Why Games and Learning?

A significant component of my research is focused on studying how K-12 students play educational games. Lots of kids love video games, but it turns out (unsurprisingly) that not every kid is equally adept at problem-solving in educational games. This points to the need for technologies that can assess how the student is doing, and tailor the learning experience to his/her needs. But more on that later...

What I really want to discuss is why one might study game-based learning environments in the first place. What do game-based learning environments bring to the table, and how do they enhance existing instructional approaches?

First, using commercial game technologies in education gives us an opportunity to appeal to students for whom traditional teaching methods have failed. Something like 94% of teenagers play digital games in some fashion, whether it's Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War, or Farmville, Peggle, Wii Sports, Free Realms, or Club Penguin. Conventional 'teach & regurgitate' instructional methods simply fail to appeal to too many students.

Second, game technologies allow students opportunities to become active learners. Too much of K-12 education is passive, with the instructor standing in front of the class and the students writing or reviewing notes and 'absorbing' facts, definitions, concepts, etc. Games are interactive, and allow students to actively pursue, explore, experiment, and manipulate. When students are actively involved in learning and knowledge discovery, they have a better chance at retaining the knowledge and developing the knowledge structures associated with deep learning.

Games situate learning within game worlds, rather than abstracting away context. As humans, we experience the world through our senses, with physical bodies, interacting with physical objects. Actions have motivations, preconditions, and consequences, problems are tied to applications and goals, and rewards and incentives provide reasons for us to act. Games reproduce many of these conditions, in contrast to typical instructional methods which strip away context from the content & problems students are faced with.

Games take advantage of multimodal presentations of content. Video, text, figures, maps, animations, simulations, character dialog, gesture, facial expression, and other forms of communication are naturally supported in games. All of these affordances substantially increase the bandwidth for communicating with students, conveying alternative and tailored presentations of information, and divergent opportunities for learning.

Games support collaboration and communication, both with non-player characters and student-controlled avatars. Team work is an essential skill for for students to learn to be successful in the modern workplace, and games that encourage cooperation, coordination, and roleplay have this in spades. Games also have support for several modalities for communication, including text & chat, spoken voice, emoticons, avatar non-verbal behaviors, webcams, and other methods.

Games provide opportunities for using artificial intelligence to interpret student actions in the game, and use observations to tailor the learning experience to the student's needs. Similar to human tutors, using AI to model student knowledge, misconceptions, plans, and emotions, and then choose ways to prompt the student, provide hints, present new problems, or adapt the scenario, can be a powerful force for enhancing learning and engagement.

Finally, with the democratization of computing across a range of devices and populations, games are accessible. Students can use them in the classroom, outside of the classroom, and in more and more contexts. This way, students can have more time on-task

Narrative Theater Design Conception

To review, the Narrative Theater is the IntelliMedia lab's latest and greatest project which we are (I am) kicking off this summer.  The first stage of the project is to construct software that will allow students to write short stories (maybe size constrained?) into a simple text editor, press a button, and see their stories realized in movie form using 3D game engine technology.  There should be multimodal character behavior and interaction, discourse-based camera control, text-based and voice-over narration (how we'll do this one I have no clue).

My original conception was to attempt to effectively render a story in a very "expert" way from the story that a student writes.  This was a seriously imposing task because of the sheer size of the space of stories students could come up with.  But rather than fret about the challenges of properly rendering the story in some wonderfully cinematic way from students' texts, why not treat our limited understanding and rendering capacity as a "feature".  Rather than offering students the promise of well rendered movies based on their stories, why not quietly encourage them to test the capacity of our system and see what they can get it to render.  In this way, students will be iteratively refining their stories to explore the system rather than refining their stories to simply make their stories better.  In that way, we need to have a tight, rapid feedback loop that will encourage iterative writing and revising.  Movie rendering needs to happen quickly.  We also need to provide them with hints as to how they can get results so that they don't just get tired of playing with the system.  More so, there should be mechanisms for students to record, bookmark and SHARE their stories+movies with their classmates.  In this way, we can foster semi-collaborative exploration of the story space.  Students could see what other students are writing and the effects of their writing on the resulting visual representation.

I am now much more excited (aka less intimidated) about this project, because it removes some of the burden of having comprehensive understanding and rendering technologies (which are probably currently impractical, even in the restricted domain).  Rather than try to take on too much, lets leverage the strengths of the problem and existing technological shortcomings to our advantage.

Booting Up

I am starting this blog as a means of recording thoughts and experiences as I doggedly pursue my PhD in Computer Science.  I am working with Dr. James Lester in his IntelliMedia Center for Intelligent Systems at North Carolina State University, with a focus on intelligent narrative systems for education.  My larger interest is intelligent human computer interaction, and games is an almost perfect test bed for research in this area.

I have just finished reading one of Michael Mateas's and Andrew Stern's older papers, titled: Towards Integrating Plot and Character for Interactive Drama.  It's a nice collection of thoughts from  back in Facade 's earliest days, and it serves as a nice overview of their reasoning behind several of the architectural decisions that they made while creating Facade.  There is a particularly nice discussion about the issue of strongly autonomous characters, the computational implications of their strong autonomy in interactive narrative, and why they steered away from this direction.  It systematically and succinctly describes many of the theoretical challenges that they faced in designing a "complete" interactive drama.  I think these thoughts can be particularly helpful as I conceive of a more interactive narrative version of Crystal Island.  It would also be a good early paper for a course in interactive narrative.

I am currently juggling a couple of balls in trying to decide what direction to take my virtual character work for my written prelim exam while coupling it into an overall vision for the new projects within our lab.  In particular, I am thinking about our new CreativeIT funded project, the Narrative Theater.  But more on that later. . .