Portal Flash Learning: Part 2

Portal Flash Learning: Part 2

After the initial class, with it’s focus on “Learning” as its theme, the next two classes focused on “Collaboration” and “Communication”.  The class continued to use the free Flash version of Portal to accomplish this.

For the day on “Collaboration” the students were asked to find a partner and log in to their computers.  The game requires the your left hand operates the keyboard, which controls player movements, while the right hand controls the mouse, which is used to place portals in the testing room.

It is physically impossible to negotiate any of the puzzles without using both hands.

With their partner, students were instructed that only one partner could control one device.  One player could operate the keyboard, and the other could operate the mouse.  This task was also buttressed by three of our class rules, which they were asked to reflect on when they began playing.

The rules were as follows:

1.     My Words Matter

2.     I have a Voice, I will Use it

3.     We can’t do it Alone.

As expected, this caused a great deal of frustration, but eventually, they began to figure out a series of commands that they could use to accomplish their goals.  We ended with another discussion around the parallels between this activity, and the group work they are usually assigned in school.

The third and final day focused on “Communication”.  The students were asked to find a different partner from the previous class, and again log in to the game.  When they began however, I told them that they would not be allowed to talk or write directions to one another.

After 30 minutes of this, I began to allow them to write or draw as a way of communicating, and at the end of class, I allowed them to begin speaking.

Many of the students felt that this was extremely beneficial, as the silence in the room, and the need for forced listening that non-verbal communication created, actually made things easier.

We are currently starting a paper that will begin to address the overall experience and its efficacy.

Here is the prompt:

The Portal Flash Unit

Did you find this unit to be of value? Is it something that should be taught again in the future?

Think about the three themes:

1.     Day One: Learning

2.     Day Two: Collaboration

3.     Day Three: Communication

You will write a paragraph/section on each of these themes.  Each paragraph/section should answer and discuss the following questions:

·      How did the game address this theme?

·      Was it effective in teaching you about the theme as it relates to you?

·      Why should it be taught again next year, or why should it not be taught?

Portal Flash Learning Lesson

Now that the first few setup lessons have been completed, we are moving into some of the experiential learning that will shape the class.  Since the main thrust of the class is to break students out of their typical assumptions about what “school” can be, I wanted to provide an initial experience that was seemingly as far from these assumptions as possible.

The students were asked to log into their computers and run a Google search on “Portal Flash”.  This should bring up multiple accessible links to the game, Portal: The Flash Version.  The Flash version of the popular game Portal was not made by the developer, Valve, and is free on various Flash sites on the internet.  Unlike the console and PC version, the Flash version offers physics based puzzles in a 2-dimensional environment.  The puzzle require “portals” to be placed to allow the player to find a pathway to an exit.  As the game progresses, the puzzles get more difficult, and start introducing variables that affect the player’s ability to easily pass through the game.

When we began playing, I set up a few rules.  Students were told that their goal was to get to the highest level that they could, but that they could not ask me questions about the game, or I would simply reply with a question.  I told them that they could use the tools available to them such as Youtube or Wiki’s, to help them through.

Then I sat back and observed the chaos.

Invariably, even the most accomplished gamers in the class hit a wall, a point where they could no longer breeze through the levels without pausing to think, or ask questions of their classmates.  Here was where the game began to provide gold.

Kids became frustrated, agitated, excited.  They clicked the mouse too hard, or squirmed in their seat as the character fell into a pit or was incinerated on a laser floor.  They were animated, began asking questions of one another, furiously searched Youtube for the best walkthrough videos.

They were engaged in the truest sense of the word, despite the difficulty.

The students continued to play through to the lunch break, and when they returned, we started talking.  I asked the following 4 questions, giving them time to write their responses prior to sharing.

1.     What were the difficulties you faced during the game?

2.     How did you deal with these difficulties?

3.     How was this experience different from your idea of what “school” is supposed to be?

4.     What have you learned about learning, or how you learn best?

The discussion went well, with most of the students explaining the benefit of doing it themselves, and of not being given answers.  They said that there was a sense of accomplishment when they finished a level on their own.  Simply saying these things to my students would have paled in comparison to having them complete the activity first.  They need the experience of learning outside of what they have been conditioned to believe it is.

I was struck by some of the student responses in other avenues.  When a lecture is occurring, or they are being asked to participate in activities that “feel” like “school”, my students are constantly asking to get a drink or go to the bathroom.  During the 80 minute block, over 2 different classes, not a single student asked to leave for any reason.  I’m not surprised by this at all.

We need to think about how we can demonstrate LEARNING in our classrooms, not simply explain to our student’s why it is important.    The more we can begin to understand that learning is something that is happening within these children AT ALL TIMES, the more we need to be cognizant of the worthiness of the tasks we ask them to do.  Is it simply busy work?  Are we just padding a grade book? Justifying our own existence?

Take some time to try the game yourself.  What emotions does it elicit in you?  How do you deal with frustration and failure?  How do you manage a lack of ability or control in something as simple as a two-dimensional computer game?

What can you learn about your student’s educational lives from it?  

Log on, and get uncomfortable.

Metaphor through Video Games: Braid

Most people don’t consider video games to be art, much in the same way that television struggled to achieve that distinction, but as the industry becomes more accessible and diverse, and less wantonly commercial, we are beginning to see games emerge that challenge not only our hand-eye coordination, but the way we think about our own place in the world.

Ironically, some of the more simplistic-looking games are fulfilling this ideal.  Braid is a two-dimensional side-scroller, in the tradition of Super Mario Bros. and other early 8 and 16-bit games.  The sprite, or character, moves through the world from left to right in an attempt to solve puzzles and advance through a series of tasks.

Where Braid differs from the norm, and many of the more “advanced” three-dimensional games on the newest hardware, is the gameplay, and how that relates to story and metaphor.

As the title of this blog suggests, the best learning happens when the learner is activated, or for the purpose of the blog, on fire.  As an adult, I find myself becoming engaged by a question, looking into the potential answers, usually through the internet, and when I’m truly on fire, following a systemic pathway of links and articles.  I sometimes even lose track of time when activated in such a way. 

Art should always have this effect on us.  The first time I watched the film Donnie Darko, by Richard Kelly, I was intrigued.  I immediately played the movie a second time, this time with the director’s commentary, even though it was already midnight.  The next night I watched it again with the cast commentary.  I went to the web, and read theories and posited my own.  I made a list of works from the film that were referenced, and went out into the world to get my hands on them.  I read Watership Down again, purchased the book and film versions of The Last Temptation of Christ, picked through the short story “The Destructor’s” by Graham Greene, and learned about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and how it relates to physical time travel.  All of this learning and consumption came about due to a movie about a guy in a creepy bunny suit. This is what good art does, activates us and invites us into the flow of ideas that the author lived in when they were creating; it enriches the art and opens us up to more of it.

Braid is comprised of a series of worlds, and within each world, time functions in a different way.  The function of Time in the game is tied to an overarching narrative that is richly developed at the start of each world.  After completing the game, I began to have questions about its meaning and development, and began to research.  I discovered that the game was based on 3 novels that the developer was intrigued by, The Cat That Walks Through Walls, by Robert A. Heinlein, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, and Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman.  I went out immediately and devoured them. 

Einstein’s Dreams was an unbelievable find.  The basic crux of the novel is the idea that in order to understand how time functions in our universe, Einstein had to see the effect that changes to time would have on the human beings in those worlds.  He then looked at what we value in our societies, and determined how time works in our world based on those things.  It’s a stunning metaphor that shows the power of creative thinking in solving incredibly complex mathematical questions.

Braid’s first world is its best example of the effect that altering Time would have on our lives.  The text at the beginning of the level questions what would happen in a world where we could take back our mistakes.  How would it change the way we live our lives.  The gameplay mechanic in this world allows the player to rewind if they make a mistake.  As a learning tool, this allows for a great lesson to our students about risk taking and success, but it also provides teachers a valuable understanding.

Just because a student is capable of “doing something perfectly” right off of the bat, doesn’t necessitate they “know” anything, they may have simply gotten lucky, and this shows no strategic skill in problem solving per se.  Think of a maze.  A student runs through without making a wrong turn on the first try.  A second student resolves to take every right turn in order to create a system for success, that results in several dead-ends prior to getting through the maze.  Which experience was more valuable?  Which student demonstrated higher order thinking?  The obvious choice is the second student, but how often do our assessments and grades reward the first student with better marks?

Using Braid as a way to access this metaphor, and to begin implementing it into our instruction is, I believe, a valid and worthy exercise.  In what other ways can we create experience and metaphor as a way to help students privilege the journey as opposed to the end result?  As we move toward more 21st Century methods of teaching, the answer to this question should help to guide our instruction as well as our assessments. 

In the Face of Certain Destruction: An Exploration of Hope in Video Games

As you round the corner, you can begin to see the ashes descending from the sky.  You break into a run, avoiding the rubble falling from the exploding buildings that surround you; and even though this apocalyptic nightmare was a perfect and idyllic spring day not two minutes ago, your training tells you what is coming next.  The distant spaceship dominates the skyline.  Already, the pods have left the ship and are descending upon Central Park.  The invasion has begun, and thousands upon thousands of the alien legion will swarm the city streets by nightfall.  You face impossible odds, the only Space Marine to survive the off-world wars, and yet, a smile spreads across your face as you calculate the odds.

Somewhere in the ether, in another dimension even, the player that controls you shares your smile.

Promotional Still from Halo: Reach, copyright Bungie

***

The subject of gaming and its role in education is hotly contested on many levels.  At its basest, the argument most typically revolves around how and to what extent play represents “authentic” learning.  Rarely does the discussion broach the topic of Hope.

Hope in videogames is omnipresent.  The basic understanding when buying a game is that it can be beaten, mastered.  In fact, it has been designed to be completed, to create anything counter to this would doom the product to bargain bins.  With that knowledge, that the task is possible, failure becomes not a stigma, but a motivating challenge.  

The best games have mastered a subtle art.  They have balanced challenge with reward.  Earlier, when the local Arcade was the hub of electronic gaming, the harder the game was, the more popular the game became, as players attempted to reach and enshrine themselves as the “highscore” before eventually dying, allowing the next player in line to get a chance.  As gaming shifted away from the arcades and into suburban living rooms, the game design and intent changed.  When you look at how the use of “save” features, “infinite lives,” and “continues” have grown to pervade games, it’s easy to see that gamers are far more apt to take risks in this simulated environment.  Why?  Because they know that there is an answer, and that they will achieve mastery at some point, if they work hard.

A typical videogame is a relatively short experience when compared with the long weekly slog through childhood and adolescence that we call “school”.  We ask students to trust us that there is a greater goal waiting for them, but constantly restart them every new year with new rules and tasks.  Often, at the start of the year, the students are treated as blank slates.  Since the teacher is incapable of judging where each child is developmentally when they arrive cold, they start from the beginning to “guarantee” that they all get the same experience in the classroom.  This is misguided at best, and oppression at its worst.  By assuming that kids know nothing because there is no guarantee of what they know individually, educators rob students of the achievements they have accomplished in previous years, and they begin to see the process of school as a series of unconnected episodes, which are predicated upon satisfying an individual teacher, as opposed to developing a sense of their own mind.

Video games do the opposite of this.  They are tailor made for the ones playing.  Most games allow for “levelling up,” when the efforts put in by players results in a new power or skill that then becomes part of their persona.  Other games have collectible “achievements” or “badges” that the player displays on their personal viewable profile.  The game, and its subsequent sequels, never discounts the work done by players as they work towards the completion of the game.

I’m not sure that schools do this well enough.  In this metaphor, are grades the equivalent of “achievements” and “badges”?  By that rationale, do grade even represent what we are trying to engender in students, or are they simply a measure of compliance?

By the end of a school year, a students will have a variety of work-products from different classes across the subject areas that represent the “work” that they have done.  They know that almost NONE of it will be utilized ever again in subsequent years, and that come September, they will be starting over.  Is it possible that, after repeating this cycle year after year, students will begin to lose sight of why they are doing anything at all?  That there might not be an end?  That none of it is connected in any meaningful way?  If we were to overhear an adult expressing what I’ve just described as the way they view their life, we would call that person “depressed”.  And what is depression, if not a pervading feeling of Hopelessness.

In the Call of Duty series, a collection of heavily popular First-person shooting games that utilize a multiplayer match format, most players have “died” literally THOUSANDS of times.  In fact, the average player has a Kill/Death ratio that is in the negative, which means their character is killed more than they kill.  The series boasts 30 million players online across all iterations.  The second-newest game in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been played for over 600 million hours so far.  An outsider would look at the seemingly repetitive nature of the game and see no distinction between the tediousness of modern schooling and the hundreds of hours of gameplay an AVERAGE player puts into this virtual world.  They would miss the subtle nuances that make it far different.  Call of Duty uses a multi-tiered achievement system that is made up of levels.  Players accumulate EXP, or experience points, from kills and other in-game achievements.  Once they reach a new level, they are granted access to better or varied weapons, and “perks” (customizable enhancements that make the player better).  Upon reaching the highest level, players are offered the chance to “prestige,” which is a fancy term for starting over.  The caveat?  When they begin the process again, they will be viewed by others as a “2nd Prestige”,  or “3rd Prestige” and so on as they negotiate through.  The ability to move upward in the game is limitless, requiring an almost ridiculous amount of time, with very little physical reward, and yet, it is one of the most addictive experiences in youth culture today.  Why is this? What does it supply that differentiates it from schooling?  Simply, they know that success is possible, viewable and transferable.

As a teacher, I’ve been in situations where a student who clearly knows the answer is succumbing to some form of institutionalized apathy.  It became fashionable at some point, or maybe it was something I read, to further question the student in that scenario:  When a student says, “I don’t know,” teachers were to respond with “But what if you did?” or “Well, (Student’s Name), what would you say if you DID know?”  While I understand the conceit, I’m not sure if it is enough to truly change that willingness towards giving up and asking for the answer to be supplied.  “But what if..” is a question that transfers ownership to the student, but if it exists in a structure where there is no guarantee of success, and where the easiest route to success is to succumb to being told what to think, I’m not sure it is enough to change the trajectory the children are on.

Gamers, on the other hand, think about this all the time.  The difference is the situation in which they are engaged.  The presence of Hope is what drives this method of thinking.  When gamers are faced with a seemingly impossible task, such as an unscalable wall, or an undefeatable enemy, they ask themselves the following question, “In a perfect world, what would I need to solve this problem?”  Most often, the answers generated from this type of questioning will solve the player’s in-game issue.  The question can not exist outside the framework of a completable task, the understanding that no matter how difficult something seems, that there is a solution.  Gamers know that every task they are given is doable, eventually, if they work and think harder.  Isn’t that the type of student we are trying to create in our schools?  And if that is true, how do we better accomplish it?

As teachers, we are tasked with occasioning a classroom space that is best suited for learning.  The systems we create in our classrooms must be optimized for this end. Our classes contain boys and girls, Jocks and Nerds, The wealthy and the poor; but they also contain Starship Captains, Warlords, Farmers, Questing Knights, Puzzle Masters, Flying Dragons, Aspiring Detectives, and Cowboys avenging their past wrongs (things most of us as teachers have only read about).  At anytime during our day, we are teaching children that have saved planets, rescued damsels, and survived the Zombie Apocalypse; children that have faced absurd odds, and through their own wits and skill, smiled in the face of the seemingly impossible.  Every single one of them had an understanding, both tacit and explicit, that no matter how difficult the task, that it was attainable.  The way we provide Hope in our schools must change, if we desire to tap into the fierceness and voraciousness with which our students are capable of learning.