Playing Games In School

Many parents of adolescents curse the electronic games that soak up their kids' time and energy. But 12-year old Chris Rybicki gets plenty of encouragement to spend time on games—at least when he's building them with a program called "Scratch." Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Scratch is a three-year old project that aims to transform education by giving kids the tools to build and develop their own computer games and multimedia projects.

Games? At a time when we worry about kids' ability to read and write? American kids are already awash in digital media, spending an average of more than 7.5 hours a day, seven days a week with a potent mixture of digitally delivered music, television, computers and games. Legions of government officials are wringing their hands over U.S. students' lackluster results in standardized tests. According to the most recent results from The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), U.S. eighth graders rank 11th in the world in science and 9th in math.

But drilling students on math and science facts, contend a growing chorus of educators, won't significantly improve those scores-- nor will it help students find jobs when they finish school. Instead schools need to put math and science skills into context.

That doesn't mean endlessly entertaining students. In the past many so-called "educational" programs have been as passive as watching YouTube. By contrast, "Scratch was conceived with the idea of empowering kids to be media creators," says Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a doctoral candidate at MIT who has helped lead the Scratch program since it was officially released in May 2007.

Scratch is a downloadable set of tools that anyone can use to create digital games and animated movies. After a Scratch user builds a game, he or she can send it to the MIT website where anyone can try it out, offer comments and even improve on it. More than 600,000 people have Scratch accounts; they've built 1.3 million projects. The program is particularly popular in the 12- to 13-year old set. A third of Scratch users are girls. And although most of those students use Scratch at home or in after-school programs, teachers are also starting to use Scratch in the classroom to teach everything from math to ecology.

"What else do kids learn in school that you want them to teach their neighborhood friends?"

Karen Randall, who now teaches at Paul and Shelia Wellstone Elementary in St. Paul, Minn., started using Scratch with students when it was still a prototype. "We helped find the bugs in the program," she recalls. Students loved taking part in the product development, she says. Along the way, they learned that technology was not a magic box but something that they could control.

When she previously taught at St. Paul's Expo Elementary magnet school, Randall encouraged students to use Scratch to demonstrate the concepts they were studying. For instance, one year Randall asked her students to use Scratch to explain the idea of complementary angles. If she had given them a multiple-choice test, some might just guess at the answers. In Scratch, the students came up with creative ways to show they understood the concept.

Could the students just make a poster? Sure, Randall replies. But she sees an intriguing difference between paper-based and Scratch projects: Ask students to draw pictures and those with poor motor skills simply shut down. By contrast, students relish learning from one another in a computer environment. "It's fascinating," she says. "In about four weeks, they go from saying, 'I can't do it,' to seeing each other as resources and building amazing designs."

For 7th grader Chris Rybicki, sharing Scratch projects is a central part of what makes it "cool." "It's fun to collaborate with others and to see what's new," he says.

Rybicki admires the flashes of inspiration he sees from his fellow Scratch gamemakers in the galleries on the Scratch website.

Others are beginning to follow Scratch's lead. For instance Sam Animation is a free program developed at Tufts University that enables students to design stop- motion animation projects. Microsoft has built Kudo, a programming language that kids can use to build games for Microsoft's Xbox game platform.

Monroy-Hernández's team at MIT is now working on a Web-based version of Scratch. That might make Scratch easier to use on some of the aging computers that schools have—but would also require more high-speed access. Nearly all U.S. primary and secondary schools report having some Internet connectivity. But about 78% of the schools that have received federal support for Internet connectivity say they need faster connections to keep up with the demand of students and teachers for online educational resources.

The buzz that goes with learning Scratch is palpable, Randall says: kids go home and teach other kids in their neighborhood about it, she says. "What else do kids learn in school that you want them to teach their neighborhood friends?"

Reposted from the Cisco news service

A spot in the value creation chain

Am walking through a very helpful process with a friend who is fluent in b-school speak aimed at identifying where Lucere sits in the classic "value chain." Here's one point worth reflection that came from yesterday's session:

Businesses use technology to save costs. So far education really hasn't done that: for-profit online publishers clamor to replace the classic textbook makers. Those textbook makers are the priesthood of this profession -- like the travel agents or even the staff writers of branded news organizations. They were people who had special access to a market (in this case the schools) and there were signficant barriers preventing newcomers from penetrating that market.

But for all their expertise and efforts the textbook makers haven't figured out how to address the needs of kids. If they had, then test scores would eventually go up, dropout numbers would fall.

Lucere's contention: There's tremendous value in the content available via the Internet, not just as "broadcasted" material but as instructional material. It's not just about "telling me" about climate change--it's inspiring me to figure out how to explore what climate change means for me, my community and then the world.

Everything comes with a cost: the cost of a textbook is printed on the side. The "cost" of so-called "free" content on the Internet is time. That's the "hidden" costs of those materials. Teachers value their time tremendously. That means they've made an economic judgment: The hidden cost of using Internet materials has greatly exceeded the cost of a textbook. The benefits of using Internet materials are murky: do they help? How do they help? Who do they help? The benefits of using textbooks may not be precise (do kids really learn?) but the penalties for not using textbooks could be severe (class is disorganized, the state standards are not touched.)

Lucere's job is clear: Lower the "hidden" costs of reaching content on the Internet -- and demonstrate the benefit.

Crystal ball gazing

Some aspects of the future aren't all that mysterious.

Given that it takes between three and five years for hardware to roll out, it's not all that hard to predict the underlying trends for say, the next five or so years. In other words, the environment is predictable. Far less predictable is what people do in that environment.

So here's a bit of crystal ball gazing on the future of kids & electronic media, where "kids" = children 8 to 18.

Predictable trends (hardly soda bottle-rocket science):
1. Internet connectivity will continue to become widespread; bandwidth will grow.
2. Handheld devices proliferate. They become cheaper and more powerful.
3. More kids continue to have access to both of the above.
4. This is a field of dreams scenario: because kids have access to handhelds & Internet access, they *will* use it. (Past trends predict this will be the case. From the Kaiser Family Foundation report:
Over the past five years, the proportion of 8- to 18-year- olds who own their own cell phone has grown from about four in ten (39%) to about two-thirds (66%). The proportion with iPods or other MP3 players increased even more dramatically, jumping from 18% to 76% among all 8- to 18-year-olds.
and this too:
In the last five years, home Internet access has expanded from 74% to 84% among young people; the proportion with a laptop has grown from 12% to 29%; and Internet access in the bedroom has jumped from 20% to 33%. The quality of Internet access has improved as well, with high-speed access increasing from 31% to 59%.

Now here's an observation: the adult world does a fine job modeling how to consume media. (Just listen to Shaq on those Comcast commercials.) What we don't do much: model how to *use* the media-- how to manipulate it, how to create stuff with it.

The KFF report is grumpy about kids who consume alot of media: Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment.

And further:
Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored. Moreover, the relationships between media exposure and grades, and between media exposure and personal contentment, withstood controls for other possibly relevant factors such as age, gender, race, parent education, and single vs. two-parent households.

It's not news to parents that the "tween" or early teen years are tough ones: those are the years when kids are starting to exercise their own will, often in opposition to their parents (just because they can). This newfound independence is heady stuff. Again from KFF:

Two groups of young people stand out for their high levels of media consumption: those in the tween and early teen years (11- to 14-year-olds), and Blacks and Hispanics.

The disparities in media use in relation to both age and race are difficult to ignore. The jump in media use that occurs when young people hit the 11- to 14-year-old age group is tremendous—an increase of more than three hours a day in time spent with media (total media use), and an increase of four hours a day in total media exposure. Eleven- to fourteen-year-olds average just under nine hours of media use a day (8:40), and when multitasking is taken into account, pack in nearly 12 hours of media exposure (11:53). The biggest increases are in TV and video game use: 11- to 14-year-olds consume an average of five hours a day (5:03) of TV and movie content—live, recorded, on DVD, online, or on mobile platforms—and spend nearly an hour and a half a day (1:25) playing video games. In other words, just as children begin to make the transition into adolescence, their media use explodes.

Once again, we should ask: what are we modeling and teaching these kids? We've done a fine job of teaching them to be consumers. What about becoming producers?

We also know that middle school is where we lose kids. The schools fail us here, even more so than at the elementary school level. And when adolescents become disaffected and want to give up, it's awfully hard to get them back on track. (Note: I've seen these statistics: will search for them again.)

So here's a half thought: There are a number of ways to categorize the proliferation of education materials on the Internet. Among them: those that are intended to be "consumed," and those that are either instructions or steps on how to "produce" things. Reading a book is consumption; watching a movie (whether a Ken Burns' documentary or Pokemon) is also consumption. Maker instructions obviously are about "production," as are contests.

Here's another differentiator: there are some resources that are uniquely available via the Internet -- and others that are simply more convenient when they are in cyberspace. Lesson plans -- things that lay out in text what to do -- may be more convenient when stored in the digital cloud but they can exist in books or many other forms. The Beckman Institute "Bugscope" is more unique: you could (possibly) visit it if you're in Illinois (then again, maybe not. I don't know if they like visitors in the flesh!) Maybe the last step with that is... how would you build a bug?

So perhaps another unifying idea: the resources that we should surface and share with educators should be about making things, not just consuming things.

Remaking Learning

20 January 2010

Interesting piece in the NYTimes today: "If your kids are awake, they're probably online." The piece describes a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Here's the money quote:

"Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week)."

More interesting than the article itself were the almost 100 comments from folks of all generations -- parents bemoaning their kids' excessive use of media to 20-something year olds commenting about how they don't quite feel ruined for life.

Most of us are looking for rules of the road: are parents supposed to restrict how much media their kids use? Or are they supposed to provide access to everything so that the kid is "in touch" with the world? And what about schools? Should "texting" be a part of the curriculum along with reading and running a mile?

I'd argue that the debates over media usage miss a fundamental distinction: are you a consumer or a producer?

Here's what we know about consumers and producers:

If all you do is consume, you will get flabby. Flabby in body, flabby in the head, and flabby in spirit. Some consumption is essential. But to do nothing but consume all the time is deadening.

To be a producer, however, is an energizing experience. You exercise whatever abilities you have -- physical, emotional, spiritual. You may produce goods; you may produce art. It doesn't really matter very much. To produce something creates a sense of personal value. You feel that you control some tiny portion of the universe.

So to that end, when we use digital media to produce something -- whether it is a gadget or a movie -- we triumph. Our "media centers" should be digital workshops. They need to be about creating stuff. The reason we tap digital resources to supplement our teaching is to inspire kids about how to invent or create a portion of the world.

Maybe that's the connection between the classroom world and the "makers." We want to teach how to create stuff. Some of it happens inside the school. Some of it happens outside the school. The internet is a vast sea where we can fish out the resources that we need to get to build something. But it's providing resources, just like the oceans provide the starting point for a fabulous seafood dinner.