Transfer is, of course, important in all educational situations. One of the greatest challenges facing any teacher is to get students to transfer what they learn in the classroom to other situations (the test being the world outside of the school). This is especially important in educational games, because by definition their worlds, like a chessboard, are artificial; any similarity to real-world contexts has to be designed into the game. It's entirely possible to acquire mastery of a game without learning any skills that can transfer to other contexts (except, perhaps, to other games).
Why use games for education at all, then? Because players do acquire mastery, often with amazing commitment and speed. Many writers, from game designers such as Will Wright (Sim City, Spore) and Scott Osterweil (Labyrinth) to academics such as Henry Jenkins and Constance Steinkuehler, have noted that computer game players learn how to succeed at games through an application of the scientific method. As Wright (2006) puts it, “Just watch a kid with a new video game. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn't a random process; it's the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, they begin to master the game world. It's a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis” (p. 110). Constance Steinkuelher and Sean Duncan (2008) even suggest games may teach hypothesis-testing better than traditional science education: “ Poincaré warned against the seduction of reducing science to a domain of seeming facts, stating, ‘Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a house'” (p. 530). As well, games are well suited to independent learning because they can allow students to learn at their own pace: each student moves through the game separately, progressing at whatever speed best suits her.
Design issues
In designing Passport to the Internet, we knew there were several major issues we would have to address for it to be successful. The most important was the question of transfer: could we really teach Internet literacy skills, or would users only learn how to succeed at the game? For this reason, we decided that the core of the game would be simulation; the modules would reproduce genuine online environments as closely as possible. For instance, our teaching privacy management skills module is a simulated social networking site that combines elements of Facebook and MySpace. Due to this choice, we were able to teach specific skills, or strong strategies, that would transfer directly to the actual Internet: a student could, for instance, use the exact same techniques used to analyze the game's fictional Web sites to judge real ones.
To take advantage of the learning potential of games, we wanted Passport to the Internet to reward exploration and experimentation. Although we wanted there to be consequences to success and failure (it's not really a game if you can't fail), we decided that failing should be a fairly minor event. (It's worth noting that in World of Warcraft, the most popular online multiplayer game, death itself is basically an inconvenience). We therefore let users replay any module as many times as needed and as soon as they want to, but also always give the option of moving to another module and coming back later, so they can take a break if they become frustrated. For that same reason, the modules are designed such that they can be completed in any order (except in one case where skills learned in one module are necessary to complete another one) and we allow users to complete the game over multiple sessions.
Because the teachers who will be administering Passport to the Internet in the classroom are not necessarily experts in the skills we hope to teach (though we offer a detailed Teacher's Guide to provide background), we provide as much of the educational content as possible on demand, to be accessed by the students when they want it rather than delivered beforehand. We created a Help tool that lets students get information on any active items on the screen; but only when they decide they need extra information.
There were, of course, many other factors influencing our design decisions. As always, two of the most important were money and time: both limited our options in terms of how much we could do and how we could do it. An early plan, for instance, to have an unlockable “bonus” module had to be dropped due to time constraints, and the fully functional search engine simulator had to be narrowed significantly in scope. We were also concerned with making the tutorial appropriate to students' cognitive development: because the age range – from as young as eight to as old as thirteen – covered so much cognitive growth, we knew we had to have two different age levels in the game. This was most important in the authentication module, where the older students analyze Web sites on a much more complex and subtle level. Older students also face more sophisticated tasks in other modules, such as being a witness to cyber-bullying instead of a victim.
What makes a successful educational game?
Henry Jenkins (2007), writing about successful educational games (or “serious games,” a term many in the field prefer), identifies several characteristics they all have in common. First, they are made to fit specific learning contexts; in other words, they teach strong, specific strategies rather than weak, general ones. We made Passport to the Internet as specific as possible, identifying at the beginning of the design process the key skills we wanted students to learn and making the game as close as possible to the real-world context in which those skills would be used. Second, successful educational games supplement classroom teaching rather than replace it. Although Passport to the Internet can be played on its own, we created a comprehensive Teacher's Guide that allows educators to make the game part of a larger lesson series, with resources and activities from which teachers could pick and choose.
