking about bringing in Kodu Game Lab and Little Big Planet to add a game/level-creation tier to project menus. For example, a student could create a level in Little Big Planet with platforming metaphors for the major events of the 1930s (can’t you see a series of rising platforms filled with prize bubbles representing the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression drops the bottom out of the level?), or use Kodu Game Lab to write a game with branching paths that simultaneously summarizes a story and speculates on its what-ifs (Pac-man vs. The Maze Runner mash-up?).   I hope, too, that the co-op levels of “Game 3,” a.k.a “BattleBlock Theater,” will offer opportunities for teamwork and reflection like New Super Mario Bros. Wii that can compete with the slapstick lure of its other modes. I suppose that where the learning design comes into play.

Yoshi by Yoshi Huang

• Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
• Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
• Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more with the highest ratio group or the lowest.
• Students identified strategies from the lowest ratio group to try this week in class.
• Students explained how playing the game was like and unlike class.
• Students suggested ways by which they and the teachers could make class more game-like.

Here are some student quotes that caught my eye:

• “It was like class because some succeeded, and some didn’t.”
• “It was more fun than class.”
• “You can fail like in class.”
• “We all need more team work.”
• “We should play on Monday when we need more fun.”

Obviously, I have some hearts and minds work to do here in my allegedly mastery-learning classroom.

This afternoon in class, two usually antagonistic students had this interchange about today’s game play:

Student 1: “Wow.  You did a good job.”
Student 2: “Thank you.”

Maybe my students don’t often compliment one another on their work like that because it’s not relevant enough for them to assess or value it.  Also, I couldn’t engage 2 students with the gaming this week.  More work to do and social learning opportunities to design.

Here’s a comparison of each group’s performance last week and this week:

Group 1 greatly improved positive communication and finished more levels this week than last, but spent a few more lives doing so.  I wonder about how much of the other groups’  improvement is due to reflection about collaboration and how much is due to learning the levels.  I have to think about switching games or levels next week and measuring work in such a way that the qualitative observations on collaboration count for as much as the ratios without making me seem subjective to the students.  Help, PLN! Ideas?

NB: Group 6 consisted of a lone gamer today.  Apparently working alone greatly increases collaboration.

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.