Yesterday I had one of the best researching days of my academic life. Through my education and work, I have spent countless hours pouring through databases and reading thousands of abstracts about various facets of learning improvement strategies.
A great deal of my research focuses on using games in education to improve student performance. A common thread through most of the research I've read is the assumption that the success of games as a learning strategy is because games are fun. Students that are enjoying the work of learning will be more motivated to complete the work and spend more time interacting with the content, and that's why games work as educational tools.
In short, student engagement leads to performance.
While I believe that is one variable in the equation of how games improve learning and an important one, I have been searching for research of other variables. The variable I'm most interested in learning more about as an instructional designer is how game mechanics should be leveraged to design games to improve knowledge acquisition and synthesis.
In short, are there types of game play that work best to teach various types of learning content? And is there educational value in the game mechanics apart from enjoyment of performing the mechanics or interacting with the game.
Currently, educational game development is more of an art, or guessing game, than a science. Often it starts because an educator wants to improve engagement to impact performance. They find or design a game that seems more entertaining than a textbook. Sometimes they focus on the playability of the game, knowing that it should be fun and enjoyable. Sometimes they focus on the game content, knowing they need adequate exposure to the information to be effective as a learning tool. Some use a holistic approach and rely on frameworks to help them focus on all important components.
Then they try it out on students. Sometimes the games work. Sometimes they don't. The educators shape their ideas about the effectiveness of games in education and move on to the next strategy or iteration.
I long to turn the process more into a science than an art. There has been exhaustive study in other fields on the impact video games have on individuals, business, and society. We know how immersion, repetition, competition, and other gaming experiences affect gamer motivation and performance. In the fields of game design, HCI, marketing, and psychology, there are mountains of data linking game design to player experiences and outcomes.
Yet, in education research, at least from my limited, yet growing exposure, there is almost none linking game mechanics to learning behavior. The bulk of the research I find stays out of the depths of asking the "whys" about educational game successes or failures. Instead, they often dangerously conclude that games are or aren't good strategies for achieving desired outcomes based off limited studies and attribute success mostly to the increase in enjoyment.
Where are the education scientists? Why are most researchers content to stay on the surface instead of digging deeper? And more importantly, why is there a pattern of drawing broad sweeping conclusions based on extremely small scale research?
I started this post by mentioning the research I did yesterday. That's because I found an article that restored my hope that there are others in the field who are asking the questions that will help us dig deeper. Lameras et al. (2017) reviewed thousands of studies to identify the various game mechanics used in serious , aka educational, games. What I'm most excited about is that this article can serve as the springboard for the deeper-level research I'm interested in exploring.
By categorizing game mechanics and linking results to them, we can begin to identify those mechanics that are more successful as learning strategies from those that aren't. And from there, we can begin to probe even deeper to identify connections to learning content types and countless other variables that may be at play, so that we might get to a point where we can set true best practices for the design and development of serious games.
Reference
Lameras, P., Arnab, S., Dunwell, I., Stewart, C., Clarke, S., & Petridis, P. (2017). Essential features of serious games design in higher education: Linking learning attributes to game mechanics. British Journal of Educational Technology, 48(4), 972–994. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12467
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