Educating Citizens versus Sheep, Part 5: The Keystone and Serious Games

I discussed the Keystone concept in Part 4 of this series and developed it in more detail in the Breaking Silos post. The Keystone concept is vital to redesigning education to meet the demands of a complex, challenging, and dynamic environment to foster creative, critical, and integrative thinking and problem solving. Serious games are the foundational component of the Keystone concept to create a learning environment that helps students to stretch their capabilities and knowledge building abilities. The breaking silos post goes into some detail.

This post and following posts will add more details than the short paper could provide. This post looks at what serious games are and are not. There is also an extensive reference list of papers on games and education at the end of this post that provide support and ideas.

When I first researched serious games for education, I thought serious games and gamification were similar concepts. I soon realized that they may be related, but are not the same.

Gamification uses badges, points, leader boards, etc. to motivate the student. As such, it is really a form of operant conditioning. As I discussed in Operant Conditioning and Conditional Expectations and Change, operant conditioning strips away intrinsic motivation and replaces it with a Pavlovian system of rewards and punishments. This is the realm of instructing sheep than educating responsible citizens. I will admit, however, that it is powerful, and Garmin’s badges motivate me to get moving when I would really like to sit around and do nothing. It is useful in the right settings, when combined with other educational tools. But by itself, we teach sheep.

Serious games are more complex and have several dimensions. They teach citizens to think critically, across disciplines and develop creative approaches to solving problems.

For example, Oxford Academic says:

“Serious games are designed to entertain and educate players, and to promote behavioral change. This chapter reviews characterizations of serious games and the theoretical perspectives, most notably Social Cognitive Theory, that have been used to account for their effects, and game elements such as identity, immersion, and interactivity.”

This definition is congruent with the effects of gamification. Niklas Henriks (Henriks, 2006, p. 3) defines them as:

“There are two fields in Serious Games, which are not mutually exclusive; Game(s) based learning (GBL) which try to harness the motivation power of games and ‘learning through doing’. The other field tries to use game engines, modified or not, as a cost effective way to visualize a problem domain or use them as parts of full blown simulations”

I am partial to Henriks’ approach as he advocates using external components and traditional game engines as the military does in its gaming approach. In this hybrid method, the game engine is used to assess the results of the decisions the players make in the planning and execution processes.

To round out a definitional approach, a paper in the University of Michigan Library states:

“Broadly defined, “a serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The “serious” adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics. The idea shares aspects with simulation generally, including flight simulation and medical simulation, but explicitly emphasizes the added pedagogical value of fun and competition.”

The Keystone concept incorporates these dimensions as the engine to evaluate the results of decisions the teams make and show the results. This is like the Army’s hybrid approach in the Mission Command Training Program (MCTP). There, commanders and staffs go through their normal staffing process in their command posts and do not interface directly with the game engine. Their subordinate units interact with game and provide the normal reports and information back to their higher headquarters, very much like they would in a full exercise or conflict.

In the Keystone, teams of students engage in problem-solving and decision-making in teams, learning discourse, dialog, critical thinking and creativity. The administrator then feeds results into a game engine to determine results and provide reports back to the teams. The emphasis is on the team’s interactions, analysis, and decisions, not the game. We do not want the students distracted from the learning objectives by the game.

References

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