These factors are not a bad thing; they can be built into learning practices. Kids do care about learning; 50% of 4th - 8th graders would choose smarts over other factors such as popularity and physical appearance.

Kids find school boring, but important. We should give them a chance to buy and use educational software. Kalinske suggests LeapFrog as a case study: LeapFrog's growth since 1995 is 75% on sales, for a total of around $700 million in 2003, and gets 30 feet of shelf space in most retail outlets.

Kalinske then showed a video on Leapster, their platform for young learners. LeapFrog has 20 titles planned this year for Leapster. Research from a variety of universities informs their efforts, including Games2Teach (MIT), Literacy Education Project (UW), and others. Still, there is not yet a formal 3rd party research on the efficacy of Leapster, but those efforts are underway. However, research on the effectiveness of LeapFrog's other platforms suggest efficacy, including a 74% gain in LAUSD reading skills in independent tests.

Kalinske closed by suggesting that as an industry bigger than the domestic film industry, video games have room to grow through meaningful educational software. Support the Games for Learning Seal as a "powerful way to help consumers sort through the tremendous noise in the market." Need animators, writers, programmers to make these games, but you also need educators. LeapFrog has 1,000 employees committed to learning, including 150 with professional teaching experience and an educational advisory board.

SESSION 5: MAKING TOOLS FOR MAKING GAMES
Eric Klopfer (MIT Teacher Education Program -- moderator)
Steven Drucker (Microsoft Research)
Mark Mine (Walt Disney Internet Group)
Tom McCormack (Muzzy Lane Software)
Philip Tan (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

Eric Klopfer
Klopfer shared some issues on tools for making educational games:

Developing reusable engines fro the commmunity, teaching kids through making games, defining successful design and development models, making games easier and more portable.

Augmented reality and location-based games are an area of interest, because they combine the physical and virtual worlds, embed the players in authentic situations, and create scenarios to facilitate learning and play. He shared two scenarios MIT has developed, "Environmental Detectives" and "Charles River City" The former is an environmental science game about investigating a toxin in the groundwater; the latter is an epidemiology game about an outbreak. Both involve team-play and changes during game time.

MIT developed toolkits to create scenarios easily. Toolkits allow them to deploy games effectgively, gain broader acceptance, and take advantage of the real context. This empowers teachers and learners to create their own location-based games, e.g. student construction. They plan to distribute these toolkits by the end of summer.

Klopfer advanced these potential benefits of educational location-based gaming:

MIT is also working on StarLogo, a tool for kids and teachers to create rules for "creatures" to explore emergent and complex systems. Games motivate kids to learn programming, but they still have to learn a text-based language with syntactic challenges. They are working on removing the syntax barrier through a graphical programming environment. Flow-chart like connector blocks allow programmers to fit code together like lego blocks. This tool also enables 3D authoring.

The challenge is to make programming fun and easy for students, and leverage the power of learning through programming (a la Seymour Papert).

Steven Drucker
"If you build it, you will learn" is a good attitude, but there are distinctions between the creation of games and the games themselves. Games can be used as a motivational tool, but how do we do it? This isn't necessarily appropriate for everyone. Games can uplift the unmotivated students (the C students).

Drucker argued that the educational motivation has to be incorporated in the game. The Incredible Machine is a good example (teaches physics skills inside of a system). Sim City is a good example (teaches complex systems, urban planning). Europa Universalis is a good example (teaches negotiation, trade-offs, and forces behind history). Combat Flight Simulator is a good example (teaches learning under pressure). Uru is a good example (teaches collaboration).

Drucker argued that we need tools for casual producers -- secondary teachers and kids. The best way to get at this is through rapid prototyping. Design it, build it, try it, refine it, try it again, and again. This kind of creation is not about high quality visuals or spoon fed learning. Lowering the barrier for entry in rapid prototyping needs to happen. We need to increase the access, rapidness, and lower the risks.

Drucker shared several methods for developing games:

(1) Languages like Lisp, Scheme, Python, Smalltalk, Squeak, Scratch, Glyph, and Processing are useful tools. So are Flash, Director, Project Fun's FunEditor. These really allow rapid amateur development. But, they don't necessarily scale well. Ideally, these need to be built into game engines, according to Drucker.

(2) Game Modding is another strategy. Half-Life, Unreal, Dungeon Siege, Baldur's Gate, and many others offer modding support. There is great community support and you don't need programming expertise, but it is sometimes hard to adapt beyond the original game format.

(3) Game Engines are another option. Professional or open source engines can he used by amateur to professional developers. Older engines are becoming free or open source as developers release new engines into the marketplace. Engines jumpstart development time and offer a great deal of automation, but htey require a great deal of expertise. Also, most engines are FPS-related; we need more engines.

(4) Small downloadable games and mobile games are alternative platforms for amateur to professional developers. These don't need the same kind of polish, but you need to start development from scratch, need specific domain expertise, and are subject to varying standards (e.g. mobile devices).

Mark Mine
Mine answered Drucker, introducing an open-source game engine with rapid-prototyping built-in. The engine started as a tool for visualization for theme park design. That model turned out not to be viable, so Disney turned to MMOGs. Toontown Online uses the new version of the engine; it's a "safe, friendly, and colorful environment for children ages 7 and up." In the game, you are a toon who defends toontown against ugly business robots.

Panda3D is the name of the engine technology, and it performs 3D rendering in C++, with a Python-based scripting layer for rapid prototyping. It was released open source by Disney VR Studio and can be found on SourceForge.

Carnegie Mellon's ETC (Jesse Schell) runs the Panda Project, which supports and make accessible to a wide variety of people. This includes documentation, installers, sample code, additions to the code base.

Tom McCormack
McCormack's company Muzzy Lane Software makes educational simulation games, their first games cover WWII-era Europe. Key goals of their games include fun, flexibility, and customization. People who might use this include:

McCormack explained the "layered design" of the product:

(1) Core - understands how the world operates
(2) Game - defines game play
(3) Content Pack - specifies era and players
(4) Scenario - specifies specific events in that era

XML files define the players, actions, goals, objectives, and even the user interface. Systems dynamics models runs the simulation. Muzzy also offers a scenario editor for the end-user, which runs on Windows.

Philip Tan
Tan described Revolution, a game that came out of MIT Games2Teach. It is an American Revolution game MIT is designing with Colonia Williamsburg. It's designed on the Neverwinter Nights platform. A team of 6 - 8 students work on the project; grad students designed the mechanics, and undergrads designed the objects. Neverwinter Nights is powerful enough to allow new behaviors, e.g. talking to people about a town meeting. NPCs can spread information, rumors, and accusations around town. The game also maintains class and gender boundaries in interactions between characters.

SESSION 6: FOSTERING GAMES LITERACY
Henry Jenkins (MIT Comparative Media Studies -- moderator)
David Buckingham (University of London)
Jessica Irish (Wellesley College)
Gerard Jones (Author of Killing Monsters)
Eric Zimmerman (GameLab)

Henry Jenkins
Jenkins showed a video about "the making of game literacy," showcasing MIT's work in local schools. He encouraged everyone to go into local schools and contribute time to large or small-scale events.

David Buckingham
If you want games to teach, says Buckingham, you first have to teach them how to understand games. But even if game literacy is required, don't we have enough literacies already. What does "game literacy" really mean? Functional literacy? Cultural literacy? Criticial literacy? The last two seem most important to Buckingham. Literacy, argued Buckingham, needs to be both critical and creative; it involves reading and writing, critical analysis and production.

Buckingham introduced two of his projects. The first, called Shared Spaces, is a digital cultures and informal learning project with ~11 year olds. Students categorized and analyzed games and made "fly-throughs" of games. You can have kids make games, but they are not really the kind of games kids use outside of such environments.

How are reading and writing connected in game literacy? Does good playing relate to good creation? Not necessarily. Writing involves a different kind of control, skills, and bstraction that complicate this kind of literacy.

The second project, Making Games, is about creating a software tool for game authoring with kids' input. Buckingham explained that a key difficulty kids have is how to conceptualize a game as a game. This results in highly imaginative, multi-dimensional conceptual ideas. Some kids get it and some can't, and those who do are not necessarily experienced gamers. The most visually impressive paper designs were often far too complex and unworkable. Now Buckingham is playing and making board games with kids in order to get them to think "in a more pure way ... about game dimension." To teach games literacy, argued Buckingham, we need to be clear with what is specific to games.

Issues relating to the software design for a kids' game authoring tool include flexibility, granularity, sequence, pedagogy, and curriculum context.

Jessica Irish
Irish explained a game she produced with Onramp Arts, an NPO that provides an art production space in Los Angeles.

Under a DOE grant, Irish worked with 25 local high school students to think about how to break down a game into character, space, interactivity, and other characteristics. The groups looked at histories of Latin America, resulting in a game called Tropical America, playable online at http://www.tropicalamerica.com. The team looked at thematic events in Latin American history. The kids mapped these connections in the game, creating a story in which the player is the sole survivor of a massacre. The game is a kind of detective story to find out what happened. The game includes a database of players who have completed the game; these players are memorialized.

The organization attempted to sell the game and use the proceeds to fund the students' college education, but that program was not approved.

Gerard Jones
Jones described the in-school comic book workshops he conducted with K-8 kids. Games emerged as something kids wanted to think about or design. Some kids saw games as a world building process, others as sequences of events, others as images of action. The world builders were most interested in games.

Jones found that schools were more open to the idea of "media literacy," and he encourages the students to explore the medium that appeals to them most. Some kids are very game-focused, while others design more abstract stories that blur the media or could take form in any medium. In the workshops, Jones helps the students achieve what they want to say. This is the most useful kind of literacy in his experience, even if it means letting kids go "into the forbidden." Some kids have trouble with this too, as do some teachers. Opening this door to the forbidden opens up the emotional and symbolic expression of kids.

Jones argued that games bring an irresolvable combination of narrative and game logic; neither is really equivalent with the other. The way kids merge the two forms is most interesting. Kids before 12 are less interested in a variety of variables and more interested in a concrete world. Later, kids become more interested in agency and options, "game design as open-ended storytelling" and less about "bolting things down." Jones argued that the urges between different kinds of games suggests different intentions. For example, twitch games are like baseball, a combination of full emotion and rest. This "stillness" suggests an opposition to some forms of games and aggression research.

Jones tries to get kids to talk about or draw why they like a particular genre or game. Jones helps the kids reflect on their impressions. Listening to what kids are saying, and creating empathy with adults is a viable extension to this project.

Eric Zimmerman
Zimmerman offered a different perspective than Buckingham on games literacy. Games provide a model of learning, so can games provide a model for literacy? Zimmerman ran an experiment with audience volunteers. Celia Pearce had to teach Kurt Squire how to play a game without using any words. The first game was Rock-Paper-Scissors (Kurt won). Players and the audience then suggested how to play RPS with three players. Celia suggested a hierarchical model, which seemed to work. Zimmerman then suggested that the entire audience play at once. The whole audience played against Henry Jenkins, using a voting model. The audience voted by applause while Henry turned his back.

Zimmerman suggested that if part of playing the game is realizing a relationship with the game (a la Jim Gee). In the game exercise, several steps took place:

Zimmerman suggested that such practice may help foster games literacy. Designers and developers might participate as design educators, by fostering literacy through advocacy, by designing innovative games, and by supporting independent games.

PANEL 7: CASE STUDIES, COMMERCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS
Warren Buckleitner (Children's Software Revue)
Scott Traylor (360KID)
Robin Raskin (The Internet Mom)
Bob Wickingden (Jersey Cow)
Carrie Heeder (Michigan State University)
James Oppenheim (The Oppenheim Toy Report)

Warren Buckleitner
Buckleitner runs the Children's Software Revue (tip: use the password smiles to get into the archives). He urged potential educational game designers to become versed in a variety of educational theories, incluidng behaviorism, constructivism, social learning theory, information processing theory, and Bloom's taxonomy. He showed a serious of commercial games and related them to the levels of the last.

Scott Traylor
Experimenting with DVD as a medium for educational content. Accessibility, penetration, and costs for DVDs is very attractive (57 million homes have DVD players, and DVD prices hover around $21). Traylor showed a Nickelodeon DVD-based trivia game. However, DVD is interactivity is low. The Letter Facctory from LeapFrog offers slightly higher interactivity. Hasbro also released a truly bizarre DVD-based Trivial Pursuit, which Traylor demonstrated.

Robin Raskin
Raskin started by sharing her assumptions. First, the CD-ROM market is dying. Second, "serious gamers" are a minority. Third, kids don't compartmentalize play, education, and other activities. She then showed several applications and devices that she thinks represent successful specimens of educational games.

Raskin showed the Zodiac Tapwave, a combination of a PDA, MP3 player, and handheld game device that runs of PalmOS. Raskin argued that devices like this have great promise. Next, Raskin showed the Princeton Review SAT test review on a mobile phone. The app also allows scheduling and reporting. Raskin also showed the visual thesaurus, a neat Java app that visualizes thesaurus entries as a network. Finally, she cited Instant Messenger as a very viable platform for educational content of many kinds.

Bob Wickingden
Wickingden talked about GMax, a 3D modeling and animation tool from Discreet (makers of 3ds max). The tool allows players to create in-game content form compatible games, and also claims to teach 3D design. This tool, argued Wickingdon allows players to learn by solving problems posed by the authoring tool. He showed a simple example of using the tool to learn boolean operations with real-time feedback, and then to create objects using these principles.

Carrie Heeder
Heeder showed demos by fifth graders in a space pioneers game design camp. The students designed a space learning game.

First Heeder showed a game designed by a group of girls. You are a space traveler collecting ingredients to concoct a cure for a spell Dr. Evil Stinky has cast on the entire earth, putting its inhabitants to sleep. On Mars, the player exchanges a Britney Spears CD for the required ingredient.

James Oppenheim
Can commercial software be a commercial success? That depends on what success is. Children's books, argued Oppenheim, are not expected to make tens of millions of dollars. Childrens software does not express the joy that is possible in learning.

Problems with children's software:

Oppenheim called for developers to put emotion, content, and everything kids get from books into new educational software.

PANEL 8: NEW COLLABORATORS: MAKING THE NEXT MOVE
Henry Jenkins (MIT Comparative Media Studies)
Doug Lowenstein (Entertainment Software Association)

Henry Jenkins
The Education Arcade website has a forum for discussing each of the panel topics from the conference. Henry also called for researchers working on this topic to come and link in their information, as well as collaboration partners from other institutions, teachers, and corporations (especially smaller game companies).

Doug Lowenstein
Kids are now growing up with interactivity. This fact allows us to use game technology in an educational way. To insist that we should teach the same way is unproductive. In 2020, 176 million people will have grown up with video games. The industry should not ignore this tremendous opportunity.

There are some challenges. Everybody in the ESA does not believe in linking games to education, but things are changing. Many companies have poor memories of the educational marketplace; 10 years ago the market was hot, but now there is no real market for such software.

The cost of development is very high; in one case, 400 people are working on a $25 million budget to make a game. While we need to keep their costs reasonable, good educational games have to feel something like the games kids are buying. Only one out of five games makes money; educational games need to keep this in mind.

Most teachers and school boards don't get it. They won't buy into games in the classroom. There needs to be work in government and private outreach. Many teachers also cannot use the technology. People will be very resistant, but we have to work with them anyway.

Lowenstein explained that the ESA is working to get some money out of the federal government to explore new ways of teaching. Education is a huge political issue today; there is an opportunity to take advantage of this industry to address this issue. The growth of the industry should drive people to open their minds to games in non-entertainment contexts.

POP QUIZ WITH WILL WRIGHT
Will Wright (Maxis)
Henry Jenkins (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

NOTE: this is not a verbatim transcript of the conversation. I have recorded key comments from both speakers, even though I've laid out the summary as a transcript. In many cases, I'm summarizing, adding words, or taking words away. In other words, this isn't a citation of what either interlocutor actually said.

Henry: What was your education?
Will: I went to Montessori as a kid, went to college for 5 years and ended up dropping out. Being self-motivated was much more useful than getting a formal education.

Henry: Are games and education antithetical?
Will: Before education was so structured, people wandered more freely along a landscape of learning. How can we use games to communicate content is a common question, but the best use seems to be motivational: getting people interested in a subject area. How do we take the games that are out there to become motivational for kids? One idea is to mark games with material that would connect to additional information.

It's much easier to think about the piques of the entertainment experience and introduce learning as an effect of these motivations, and this would work across disciplinary boundaries.

Henry: Should educators think in a different way, for example, that you design teaching practices that layer on to other experiences?
Will: Commercial games are in a very Darwinian environment. Proving a profit motive would help. This has put filters on game design: games have to be compelling, kids have to want to ask for them. Games also have to hit the most people possible with the same title. Gender balance is one issue, but age is increasingly another (trending upward).

Henry: You and I are both fans of Scott McCloud, who argues that comics have only seen a fraction of what is possible in the medium. Games have also only done a fraction of what they're capable of doing, right?
Will: Yeah. But games will probably improve more than comics. Games will inevitably shift toward wider and wider experiences. There are four or so niche genres for games. If you go in a bookstore, you see a lot more kinds of books, same with television. This shows that they're hitting a much wider demographic and experience. This will happen with games too.

Henry: There's an apocryphal story about Rudy Guiliani's son (does he even have a son? I"m not sure) playing Sim City, and his father coming in to play. His son told his father, (you run your city, I'll run mine." Does the sense of possession in Sim City suggest that it is educational?
Will: There's another story that's not apocryphal. A kid invited all four mayoral candidates in his town to come and play Sim City. The incumbent refused to come until he knew all the rules. Another candidate was a city planner. The city planner did best and ended up getting elected. The models of reality started feeding back on reality.

When we sell games, we're selling problems for $40 a pop. And people buy them because they're fun to solve. The more interesting games have a larger solutions pace: there is an infinite range of solutions that solve the same problem. This gives people a deep sense of personalization and identity. You can get a good sense of how some players are approaching the problem by looking at your solution. This is one way that games can become more personal, like Giuliani's fictional son.

Henry: Tell us about your thoughts about play and education when you create games.
Will: It's wired into us to enjoy creative problem solving. It's amazing how kids in a game environment can very quickly intuit what the rules of that environment are. That's a very important thing we have to realize. Education has a lot to do with compression. You have to look at problems and decide what solutions you could apply. And that's very much what any player does when they play a game.

As game designers, we're trying to build a model in people's head. And that probably has a lot to do with education. That model building is starting in the store; the kid is already playing an imaginary game. How do we build a fun model they can build in their imagination? The computer helps keep track of things well, which lets me build a more elaborate city, but it's all about a model in my head.

Henry: What about corporate culture's aversion to the word "learning?"
Will: That speaks to the economics. In the past, below 12 years old the parents were making the buying decisions. That age has gone down -- now you've got 5 year olds saying, "I want Pokemon!" The kids are pulling all the software off the shelves: buy this, buy that.

Now, putting a sticker on the box, I'm not sure that would make such a big difference. Even if the mother is looking at the sticker, it's going to be next to about 5 others: Game of the Year, ESRB, etc.. Imagine if you had never seen a movie and you saw "PG-13" on a movie poster. Parents, if they don't consume the game, they have no concept of what the game is. More stickers will just confuse the parents more. I think there will be internal motivations on the part of kids, but I'm not sure we can go with a cookie-cutter approach like that. There's a grey area; who gets to draw the line in the sand.

Henry: It seems to me that The Sims might be the only game to deal with adult issues, while most other games deal with adolescent issues.
Will: Another problem we face are the metrics we apply to education. When you play the Sims, the more valuable lessons you get are when 12 year-olds become the parent, and they're complaining to their real parents about their sims. But what category does that fall into? It doesn't apply to any learning they do in school. And a lot of learning will require us not to apply these strict measurements. How do you convey those lessons with a label?

Henry: Extend this notion of education in The Sims Online. Tell us about the situation in Alphaville, with the scandal of rigging the outcome. This brings up Issues relating to being a citizen in an online world. People are doing things that are not designed for education, but they are topics that teachers would consider educational.
Will: Kids now are growing up with this idea that they have a malleable media environment -- they make movies, CDs, game mods -- but they're also involved in larger topologies, communities, social networks... and online games are good examples of that. Some of these have different consequences than others. In that sense, it's more playful -- it's the sociology they're playing with. I think you're right, that's an incredibly educational thing, but it's hard to quantify that. Kids learn chaotic and complex systems in games, and I can't imagine teaching that in any other medium. But it's also hard to design. What you want to do is have this emerge from the social dynamics, and that's proved very hard to engineer.

Henry: Another dimension of what we're talking about is ownership. People feel like Alphaville is a place that belongs to them, and they care about who is mayor. What would it take to give kids that same ownership of school?
Will: It brings me back to the motivation side: how do we bring this technology to motivate people? Imagine if every student could pursue independent study, and if their interests wander, whatever resources they needed would be available to them. If there were some system observing them, sorting them, accruing credits, without forcing them to do something for a certain amount of time very day, and then try to apply metrics to it, what would that world feel like? I think a lot of kids are doing that right now, when they get home from school, online. But it's invisible education to us.

Henry: Mary Louise Pratt has written an essay about her son learning from collecting baseball cards. Starting with something that kids care about, seems to be a much better way of creating that exploratory environment.
Will: That's why I keep coming back to this idea of motivation. If you have a really motivated kid, you can't stop him from learning.

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