Video Games as Collaboration Tools Report.

Video games have the potential to be deeply engaging for learners. For decades, psychologists have studied video games as models of intrinsically motivated learning. The techniques that games use—fantasy, control, challenge, curiosity, collaboration and competition—are now the cornerstones of motivational theory. Games have grown in complexity, and our understandings of them have grown as well. Consider for a moment how games have moved away from requiring players to read instructions. By analyzing what players do, and by providing real-time feedback to the player, game designers can successfully teach players how to play without supplemental materials. Educators often have similar goals: We want to deliver feedback just in time, while students are engaged in meaningful activity. This capacity for immediate feedback and instruction is a primary reason to use games for learning, because, in a modern school setting, real-time feedback is difficult to come by.

Games can record learners’ actions, which opens new opportunities for data-driven decision-making. Students, teachers, parents, and administrators can view individual or aggregated data across play sessions. With the assistance of data-based metrics collected from games, educators might know when a learner is on- or off-task, or know when a learner is struggling with a concept. For example, in “ProgenitorX,” players face an outbreak of zombies due to a virus that escaped a science lab. Players use stem cells to grow tissues and organs and heal the victims of the zombie plague. Liz Owen and Rich Halverson studied player data and found that successfully completing the game’s advanced levels is a strong predictor of player performance on traditional post-tests—meaning the player has learned some stem cell science.

 Soon, data visualizations will be available to students and teachers. We imagine them supporting students reflecting on their own learning, as well as deep conversations among teachers, students, and perhaps parents and the public about learning. Our goal is not to replace teachers, but to empower teachers through tools that make their jobs easier and more fun. We imagine games helping teachers not only by making learning fun and interesting for students, but also by giving them better tools for diagnosing and assessing learning.