Abstract
Educational games have had a troubled history. At their worst, they have been neither educational nor games; even at their best they have faced scepticism from educators, game designers and especially children. The standard response to being given an educational game – This is supposed to be fun? – might be compared to finding a Brussels sprout at the centre of a Tootsie Pop. Teachers, meanwhile, are rightly concerned that the educational content of these games might be outweighed by the entertainment value. Already loaded down with curriculum that has to be delivered, many educators feel they don't have the time to spare on anything but direct instruction.
Identifying the need for an Internet literacy game
Media Awareness Network (MNet), Canada's leading media education organization, conducted research in 2005 that investigated children's use of new technologies. Results from this study, titled Young Canadians in a Wired World (Steeves & Wing, 2005) (the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of its kind in Canada), convinced MNet that there was a need for a comprehensive Internet literacy resource that could be used in elementary and intermediate classrooms.
The research showed that young people are actively interested in learning more about their online environments. In focus groups, young people articulated that what they need from adults is more information about the kinds of content they find online so they can make informed choices about what they choose to see, as well as training in how to protect their online privacy and how to avoid undesirable content. The interest is highest among the children in Grades 4 to 6. This is a particularly important time to learn these skills because kids in these grades are playing on commercial game sites that actively seek to collect their personal information, and, by Grade 6, students are exploring edgier Web sites.
These were our concerns as we began the development of Passport to the Internet , an Internet literacy tutorial for Grades 4-8. As we listed the areas we hoped to cover - understanding safety, marketing and privacy issues, authenticating information found on the Web, managing online relationships and dealing with cyber bullying - it quickly became clear that Passport to the Internet would be a very ambitious project. Media Awareness Network had already produced several educational games, such as the award-winning CyberPigs series. Most of these, however, weren't games in the proper sense but rather animated stories, which were occasionally interrupted with quizzes. With the amount of content it would need to deliver Passport to the Internet had to be more interactive than our previous endeavours but still maintain a game-like atmosphere so that students would play through each of the modules with little encouragement from their teacher. Could we achieve this without sacrificing its educational value? Was it even possible for a game to teach complex skills like these?
Learning through games
Given the relatively brief history of educational games, it might come as a surprise that the question is an old one. One of our oldest games, chess, was traditionally seen as a preparation for war, and in 1989 David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon designed a thought experiment to test whether or not it actually did so. They imagined that a small country, home to the world's greatest chess master, was invaded by its larger neighbour. The citizens of the invaded country immediately put the chess master in charge of their military, reasoning that his skill on the board would transfer to the battlefield. In designing this scenario, Perkins and Salomon raised the question of just how we learn: is it more important to develop skills with broad application, that might move back and forth between related fields (such as chess and war), or were the skills specific to each context more important? In his book Schools For Thought, John Bruer (1993) revisits this problem, applying recent advances in cognitive theory to show that neither answer is entirely true: the chess master will not automatically be a great strategist in the real world-the two situations are too different-but some of his specific skills may transfer to the new context.
The word “transfer” is key to understanding why some educational games work and some don't. In cognitive theory, it's used to refer to the ability to apply skills acquired in one context to another. In general, the more similar two contexts are, the easier it is to transfer from one to the other. Learning Spanish grammar, for example, will help you learn Italian grammar, but not Russian grammar, because Spanish is similar in structure to Italian but not to Russian. The catch is that strategies which are applicable to the most contexts are also generally the least useful: cognitive scientists call these weak methods . Conversely, those skills most dependent on specific understanding of a particular context, called strong methods, are the most effective, but are also, for obvious reasons, the hardest to transfer.
