The folk across the Pond are having National Computer Science Education week this week. Hug a computing teacher today!
[cross posted from Communications of the ACM blog)
Do computer games have a place in classrooms as learning tools? Or do they act as a mere sugar coating to learning? That is: if computer games have a motivational effect on children are they worth using at school? Or do they have to improve learning outcomes to be worth it? This old chestnut crops up regularly, but a recent example in the Scottish press caught my eye this week as an illustrative example.
On one side, we have Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), a government organisation whose purpose is supporting curriculum development in the country. They have a unit called the Consolarium which enthusiastically and energetically promotes the use of game based learning in schools. They have conducted some research into the use of common off the shelf games in classrooms, particularly relating to the effect of brain training games on mental arithmetic.
On the other side we have Professor Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at Edinburgh University publically “slamming” (don’t you love newspaper headline verbs?) a recent brain training study by Learning Teaching Scotland at a conference for Scottish head teachers. He does quite a lot of public engagement around debunking brain myths (such as you should drink more water to help your brain function as it is 80% water).
Ho ho. A little spat between a government quango and an academic: could be entertaining. Let’s look a bit more closely at it.
LTS conducted a study of 634 ten year old pupils in Scottish primary schools, spending £33, 000 of public money. The control group took part in classes as normal with no treatment. The experimental group played the consoles game Dr. Kawashima’s brain training for 30 minutes a day, 5 minutes a week for nine weeks. They measured pre and post tests of accuracy and speed of mental arithmetic and some attitude and self concept measures. They report that there are significant improvements for the experimental group in speed and accuracy i.e. playing the game made the kids more likely to get their sums right and do them quickly. Interestingly, there were no differences in the children’s perceptions of their own mathematical ability between groups, although there was a slight but significant improvement in attitude to school for the experimental group but not the control.
Our neuroscience professor dismisses the findings and methodology of the study as “flim flam”. For some reason he thinks there was no significant difference on mental agility between the groups (as interviewed on the radio show "Good Morning Scotland on 20th Nov 2009). This contradicts LTS’s report, so I am not sure what his source for this is. I can’t find any of the actual data published to check it. He also criticised the control group’s complete lack of treatment for comparison. (In my view he should be grateful for this, because in a pilot study LTS had a brain training group, a control group and a group who did Brain Gym ! Yes, Brain Gym, that bizarre set of exercises which have no scientific credibility whatever. Doh! What a weird choice of comparison.) LTS are “disappointed” and claim the Prof is being “disingenuous”.
You may be less amused by this piece of local squabbling than me, but there are more general points to consider. Firstly: the professor commented that the children might enjoy it, but it is not a suitable educational tool. We do need to consider whether increases in motivation are sufficient reason to introduce games into the classroom. Suppose LTS had not found improvements in performance, but the kids had enjoyed it and had a more positive attitude to maths afterwards. Would that be worth having? In my own opinion, it probably would be beneficial because negative perceptions of maths at an early age may well put people off pursuing it later in life, to the detriment of society in general. However, what LTS actually found was more positive attitudes to school but no difference in self-perception of maths ability.
Secondly, and more importantly, I have to ask why we care about speed and accuracy of mental arithmetic anyway? Have these people not heard of calculators? Seriously, as ACM members we might value children knowing, understanding or devising an algorithm, or even comparing multiple algorithms for the same task, but do we really care how quickly and accurately a human can compute using them? Humans are better at other more interesting tasks. Perhaps it is not surprising that children end up avoiding maths if their educators confuse it with mental arithmetic. Maths can be so much more than that. Maybe computers (and games) in the classroom could be used to explore bigger ideas, as Seymour Papert has been arguing for some time.
We had a fantastic two and a half days' training with Cohort 1 colleagues back in September, exploring the software and the principles of the project but also discovering the delights of sucking tea through chocolate biscuit straws, so we now know how to improve the content for Cohort 2!! We then set everyone loose to plan and execute their projects back in school, and preparations for this have been going well (see Tony's blog on progress at St Aloysius, top left, including possible cake-baking ventures by English teacher Ryan, all in a cross-curricular cause, of course). Everyone now seems poised to work with their pupils from the second half of the term onwards and in many cases schools have wooed other departments such as geograpy, MFL and business studies, forming teaching partnerships in the true spirit of A Curriculum for Excellence. We also have four fine Heriot-Watt PhD students to support schools with technical matters, which is a great bonus for the project. As the classroom-based work unfolds in the coming weeks we will give you news of progress - and each school will be linking a blog to this site, so you can hear from the horses' mouths just how it's all going!
And now my thoughts are turning to Cohort 2, whose training begins in December. We have already had much interest and it looks as though we might already be full, but do please submit an application in case we have a last-minute casualty (as happened in September) or if you want to be considered for Cohorts 3 or 4: http://judyrobertson.typepad.com/adventure_author/2009/05/mgis-4-deadlines-for-applications-20092010.html. We can offer on-the-ground support if you are reasonably accessible from Heriot-Watt (about a 50 mile radius), but if you have the technical back-up in school and feel you could cope on a remote support basis, do talk to us to see what might be possible.
Here is the early release version of the Adventure Author Installer.
It is not completely finished but should be easy enough to get going for those of you keen to get started as early as possible.
The following .zip contains an important 'readme' document in PDF format, please have a read at this (but don't be intimidated by what you may need to do - its nice and simple) before you begin the installation.
Enjoy
Have a look at the updated training materials and videos which Cathrin has developed this summer!
I'm in a panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Monday - come along if you can!http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/
"Technology & Literacy Mon 24/08/2009
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
CHILDREN AND EDUCATION
Can video games, the internet, and other ICT applications help young people engage with literature? Find out in this inspiring event where panellists Bill Boyd, Programme Manager at Learning and Teaching Scotland, computer scientist Judy Robertson and Australian cyber-journalist Lili Wilkinson demonstrate how to utilise new technologies in the classroom. Chaired by Joy Court of CILIP. "
I ventured south earlier in July to join the United Kingdom Literacy Association's international conference entitled 'Making Connections: Building literate communities in and beyond the classroom', and gave AA its first real airing in literacy circles. Our work was greeted with enthusiasm and seems to contribute to the latest thinking about new ways in which children are reading, writing and learning. It was a great few days, with lots of opportunities to catch up on the latest research and practice and I met a host of fascinating people - not least lots of folk whose books I've been reading, including Kate Pahl, Debra Myhill, Eve Bearne, Jackie Marsh and Teresa Cremin. How exciting to meet them in person!! Great contacts made, too, both here and in other parts of the world, so ideas will continue to be exchanged.
Our seminar was entitled 'Adventure Author': Storymaking through computer game design and I've attached our slides in case you want to see what we said, but I'm afraid it's a pretty big file - lots of screenshots: Download Storymaking through computer game design updated notes. If you do succeed in downloading them, the notes view will help you to make sense of the thinking behind some of the slides.
We also produced a mini-poster by way of summarising some of our latest ideas, which you can download here: Download AA UKLA poster July 2009
Schools from Edinburgh, Falkirk, Glasgow, Moray and West Lothian are joining us for the first round of Making Games in Schools, kicking off with a residential course at Heriot-Watt University from 2-4 September. We'll be encouraging them to blog their experiences and are very much looking forward to seeing what they do with the NWN2 and Adventure Author software in their classrooms. Watch this space for further news of their exploits!
Applications are steadily flowing in for the Making Games in Schools project, some for cohort one, some for cohort two, and we are delighted to be in a position to say that the first round of training will definitely be going ahead, such is the level of interest as the last few applications make their way through the ether. Judy and I will be looking through all the applications in detail early next week and will let everyone know our final decisions as soon as we can. It's very encouraging to see so much enthusiasm, and we do appreciate some schools being flexible about which cohort they join.
I must add that it's been fantastic to see how good the bids are - we tentatively asked for at least two classes and two teachers to be involved, but in most cases far, far more than that will be brought on board, and over a longer period that we had dared hope, with all sorts of plans for cross-curricular projects and wider staff training, too - thank you, brave pioneers all!
More news soon of the final group for cohort one . . .