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Frontiers
Playing with Our Future
High-Tech Toys as Teaching Tools
January 1998
The game opens with an introduction: the player
must get to the home of the Greek god Zeus. Unfortunately, the map to
his house has been ripped apart and the gods and goddesses have the pieces.
To collect them, the player needs to visit each deity and answer a question
about a fraction. If successful, the player will end up with the whole
map, bypass the raging bull at the front of Zeus' house, and become the
god or goddess of fractions.
As computer games go, this one will never rival Mario Brothers or Pac
Man for excitement. Even as a teaching tool, it leaves something to be
desired, admits Yasmin Kafai, Director of the Game Design Project and
professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles.
But as the first design and delivered product of a fourth grader, the
game in question is a huge success.
The designer and her 15 classmates in a Massachusetts elementary school
each conceptualized and developed a game. They learned how to make the
games interactive and how to address consequences for right and wrong
answers. And they learned how to step back, take the player's perspective
and make sure their instructions were clear.
"Many children have a hard time with this concept," says Kafai. "Designing
games forces children to think up front about how other people will react,
and then use that information in the design."
The Game Design Project is one of many NSF-funded projects that takes
advantage of children's love of video games and their lack of apprehension
about technology to help them learn and use high-level thinking. Projects
in inter-school computer networks, virtual reality, science-oriented software,
interactive science Web sites, and robotics are all part of NSF's parade
of information technologies systems.
The systems, educators find, can motivate learners, regardless of location
and socioeconomic status, to access resources, information, experts, mentors
and colleagues. Teachers use the technologies to integrate abstract and
hands-on learning, and to provide students with access to research methods
previously available only to scientists and other professionals.
In addition, NSF is using these projects to address the premise that,
if society is to continue to benefit from the rapid expansion of new knowledge,
humans need to exercise and expand their powers of reasoning.
So while some of the projects, especially those for younger students,
might seem like they're asking kids to "just play around," in reality,
they're developing valuable teaching and learning strategies.
"We know that motivation plays an extremely important role in education," says
NSF's Nora Sabelli, Senior Program Director in the Directorate for Education
and Human Resources. Motivation comes from children directing, participating
in, or playing at projects. "To adults, play is just what children do.
But that's the point. Play implies doing something, not being passive.
Playing while learning increases the time spent on the task, an important
predictor of retained knowledge."
FLUENCY IN TECHNOLOGY
Dolls, miniature cars, and building blocks. Children play with
items that will become important to them as adults.
For Seymour Papert, the toy of choice was gears. Papert is a
mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
one of the founders of MIT's Artificial Intelligence and Media
Laboratories. He pioneered educational research using mathematics
to understand how children learn and think.
As a child, Papert was fascinated by gears. In them he found
a useful metaphor for visualizing abstract mathematical ideas.
Only as an adult did he realize that not everyone has such a
metaphor. In his 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers
and Powerful Ideas, Papert suggests computers may work for
modern children the way gears worked for him. "[The computer's]
essence is its universality, its power to simulate," he writes
in his introduction. "Because it can take a thousand forms and
can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes."
But recreation itself is not enough, says Kafai, who worked
at the MIT Media Laboratory. Instead, she wants children to create
their own games, learning not only design and organizational
skills, but also programming techniques.
"Just as we hope children will learn how to read and write to
express themselves, making games provides a vehicle to bring
children up to some level of technical expertise so they can
express themselves in the electronic media as well," she says.
NOTICEABLE BENEFITS
Besides the skills learned in handling technology, Kafai and other
researchers are finding other pluses, including the fact that projects
such as the game design serve as gender equalizers. Kafai found
that, with a motivating project and computer time, girls easily
perform at the same levels as boys.
For students in the Maryland Virtual High School of Science
and Mathematics, the benefit was learning to think independently.
High schoolers worked on a collaborative project in seismology
that used a computer network to link six schools. With each school
acting as an independent seismograph station, the students had
to find the epicenter of a distant earthquake.
Individually, none of the schools had enough information; however,
by sharing the information across the Net and working in teams,
the students discovered the answer for themselves. The process
pushed them into independent thought, says the project's principal
investigator Mary Ellen Verona.
"Students were in the habit of uncritically accepting information
obtained from so-called authorities, such as textbooks and teachers," she
says. "Now students are understanding that the information we
have about natural phenomenon is incomplete and sometimes contradictory."
Another important factor, says Bill Winn, Director of the Learning
Center at the University of Washington, is that the new technology
appeals to many kinds of learners. The Learning Center is part
of the University's Human Interface Technology Laboratory and
manages such projects as taking virtual reality (VR) demonstrations
to schools, building VR systems, and working with classes to
design their own.
In one of the projects, Winn worked with a class that was designing
a VR ecosystem, while down the hall, another class was studying
the same material in a more traditional setting. This allowed
for an informal comparison of the two systems.
Winn and his colleagues found, not surprisingly, that students
who normally do well on traditional tests did well in both classes.
However, students who do not do well on these tests did perform
well in the VR project.
"It leveled the playing field," Winn said of the VR project.
He attributed the change to the number of ways the children had
to learn. In VR, they were no longer limited to the text and
lecture system of the traditional school setting.
Winn also found that VR offered children a way around the difficulties
of abstract concepts. When studying chemistry in VR, molecules
are no longer seen as numbers on a sheet paper, but as visual
representations of nuclei, protons and electrons in interaction.
What's more, the project extends the students' thought processes,
says Winn. "The children tend to depart from a purely linear
way of thinking. They develop hyperminds, linking ideas very
quickly, and looking for connections."
Likewise science software, such as ScienceWare, developed at
the University of Michigan, and GenScope, a teaching aide for
genetics, as well as interactive science Web sites, act as catalysts,
expanding students' thought processes and their excitement about
science.
Mitchel Resnick, an MIT professor who studies learning at the
Media Laboratory, has had similar responses to his hands-on technology
projects. Technology, he notes, can engage children in thinking
through difficult topics. Resnick has developed new "computational
construction kits" that children use to build and program their
own robotic "creatures". As children work on these projects,
they learn about feedback and control concepts that are normally
considered advanced engineering techniques. "If you give kids
the right tools and toys, they can start exploring these concepts
immediately," he says.
Resnick also pushes for kids to take science personally. In
a project called Beyond Black Boxes, children design not only
their own science experiments but also the equipment needed to
run the experiments. "The idea is for children to investigate
personally meaningful questions, not just follow some recipe."
Resnick's research group has developed "programmable bricks" (LEGO
bricks with computer chips) to help children build scientific
instruments. One pair of girls (10 and 11 years old) decided
to investigate the eating habits of birds. They built a new bird
feeder equipped with sensors, a camera and programmable brick.
When a bird lands on the feeder, the sensor sends a signal to
the brick, which turns on a LEGO mechanism, which presses the
camera shutter to snap a picture.
The girls' pictures show birds at the feeder, as well as some
squirrels and their younger sister. As a next step, the girls
plan to investigate whether different types of seed attract different
types of birds.
CREATIVE LICENSE
The guiding principle behind these projects is the educational
theory of constructionism. Constructionism, a concept developed
at the Media Lab, is grounded in the idea that people learn by
creating new knowledge through the manipulating objects, not by
having information "poured" into their heads.
Another way of looking at it, Resnick suggests, is to compare this kind of
educational experience with playing music. "If you want to learn about music,
you can learn to play the stereo or learn to play piano. Our method is more
like learning to play piano. You are becoming the creator."
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