More COTS research

This is stolen from Silversprite and the GU Gamesblog who dug up two interesting articles. The first is one that I found yesterday as well when I was chatting with my niece in England over MSN looking for any games that UNICEF might have available to help people understand it’s work (like Food Force). The forward is by Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, CBE – President of UNICEF UK so I guess that is how it came up, but it is published by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association. It does have a rather British tilt, but I like how it profiles the various designers in the field and give solid figures as to why this is a phenomena that can not be ignored for much longer. It also gives a number of case studies (including the Chilean PDA spelling game) and addresses concerns that teachers have raised.

The second is a new report out of futurelab. It has of it’s key findings, six that I think are truly important:

• Many teachers found the fixed length of lessons to be constraining in both the planning and implementation of games-based learning in schools.
• There was a range of gaming ability amongst students which had an impact on teachers’ lesson plans. In general, there seemed to be an expectation that students would be more competent using the game in class than they were seen to be.
• While teachers needed a certain level of familiarity with a game to be able to use it in their teaching, achieving particular educational objectives through the use of the game was more dependent upon a teacher’s knowledge of the curriculum with which they were working than it was on their ability with the game.
• Teachers followed either competence or content-based curricula. Despite initial assumptions, the particular curriculum followed by teachers did not appear to be the primary factor determining success in integrating a game into classroom teaching. Rather, the particular context in which a teacher worked – their experience, their teaching style, their familiarity with the curriculum followed and the wider culture of the institution – appeared to have more impact.
• Using games in a meaningful way within lessons depended far more on the effective use of existing teaching skills than it did on the development of any new, game-related skills. Far from being sidelined, teachers were required to take a central role in scaffolding and supporting students’ learning through games.
• Where previous studies have suggested that games need to offer a fully accurate underlying model to be of benefit for formal education, this study suggests that for the game to be of benefit to teachers, it need only be accurate to a certain degree: there may be wider inaccuracies within the game model, but these do not necessarily preclude the game from being used meaningfully in a lesson.

Distilled, this suggests that the major issue is that not all kids are at the same skill level – and it may be quite a stretch to get minimum proficiency in terms of manual dexterity for lessons to be fair – which causes issues as does having fixed time classes, something that anyone who has ever been “game locked” can certainly attest to as being “not good”. It also supports what was mentioned in Kenneth’s letter – it’s the teacher’s skill at communicating content, and not necessarily skill at using tools that is the most important.