Adopting a GBL approach enhances student experience of the Building Learning Power program

by Chad de Kretser

http://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/rugame

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” Pierre de Coubertin

“Life is more fun if you play games.” Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

“And the winner is… Student learning!”

You are formally invited to participate in the inaugural 2015 Quandary Game Project.

This invitation is directed to educators who implement or will be implementing the frameworks as outlined by Guy Claxton, originator of BLP.

Accept this personal invitation to ‘take part’; ‘to play games’ and to announce, ‘the winner is…student learning!’.

In accepting this invitation you will be allowing students to experience the benefits of game based learning. They will also ‘flex’ their ‘learning muscles’ when Building Learning Power (BLP). What is game based learning (GBL) and why should it be used will be explained and supported by influential GBL advocates, such as Gee, Prensky, and McGonigal. A description of the 4 Learning Dispositions and the 17 Learning Practices will give an understanding of the BLP program. A walkthrough of the game ‘Quandary’ will explore and explain the alignment with BLP. A matrix for student reflection will help identify which BLP Learning Dispositions and Practices have been achieved. A summary of the invitation is repeated with an urgency to accept.

Invitation to GBL. (Source: Wise Play, 2014)

What is GBL?

Unless we are either incredibly disciplined (like those people who keep toothbrushes at work) or masochists, we need some incentive, some fun way to make us practice — to want to do it. This is one reason why games are an important piece of learning. Marc Prensky

To understand a new concept it is important to study the ‘part’ before the ‘whole’ with few rules and guidelines. Agreed?Narrowing learning constraints makes it easier to understand and is important for learning. Agreed? If you do, and you have implemented these practices in the classroom, you maybe practicing GBL already!

This classroom practice and belief is understood as ‘scaffolding’. Knowing how to scaffold for various learners is an important role of educators. Agreed? Scaffolding allows learners with the most challenges to succeed in an activity. Agreed? Scaffolding determines the success of a learner. Agreed? Scaffolding helps students successfully complete an activity. Agreed? Scaffolding helps students own their own learning, at their own level and have a positive experience. Agreed? If yes, and you have transferred these beliefs into the classroom, you maybe practicing GBL again!

When playing a ‘game’ scaffolding is happening. The ‘game’ is scaffolded. Playing occurs within the zone of proximal development (ZPD) where:

the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).

GBL is a way to accomplish using technology to integrate real world problems, provide scaffolds and tools to enhance learning (Turkay, Hoffman, Kinzer, Chantes, Vicari, 2015, p. 3).

GBL is scaffolding, as it includes all of the above. GBL is also interdisciplinary, with a multimodal pedagogy; it increases student engagement, motivation and performance. Links between the components of the flow state and its possible usages in educational video games can be made with the idea of learning needs as an essential motivational factor of games (St-Pierre, 2011, p. 86).

For Prensky (2001) games are the union or ‘marriage’ of educational content and games (p. 145). The GBL definition used will include Prensky’s idea of ‘marriage’ of content and game and adopt a modification of Bober (2010). This results in a definition of GBL which has a game as the core activity and as a stimulus for other related activities, which take place in a formal learning environment and has learning as a desired intentional outcome (p. 5).

Why use GBL?

I never try to teach my students anything. I only try to create an environment in which they can learn. Albert Einstein

We have to stop telling, because almost nobody’s listening. Marc Prensky

Games that have good design engage players in critical thinking. GBL is effective in improving learning motivation and academic performance (Liu, Cheng, & Huang, 2011).

GBL requires multiliteracies such as auditory, linguistic, spatial, and visual. This ensures students engage in multimodal literacy with elements of music, video, movement, and image. These elements require understanding of moving images and their functions, and recognition and responsiveness to audio and visual cues. Various literacies, such as books and games, are modes of literacy that require meaning-making (Gee, 2013) and are situated within social contexts (Gee, 2001). Educators should have a ‘multi literacy mindset’ so that play and a fun learning space exist (Jacobs, 2014).

GBL can harness student passion. A combination of images, of art, and story, ensure players keep playing. Students have passions in these areas. Through interdisciplinary projects student passion can be used in projects or assignments that engages their passion. And students learn to do so in their “own newly-acquired learning style” (Prensky, 2001, p. 19).

Turkay et al. (2015) recognise that GBL requires

cognitive activity such as selecting relevant information, mentally organising it into a coherent structure, and integrating the new knowledge with existing knowledge

Turkay et al. (2015) also include cognitive load theory and the theories of embodied cognition (p. 6).

GBL allows for interaction with peers. GBL requires developing of skills and strategies and encourages the use of cooperative learning exercises which can be effective for learning. Vygotsky believed that a student in the zone of proximal development (ZPD), when given guidance, helps the student achieve (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).

However, integrating games in formal education can raise problems. These problems include:

Games not accepted as ‘learning tools’. That is, games are ‘leisure time activities’ or used merely for developing ICT skills.
The ‘transfer of learning’ concern, where the learning that occurs in the game does not or can not transfer to real-life contexts.
Existence of practical barriers. These include issues with the school’s IT equipment and infrastructure and timetable constraints (Brom, Šisler & Slavík, 2010).
Games seen as disreputable and violent, seeing little to no potential for use in school contexts (Shaffer, 2006).

O’Brien (2011) acknowledges that games can be seen as a distraction from learning, a waste of time, a tool for teachers to control behaviour, or even an immoral influence. O’Brien’s solution is to “explicate their (GBL) value for education”. Learning about ‘educational affordances’, will help learning and student motivation (p. 2).

Bourgonjon (2011) suggests playing games is the best way to understand them. This would experientially enhance GBL as indeed a learning tool and give evidence of transfer of learning to real-life contexts.

See Appendix C for a ‘List of Games’ that include over 20 games that can be used in GBL which can get you started playing games.

Edutopia provides a list of GBL Resources and Games.

Major influences of GBL

Marc Prensky understands that the thinking and processing by students now is different to the thinking and processing that has occurred by previous students of previous generations. Students are “Digital Natives”; are “native speakers” of a digital language. Those born before these ‘Digital Natives’ are “Digital Immigrants”.

Digital immigrants adapt but have an “accent”. The ‘Digital Immigrants’ are educators who don’t, can’t or won’t speak the language of the ‘Digital Natives’. Thus creating ‘cross-generational dissonance’. Digital natives get information fast and can multi-task; graphics are valued rather than text and want gratification as fast as they can get it. This is foreign to digital immigrants – hence the cross-generational dissonance.

For Prensky, traditional education does not meet the needs of the new ‘Digital Immigrants’. The Digital Natives cannot and do not want to go back to traditional ways of thinking and learning.

The result: traditional education needs to adapt to the Digital Natives in content and methodology. For Prensky there is a ‘legacy content’ which is reading, writing, math and logic; and a ‘future content’, which values digital and technological matters. Combining the two ,which suits digital natives, has a ready made answer in GBL.

James Paul Gee’s (2003) book provides a list of 36 learning principles. These principles are used by educators for designing curriculum. He coined the phrase ‘semiotic domains’.

Gee uses semiotic domains to explain the use of conventions and vocabularies. For Gee, games can amplify areas, and represent subset of domains for practice. With semiotic domains, there is transferring between domains where what you learn in games is transferred to other contexts.

Gee includes the “psychosocial moratorium principle” (2003, p. 62). Players take risks when they normally would not do so. Players do so in games because the impact is not ‘real’. In a game environment a character may die but ‘gain a life’. In the real world, behaving contrary to social boundaries (and the law) bring serious and ‘real’ consequences. With GBL, students experience this principle in a safe environment.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who has been making games for 10 years. She wants to make saving the real world as easy as saving the world in online games. She has made three games on this basis. McGonigal (2010) wants everyone to increase their game playing behaviour if they are to solve the problems facing the world today, because games provide the ideal collaborative, co-operative problem solving environment where players believe that they can achieve.

McGonigal (2011) argues that the characteristics of games are:

Rules
Goals
Feedback
Participation – that is voluntary

What is BLP?

Students… concentrate more, think harder and find learning more enjoyable. They do better in their tests and external examinations. And they are easier and more satisfying to teach. Guy Claxton

Guy Claxton, the originator of the Building Learning Power program, believes it is not enough

‘to leave school with a clutch of examination certificates’. He argues for students to be “tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self disciplined and self aware, collaborative and inquisitive.” Building Learning Power (2013).

Claxton has developed a framework to allow teachers to become more effective ‘learning power coaches’. He believes that a working model of learning power helps teachers

design targeted, effective activities that, over time, add up to greater confidence and capacity in facing all kinds of uncertainties and challenges (Building Learning Power, “How its Done”, 2013, para. 4).

BLP provides two frameworks. The first is a view of what the ‘powerful learner’ is like. The second is a “route map of how schools can build the constituent dispositions of the powerful learner.” (Building Learning Power, “How its Done”, 2013, para. 2).

The BLP program is summarised into 4 Learning Dispositions and 17 Learning Practices. Each disposition has a relevant ‘aspect of learning’ that impacts learning practices. (Table 1). These Learning Dispositions and Practices are the ‘learning muscles’ that students will ‘flex’ as they experience GBL.

Table 1. Building Learning Power – Learning Dispositions and Practices (Source:Author)

Quandary game explanation and exploration

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. Sophocles

Quandary is a free game for players aged 8-14; presenting engaging situations about how to build a new colony on the planet Braxos. Set in a futuristic colony, players develop skills of critical thinking, perspective-taking and decision-making. Quandary provides a framework for how to approach ethical decision-making without telling players what to think (Learning Games Network, 2012).

Figure 1. Screenshot of Quandary Start Page. (Source: Author)

There are three episodes (See Appendix A – Quandary Game Walkthrough). A look at Episode 1: ‘The Lost Sheep’ will allow exploration of BLP learning dispositions and practices.

This exploration acknowledges that meaningful use of games

within lessons depended far more on the teacher’s effective use of existing pedagogical skills than it did on the development of any new, game-related skills (Becker, 2011, p. 84).

Also acknowledged is the teachers’ role. For this exploration the roles of motivator, debriefer, and facilitator are presumed. As,

a motivator for learning through engaged games; debriefer for helping students reflect on what is being learned; as facilitator for guiding and facilitating learning by sound instructional design (Park, 2012, p. 104).

Appendix B highlights 5 guidelines that are helpful for integration of games into instruction. (Turkay et al., 2015, p. 15).

Quandary Game: BLP Learning Dispositions and Practices

In Table 2, the exploration identifies three Quandary game instances (instances being stages of the game) and identifies how BLP dispositions and practices are aligned and can be experienced. (See Appendix A for a more detailed exploration, with 12 instances of the game explored and explained).

Table 2. BLP Alignment of Dispositions and Practices. (Source: Author)

BLP: Student Self Reflection Matrix

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius

In GBL players are allowed to try again if they do not succeed, which is not common in classroom-based learning. The Quandary game allows students to evaluate their errors and play the episode again. They determine their own zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), and the feedback they receive, can allow students to evaluate and amend their strategies accordingly (Turkay et al., 2015, p. 10).

The BLP Student Self Reflection Matrix (SSRM) gives students an opportunity to evaluate their ‘learning muscles’ (Table 3). Students rate their ‘flexing of learning muscles’ as an experience in each BLP Disposition/Practice (using a scale from 1-10). If the rating is between 7-10, students are experiencing the BLP Learning Disposition/Practice to a high degree. This can be reflected in the ‘Comment’ section as an answer to the question, “What am I experiencing at a high degree?”. If the rating is between 1-6, students are experiencing the BLP Learning Disposition/Practice to a lesser degree. This can be reflected in the ‘Comment’ section as an answer to the question, “What am I experiencing at a lesser degree?” This last comment can provide the motivation to answer the question, “What goal(s) can I set to improve my experience?”

Table 3. BLP Student self Reflection Matrix. (Source: Author)

Conclusion

GBL has a game as the core activity and is a stimulus for other related activities. GBL takes place in a formal learning environment and learning is the desired intentional outcome. GBL enhances learning motivation and academic performance and is advocated by Gee, Prensky and McGonigal. BLP includes activities that develop ‘confidence and capacity’ in students. The BLP ‘learning muscles’ have been aligned with instances of the Quandary game. The BLP Student Self Reflection Matrix revealed how students can reflect on how they have ‘flexed their learning muscles’ by playing Quandary.

Accept the invitation: ‘take part’; ‘play games’ and announce, ‘the winner is…student learning!’. Now!

Appendix A – Quandary Game Walkthrough

Event 1: The Lost Sheep	Screenshots	Explanation/Description
Instance 1. Start Screen		At the start of the game you are presented with options to register with an account which allows you to then retrieve your progress
Instance 2. Choose Captain Gender		The ‘Play as Guest’ option takes you to your next screen. You choose the gender of your player or Captain.
Instances 3-5. Get Your Facts Right		Sort between fact, solution or opinion. 12 cards for 12 colonists. Sort cards into correct categories. Points given for choices.
Instance 6. Narrow It Down		Solutions presented. Narrow to two. Opportunity to review, & complete task again to select full possibility of solutions.
Instance 7. Investigate Viewpoints		Select a colonist & present a solution card to get their point of view.
Instance 8. Decision Time		Select a solution. Recommend to the Council.
Instance 9. Council’s Respons		Council gives their response.
Instance10. What Will They Think		Share the council’s decision, predicting & categorising colonist reactions into ‘Agree’ or ‘Disagree’ options.
Instance 11. Check Earlier Investigation		Question if there was more you could have found out earlier in the investigation.
Instance 12. Concluding Narrative		Takes you to the narrative that concludes the Episode.

Detailed Exploration of BLP Learning Dispositions and Practices.

The following exploration identifies the Quandary game event and identifies how BLP dispositions and practices are aligned and can be experienced.