This post stems from a presentation myself and co-conspirators Allisyn Levy (BrainPOP GameUp) and Barbara Chamberlin (New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab) gave at the Games for Change Festival in New York this year. If you prefer, you can watch the video of the talk (also embedded below).

Laying the groundwork

First, let’s cover some fundamentals.

Tie your game to standards. Stateside, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the equivalent of the National Curriculum. Sort of. CCSS only covers some subjects, it’s very new, and not all States have signed-up to it. There are also individual state standards in various subjects.

Provide support materials for your game. These are resources designed specifically for teachers. Reduce the technical barriers to using games. Many schools have older IT equipment, are locked-down in terms of installation and internet access, and students are often more tech-savvy than the teachers. Unless you’re going for specific use-cases or target markets, the less technical barriers the better.

Help teachers find your game. Apart from Google, there are various places where teachers can search for games. Here are some options:

• Specialist lists, such as the Science Game Center and Preloaded’s Games With Purpose.
• BrainPOP’s GameUp – a curated collection of embedded games, free to play.
• Playful Learning. New from the Learning Games Network (for which I work), it’s a free platform designed specifically for teachers to search, share, rate and curate games (both educational and commercial) and ways to use them.

It’s also worth engaging with teacher communities such as Edmodo and EdWeb, as well as academic and teacher-directed conferences.

If you’re making games for the classroom, all this is probably nothing new. So what else can you do to help teachers use your games?

Strategy 1: Show what your game looks like

Teachers are busy. They may not be gamers. And the start of a game may well not reveal the core gameplay and how it works.

Here are three ideas you can implement to help teachers judge your game:

• Create a game guide. This is best as a PDF or something easily printable that a teacher can take with them. For instance, for the Game Guide, I included specifics about the content, classroom configuration ideas, possible pause points in the game (such as great places for discussion), and a road map of the game stages.

• Create a video or set of images that show gameplay. This is distinct from a promotional video – it’s not about hooking people in, but about giving teachers the confidence to say, “I can see how this works”. Check out Filament Games for a great example.
• Provide hints in your game design that help teachers understand where their kids are in the game. In Math Snacks’ Ratio Rumble, the rollover on each game level subtly hints at what type of ratio is being used (2 part, 3 part, simple, complex) and what types of potions are used (whole numbers v. fractions).

Strategy 2: Show how to teach with your game

Now teachers know what the game is and how it works, you need to show them what teaching with the game looks like. You want them to say, “I can implement that in my classroom”. Here are some questions to consider:

• How does learning happen with your game? It is likely that it is best used when there is some kind of discussion before, during or after the gameplay, or a combination. Offer examples of guiding questions for these discussions, and provide or link off to complementary activities.
• What do teachers do during gameplay? How active should they be? Do they play along with the students?
• How can teachers justify using your game? As well as teachers, heads, administrators and parents often need convincing. What value does the game bring? Is there any supporting research or evidence for the game’s effectiveness?

Answers to these questions can be provided in a game guide, or an accompanying teacher website. Videos are also great for showing the different ways teachers can interact with students and the game. Again, an example from Quandary is our classroom implementation video.

Strategy 3: Work with teachers and classrooms

This is something we know we should do, but it’s often hard to make it happen and to do it right. Here are some ideas to get the most out of working with teachers and kids.

• Try to use multiple classes and observations. There are great differences between teachers, between students and between schools.
• Use an iterative design approach for your classroom materials. We’re familiar with giving ourselves time and people to develop, reflect and modify the game. Do the same for the support materials. Give your teachers a chance to play the game, come up with strategies, modify them and try again.
• Build great teacher links. There are many ways to do this. At the Learning Games Network, we’ve leveraged student and teacher attendees of our annual Game Design Boot Camp for play testing and content creation throughout the year.

Want more?

I hope this has provided a useful starting point and some food for thought. If you’re hungry for more, do check out Barb Chamberlin’s recording of the Games for Change presentation that inspired this post. There’s a ‘buy 3, get some free’ special at the end of the video with more ideas and tips that we’ve found super useful when making games for use in class!

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A teacher focus group for Playful Learning

A busy time for games and learning Stateside

I’m writing this first ’view from the US’ post as I fly between Boston and Chicago, eager, excited and slightly nervous about the next few weeks. This time of year is always super-busy for the games and learning field here in the States.

I’m on my way to the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The GLS Center comprises videogame scholars and designers that study game-centered learning systems, design and develop videogames, and conduct outreach with learners and academics. The annual Conference is recognised as one of the best in the field, and it certainly has plenty of food and beer to fuel the debates and discussions. This year, keynote speakers include Mary Flanagan and Constance Steinkuehler, who co-directs the GLS Center and served last year as a policy advisor to the White House on the use of games.

Just down the road from the GLS Center in Madison is Filament Games, the award winning learning game studio that, among many other projects, created a suite of very successful citizenship games for iCivics.

Madison is also the home of one of the two Learning Games Network (LGN) studios, the non-profit I’ve worked at since I moved to the US in January 2012. Our mission is to close the gap between research and practice in games-based learning. We’re all about the development and distribution of games informed by research in the learning sciences, creative design, and technical development. I’m based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts studio – on the other side of the river from Boston, and on the edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. This location is no coincidence. LGN started as a spin-off from The Education Arcade at MIT.

The Education Arcade’s research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players. You can read about the creation of their latest MMO project, the Radix Endeavor, on their design blog.

Boston and the surrounding area is quite a hub both for games generally and games for purpose. At LGN we work closely on various events and activities with the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, and the MIT Game Lab, the latter of which recently released OpenRelativity, a Unity physics engine that allows developers to adjust the speed of light.

OpenRelativity: An Open-Source Toolkit for Unity3D by MIT Game Lab

As soon as the GLS Conference wraps-up at the end of this week, I’ll be returning to the East Coast for the Games for Change Festival in New York. This year I hope to again catch-up with several of my old UK gaming colleagues. And I’ll be crossing my fingers at the Games for Change Awards. The first game I was involved with at LGN, Quandary, is up for Best Gameplay. Quandary lets players aged 8-14 shape the future of a new society while learning how to recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives. The game aims to develop ethical thinking skills such as perspective taking, critical thinking and decision making.

NYC is of course a hub of gaming and ed tech. For instance, the Institute of Play, whose initial project was the design and implementation of Quest to Learn, an inner-city public school inspired by gaming. BrainPOP creates animated and curriculum-linked animations and has had great success in recent years with GameUp, a free and curated portal of third-party educational games. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is a research and innovation lab that forms part of Sesame Workshop (the organisation behind Sesame Street). The Center has formed the Games and Learning Publishing Council, with the aim to understand the dynamics and areas of innovation in the educational games market, and to push the sector forward.

The third major conference of the trio this June is ISTE, in Texas. It’s America’s version of BETT, although apparently a lot smaller and less intense. ISTE will mark the official launch of my most recent project, Playful Learning.

Playful Learning is a nationwide (and, we hope in time, a worldwide) initiative that invites teachers to innovate through the use of games in education. It consists of a free online portal designed for teachers to explore, discover and use games for learning, plus a growing community of teachers connected through both the website and national and regional events. The initiative aims to compliment the various teacher networks and game-based communities already in existence. Playful Learning, targeting teachers, forms part of a trio of sites that include Institute of Play’s recently launched Playforce, targeting players, and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s upcoming Games and Learning website, targeting publishers, policy makers and researchers.

With ISTE at the end of the month, that completes the outlook for June, at which point I’ll be laying myself and my British accent low for the July 4^th celebrations! There is, of course, so much more going on over here in terms of games for purpose – I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the hive of ed tech and gaming activity in California. My colleagues and myself here at LGN look forward to continuing to share news and insights from across the pond, and to build more links through this exciting new site.

Peter Stidwill is a British educational games producer who moved to the States 2 years ago and now works for the Learning Games Network in Boston. He’ll be writing a regular column on what’s going on with educational games in the US.

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