The Path to Mastery Using Serious Games

In developing my graduate course on Serious Games at DePaul University, I conducted a year-long study on some of the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and assessments: Can we encourage adults to experience failure in the spirit of learning? Can we build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process? Can we help adults further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving? This session will address these questions and more.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to-Encourage adults to experience failure in the spirit of learning-Build reflection and immediate feedback loops into the learning process-Help adults to further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving

AUGUST 18, 2015 | NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY CHICAGO CAMPUS

https://www.discoursellc.com/blog/

Michelle King, Professional Learning Executive Director, Lewisville Independent School District

The Second Machine AgeWhat is it and why does it matter?

Andrew McAfee: The Industrial Revolution was when humans overcame the limitations of our muscle power. We’re now in the early stages of doing the same thing to our mental capacity—infinitely multiplying it by virtue of digital technologies. There are two discontinuous changes that will stick in historians’ minds. The first is the development of artificial intelligence, and the kinds of things we’ve seen so far are the warm-up act for what’s to come. The second big deal is the global interconnection of the world’s population, billions of people who are not only becoming consumers but also joining the global pool of innovative talent.

Erik Brynjolfsson: The First Machine Age was about power systems and the ability to move large amounts of mass. The Second Machine Age is much more about automating and augmenting mental power and cognitive work. Humans were largely complements for the machines of the First Machine Age. In the Second Machine Age, it’s not so clear whether humans will be complements or machines will largely substitute for humans; we see examples of both. That potentially has some very different effects on employment, on incomes, on wages, and on the types of companies that are going to be successful.

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/artificial_intelligence_meets_the_c-suite

Man and machineI think we’re finally getting at that seminal moment in human history when we can talk to our machines and our machines will understand us in regular, natural language. It’sa little clunky if you use Siri or some of the automated voice-response systems. At first, you’re kind of amazed by a few things you can do, but you quickly run into the boundaries and it can be a little frustrating. But it’s advancing very, very rapidly.

Productivity paradoxInnovation has never been faster. And in fact, if you look at the underlying statistics, productivity growth is doing pretty well. Productivity levels are at an all-time high, and in the 2000s, productivity growth was faster than it was in the 1990s, which was a great decade.

There is no economic law that says that technological progress needs to benefit everybody, or even that it needs to benefit a majority of people. It’s entirely possible for technology to advance, to make the pie bigger, and yet for some people to get a smaller share of that pie.

A conversation with MIT’s Erik Brynjolfssonhttp://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/charting_technologys_new_directions_a_conversation_with_mits_erik_brynjolfsson

But:

http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/see-results-learning-remembering-survey/

http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/see-results-learning-remembering-survey/

Gamification places non-game experiences into a game-like environment.

Serious games, however, are educational experiences specifically designed to deliver formative or summative assessments, based on pre-determined learning objectives.

Gamification creates an experience; Serious Games promote task or concept mastery. The underlying aim of Serious Games concentrates the user’s effort on the mastery of a specific task, with a feedback loop to inform the user of their progress towards that goal.

“How quickly can I get into Gaming?” Gamification: one of the hottest topics in corporate learning today, yet fraught with pitfalls.

http://www.clomedia-digital.com/read-clo/may_2015?sub_id=PaJxZM9LkoWJ#pg19

It may sound trite, but for us educational games are first and foremost games. Whether a bona-fide contest with logical rules and a winning condition, or a Sim City-style sandbox playtoy, a game experience needs to have certain basic elements to be a meaningful experience for players. These elements include interactivity designed with clarity of input and output; short-term and long-term goals to shape the player’s experience, a well-designed ramp for beginners to learn the ropes; and a game structure that actually contains the possibly of genuine play, not just quiz-style questions and answers.

Why emphasize what seems so obvious? Because many times we’ve seen educators entering into game development that are content to transfer the style of games onto educational tasks without understanding the substance of what makes a game work. And without these fundamentals, the end experience can be dead in the water. What exactly creates that elusive feeling of “play?” No one really knows. And it varies from game to game. But experienced game designers are probably the best-equipped folks to bring it into your project.

http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/learningtoplay.html

The Cognitive Domain - Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001. Key to this is the use of verbsrather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy.

They are arranged below in increasing order, from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

This categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives. His taxonomy follows the thinking process. You can not understand a concept if you do not first remember it, similarly you can not apply knowledge and concepts if you do not understand them.

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+-+Introduction

Learning from our failures – transferring the lessons of a failed experience to a future experience (Argote & Todorova, 2007) –is a fundamental component of individuals’ lives, particularly at work.

Failure is a bedrock of workplace learning processes (Lapré & Nembhard,

2011), as the dynamism of the work environment generates a host of failed experiences to which individuals must respond and adapt,such as the failure of a new product initiative or the failure of an existing strategy to meet changing organizational and environmental demands.

My Bad!' How Internal Attribution and Ambiguity of Responsibility Affect Learning from Failure

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2426674

The most important benefits of gaming are:

* Failure is accepted and recognized as a benefit to mastery; * The player is rewarded with appropriate and timely feedback; * The player makes social connections and is made to feel part of something bigger than oneself.

Failure in gaming is never personalized. In serious games, frequent feedback (when accompanied by specific instruction) dramatically reduces the time to mastery. Since the computer will record all data during the assessment, specific pathways to mastery can be identified and offered to the learner. This feedback loop leads to self-reflection, which recent research calls “a powerful mechanism by which experience is translated into learning. In particular, we find that individuals perform significantly better on subsequent tasks when they think about what they learned from the task they completed.”

Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, Bradley Staats, Working Paper: Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, 14-093, March 25, 2014

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-093_cf6e76d2-8e4b-466f-bf1c-e8d694afd2bc.pdf

Learning for Mastery. Instruction and Curriculum. Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia, Topical Papers and Reprints, Number 1. Bloom, Benjamin S. Evaluation Comment, v1 n2 May 1968

Most students, perhaps over 90 percent, can master what teachers have to teach them, and it is the task of instruction to find the means which will enable students to master the subject under consideration. A basic task is to determine what is meant by mastery of the subject and to search for methods and materials which will enable the largest proportion of students to attain such mastery. That is, the basic task in education is to find strategies which will take individual differences into consideration but in such a way as to promote the fullest development of the individual.

Wouters, P., van Nimwegen, C., van Oostendorp, H., & van der Spek, E. D. (2013, February4). A Meta-Analysis of the Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Serious Games. Journal ofEducational Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0031311

Research Studies

Additional moderator analyses on the learning effects revealed that learners in serious games learned more, relative to those taught with conventional instruction methods, when the game was supplemented with other instruction methods, when multiple training sessions were involved, and when players worked in groups.

Stizmann, T. (2011) A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of Computer-based Simulation Games. Personnel Pyschology, 64, pp. 489-528.

Consistent with theory, post training self- efficacy was 20% higher, declarative knowledge was 11% higher, procedural knowledge was 14% higher, and retention was 9% higher for trainees taught with simulation games, relative to a comparison group.

Connolly, T. M., Boyle, E. A., MacArthur, E., Hainey, T., and Boyle, J. M. (2012)A systematic literature review of empirical evidence on computer games and serious games. Computers & Education 59, pp. 661–686.

The findings revealed that playing computer games is linked to a range of perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, affective and motivational impacts and outcomes. The most frequently occurring outcomes and impacts were knowledge acquisition/content understanding and affective and motivational outcomes.

http://karlkapp.com/abstracts-of-three-meta-analysis-studies-of-serious-games/

Former Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Constance Steinkuehler, commented, “For the first time ever, we have a clear picture of the nationwide landscape of higher education video game programs and the resultsare exciting. The growth of the domain across universities and colleges, coupled with

the quantity and diversity of students we attract and keep, clearly demonstrate the strength and relevance of our dynamic and developing field.”

March 2, 2015 — Today, the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (The Alliance) unveiled Our State of Play, the first comprehensive nationwide survey of college and university videogame design programs. Among the key findings from 73 participating colleges and universities are that video game programs have greater gender diversity, by nearly a two to one margin, than other computer science and STEM related programs, and have significantly higher retention rates than the national average forall undergraduate and graduate majors.

http://www.higheredgames.org/

Military organizations have been using games to train their officers and predict possible outcomes of future battles since the Prussian Army began using the game “Kriegsspiel” some 200 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)).

http://blog.scmglobe.com/?p=2169

“This shouldn’t be surprising if we accept the notion that games are a biological adaptation in mammals to gain survival skills. In nature, play is the activity of practicing survival skills in low-urgency situations that can then be used in high-urgency, life-and-death situations. This is exactly the way the military uses war-games.”

War-games seek to literally replicate and recreate history. So the data used in war-games for terrain, logistics, weapons capabilities, etc. needs to be as accurate as possible.

SCM Globe is a serious supply chain game, and like war-games, it uses real world data, and it uses a map of the world as its game board. This is shown in the screenshots below. These screenshots show the model of an actual supply chain for a company that makes furniture in Indonesia and sells to customers around the world. This model is created by defining four types of supply chain entities (products, facilities, vehicles, and routes) and placing them on a map of the world. They are the game pieces in this supply chain game.

http://www.scmglobe.com/user_sessions/new

Serious games and simulations have been used in computer-based flight simulators since the 1960’s. Full Flight Simulators (FFS) are a shining example of mastery learning using serious games. These simulations are the highest standard and eligible for zero flight time (ZFT) training of civil pilots when converting from one airliner type to another.

https://as01.simcoach.org/simcoach/index.html

http://www.allencomm.com/portfolio/toyota/

http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/

http://gameslearningsociety.org/econauts_microsite/

http://www.schellgames.com/schell-games-awarded-1-million-to-transform-molecular-chemistry-education/

http://www.seriousgamesnews.com/

http://www.seriousgamesdirectory.com/

http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/category/learning-games/

http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/category/learning-games/

http://www.eship.ox.ac.uk/business-model-canvas-explained

http://richardcarey.net/

Why compliance is killing e-learning

E-learning producers are in a difficult position, because a great deal of their work comes in the form of compliance training (according to Charles Jennings, 80% of all e-learning produced in Australia is to meet compliance needs). But in the long run they must surely feel the effects of a poor user experience:Employees hate doing compliance trainingAs a result, trainers hate training it

Some time ago, Tom Kuhlmann posted about Those Pesky Compliance Courses, making the point that these aren't usually performance based and therefore a 'course' is probably not what's really required; he recommends keeping them simple, putting a test up front so those who already know the rules can exempt themselves from the body of the material, and un-locking all the navigation, so no-one's forced to sit through something they don't need.

All good advice, but only assuming the whole process is just one of getting boxes ticked to satisfy an external regulator. If the material is really not relevant, then it makes sense to make the box-ticking exercise as painless as possible, like renewing your passport or some similar administrative chore.

One of the strengths of serious games is that it provides visible milestones of the student’s mastery of content in real time (when it is well designed). Too often in an instructional setting, the learner doesn’t know whether or not he or she really understands or can apply the knowledge they are learning. There is often no visible sign of mastery of the content or application of the content.

The basic concept of mastery learning is that content is organized into discrete units where complete mastery is required before moving to the next unit, the method of moving through the instruction is based on ungraded assignments or instructional tasks with formative evaluation as a tool for identifying what is learned and what is yet to be learned and then providing additional support for concepts that have not been mastered. (Bloom, 1971; Melton, 2008).

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/gamification-shows-learner-visible-signs-learning/

Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures. “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States. Bankruptcy codes are far more punitive, in contrast to the United States, where bankruptcy is simply a rite of passage for many successful entrepreneurs.

Professor Moser recalled that a businessman who had to declare bankruptcy in her hometown in Germany committed suicide. “In Europe, failure is regarded as a personal tragedy,” she said. “Here it’s something of a badge of honor. An environment like that doesn’t encourage as much risk-taking and entrepreneurship.”

When David Byttow, co-founder of the anonymous social app Secret, announced this springthat he was shutting down the San Francisco-based start-up, he didn’t seem the least bit chastened. “I believe in failing fast in order to go on and make only new and different mistakes,” he wrote in a blog post.

There is also little or no stigma in Silicon Valley to being fired; Steve Jobs himself was forced out of Apple. “American companies allow their employees to leave and try something else,” Professor Moser said. “Then, if it works, great, the mother company acquires the start-up. If it doesn’t, they hire them back. It’s a great system. It allows people to experiment and try things. In Germany, you can’t do that. People would hold it against you. They’d see it as disloyal. It’s a very different ethic.”

A Fearless Culture Fuels U.S. Tech Giants

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/business/the-american-way-of-tech-and-europes.html?_r=0

The only thing more dangerousthan trying too hard and failing …

… is not trying hard enoughand succeeding !

Michelangelo 1503

https://www.discoursellc.com/blog/