First, this is one of the most incredble games I’ve ever played. I cannot begin to express how much fun I’ve had playing this game with my daughter, much less how much I’ve enjoyed it after she’s gone to bed! It is a blast! If you haven’t checked it our fot the entertainment value, it’s worth every penny.

Second, it has been a fantastic educational tool! That really is the focus of this post and future ones about the game. First, a bit on educational gaming theory. The engagement level of this game is profound. As a teaching tool, is does need mentoring to fully gain the educational value of the game. The game was designed for entertainment first and the educational value works when you bring external knowledge into the gameplay.

With that said, Willow has been learning about evolution. We’ve discussed theories of how life started (the game shows an asteroid breaking open in a “tide pool” to reveal your first single-cell organism). We’ve discussed DNA (provided as “points”). We’ve discussed the difference between how creatures evolve in the game (you, as gamer, decides vs Darwinian evolution vs God. And we’ve discussed how Will Wright has unfortunately left out the “fish” stage of evolution: what happens between the tide pool and land creatures (ok… so this is up to debate, but you do see what appears to be a very complex microorganism swim right up onto land).

The game provides an evolutionary timeline, although Willow hasn’t quite grasped the time scale, so that is an additional lesson outside of the game. We’ve spent the last week up on land and have been discussing animal behaviors and what it means to get bigger brains (social behaviors and species eradication by your own species correlate to bigger brain sizes… your creature is learning). The game lets you decide wether to attack another species or befriend them.

Next up: the tribal stage. And due to some events in Willow’s real world, we’ll be discussing race relations and addressing the natural apprehension we feel when encountering tribes that look and act different than we do.

One of the game design elements that I find brilliant is the user-invention facet of the creature pool. Users submit the creature designs to the Spore portal, and the creatures are used to populate gamer’s planets. The creations can also be find on the Spore web portal (look under our username: qgecko).

Does it work? Early student observations show the game is very engaging. We’ll have to wait for the final study to be released to show it’s educational effectiveness…2009 at the earliest, but more like 2010. When the results do come out, expect a study on a scale unheard of in educational research: 2400 students across over two dozen school districts!

Can I try? Not yet. The study is still in progress. Once completed, and assuming the results show positive educational efficacy,  the game will need to move to commercial prototyping. This could be another year or two. University technology transfer can be a complicated process… the technology either needs to be bought by an existing company (hey EA, are you listening!?), or the university will spin off a company that will need to find venture capital.

Considering the $14 billion market in educational technology, this could be the start of some awesome new educational tools that could make classrooms into LAN parties! Oh yea, they’ll be making better grades and gaining those 21st century skills as well.

Wesley Fryer was kind enough to podcast the talk and post it to his blog. I’ve posted the Powerpoint at Slideshare here. Here are some of the concepts I’ve been working through:

1. I believe technology can greatly assist learning by scaffolding learning at different levels. Kids, as much as NCLB would like to have you believe, do not all learn at the same level. I brought this up by going back to the Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve. It’s not that I like what the book concludes, but I do see statistical facts for what they are. And to force a common testing paradigm on kids across all intelligence levels is simply criminal. As mentioned in a previous post, kids with high intelligence need the opportunities to excel, and kids with low intelligence need proper scaffolding and support the the smarter kids can offer. In the adult world, we work together as a community, finding a place for everyone at all levels (at least we should). We collaborate in order to bring out the strengths in everyone. And we don’t compare each through test taking (except the few weirdos who get into Mensa . I never even got to the considerations of multiple intelligences, such as the very important topic of how Emotional Intelligence factors into learning. More posts on how technology can help in that arena later.

2. Engagement is key. Kids today have found technology engages and they are going to great lengths to get their hands on it. During a visit to EA Games in California a couple of years ago, A question was asked about the increasing incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and computer gaming. The response from one gaming programmer: “We don’t really see that as an issue. A kid will sit and concentrate on a game for 17 hours in a week.” Technology has tremendous power to engage students. A wonderful report recently released by the National School Boards Association (I will post in further detail later) makes a fundamental shift in U.S. education thinking about online social networking: this is not something to be ignored. Kids are using it, learning from it, and schools need to be thinking of ways to engage students with it. Online social networking tools can be summed up in one word: participation. Participation through creative activities online. Students are engaged when they participate and technology makes it happen.

3. How do we move away from our current paradigm of teaching that increasingly ignores differences in how students learn and fails to keep up with emerging technologies that are capturing the undivided attention of kids today? Change must take place in our schools. Change is not an easy process in educational reform, but the K20 Center has found a way that can move a school in the right direction. Development of Professional Learning Communities has found student achievement increases as well as reforms in teaching practice. This is a school-wide cultural change that brings action research into the classrooms, leading to adoption of new pedagogies. But here’s the icing on the cake: technology makes a wonderful catalyst for change. The year-long work of the K20 Center in schools, using technology as a catalyst for change, has proven to be highly effective. And all this without adding content or pushing for more test preparation.

I only take issue with one aspect of the OK-ACTS program: the technology going into the schools has one wonders to engage students, but it has been primarily by taking existing curriculum and presenting it in new and engaging ways. Instead of a lecture, the teachers are making Powerpoint presentations and showing them on Smartboards. They are getting feedback using student response systems. This is not across the board. Some teachers are increasing student participation in the learning process by having the students create the Powerpoints, but it still fails to engage them at their level.

I’m working on it. But I need to find more research on how creativity can raise student achievement. Yuck. I hate having to revert to finding methods that increase test scores, but until NLCB leaves the learning alone, I’ll work with the system. Kudos to Marco Torres for bucking the system. I wish it were so easy for the majority of teachers.

The take home message, which she acknowledges in the interview, is that playing these violent games aren’t creating violent kids. In fact, playing violent games is now quite normal. The kids do it as a social activity, not in solitary confinement while planning physical violence. I suppose it may be too early to tell if 48% of young men in 10 years will be homicidal, but I would bet they will actually be more grounded than many of us today. Besides the social aspects, the report finds the gaming is used for self-emotional regulation. It may actually be good for them. Boys will be boys. If violence is part of adolescence, then let it be virtual. Personally, I’m glad I have a daughter. She’s only into dropping an occasional gazelle or unsuspecting visitor into the lion pen in Zoo Tycoon.