Educational Game Design First Steps: Find a way to Avoid "Testing"

I go through pages and pages of handwritten notes
at the beginning of any design process.

This last week I moved out of the research phase of my educational game design, and started incorporating the things that I had learned from educational research on games, feedback, motivation, and memory retention. I also looked at many examples of current educational games - both good and bad. When I started this journey, I wanted to make sure that whatever I created could not only make a difference in the lives of the children that used it, but also demonstrate that the meaningful growth of an honest educational experience and the lighthearted catharsis and escapism that come from a well-crafted game were not mutually exclusive.

That having been said, my last post "Why do all Educational Games Suck?" and Other Nonsense garnished the most views of any article on my blog so far. It seems that I may have hit a nerve, and a lot of readers agreed with my sadness at encountering so many educational video game titles that seemed to fail at being games. In that post I lament that so many educational games resemble fancy tests rather than games: they have one right answer, and provide feedback for the answers provided. In general, these games seemed to be built on the foundational idea that drilling problems is how one learns. Also, besides the potential detriment to the game as an instructional tool, giving someone cascades of problems to answer is a lousy game mechanic and it makes for a lousy game (I've covered this more thoroughly in my last post).

Needless to say, my experience researching both effective and ineffective uses of games gave me a strong sense of what I did not want my game to be. By the end of my research, there were so many don'ts on my list of game design parameters that I became less and less confident that could satisfy them all. Starting the design process led me to understand the reasons I found so many educational games that sucked, and start to empathize with the game developers who came up with those games.

When you are designing an educational game, it seems like all roads lead back to "testing."

How do you do well at this game? You answer questions
correctly? Yeah, that's called a test.
Photo care of play.google.com

But the fact of the matter is that the test game mechanic is almost impossible to avoid in an educational game. It's always there because in the end we are in fact trying to educate the player. Now, I'm not going to go into a discussion on effective testing methods, the widely varying forms of educational evaluation, or other topics central to educational testing - as that lies outside the scope of what I wanted to focus on. What I will say is this: Within educational games, rules and mechanics are there to create an environment where the student gains some knowledge or understanding - and the only way to get at that, the only way to know if a player has achieved that particular type of progress, is to give them some type of test. If, as a designer, you cannot allow that test to blend seamlessly within a game environment, the transaction will feel forced, but if you allow the game to override the importance of the educational experience, and the test that evaluates it, then you are left with a fun game that has little to no instructional value.

This is the balance beam that I found I had to walk: no matter how much I hated it, the testing mechanic had to be there somewhere. Both traditional games and educational games have tests, but educational games run a higher risk of being nothing but a test. Educational games usually have a logical connection between the testing game mechanic and the concepts that the designers/developers intend to teach. Designing an educational game is hard because the testing part of the game is easy to come up with, but the rest of the game is much more difficult without adding so much game that the education is lost. This makes it so that as you are coming up with the structure of your game, it is natural for your brain to decide how to implement testing, and so you think ( and I've done it tons of times too), "That's it, I've got my core game mechanic."

Here's an example of what I mean, let's take a look into an educational game design meeting:

Designer 1: So, we know that we need to create a web app that teaches children the importance of brushing their teeth, but how do we make it a game? 

Designer 2: Well, if we can reward them for properly demonstrating that they know the importance of brushing their teeth, we can help motivate them to progress and learn more about teeth brushing.  

Designer 1: Ok, so we could give out achievements for answering questions correctly, or we could develop a tooth version of Asteroids, but each time they lose a life they would have to answer a question about teeth in order to keep playing.  

Designer 2: What if we had them explore the inside of a mouth from a the perspective of a piece of bacteria, and then every time they want to progress they have to answer a question about dental hygiene. 

Notice how all roads seemed to come back to testing these students/players? That's because at some point the game (or the developers that made the game) need to know if the player has learned anything about brushing teeth. Even in attempts to be innovative, the test game mechanic is pervasive in educational game design.

But after seeing so many games I disliked, either as games or as pretend educational experiences, I knew I had to find something else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint Designers 1 and 2 as idiots, or even as straw men in order to make a point. I've been in meetings that have gone just like this, I know Designer 1 and 2 by name. But since the "testing" part of any educational game is so central to making something have instructional value, it can be very difficult for designers to see beyond it to find other potential game mechanics.

This became a giant roadblock for me in the design process of my current app, and it was very difficult for me to overcome. No matter what type of game I brainstormed, it all seemed to come back to a test-like game model. But then I realized, as I was mulling over some old video games that had a major impact on my perception of the medium, that testing and evaluation should exist in an game that teaches you something, but there is a way to have them not necessarily be the game mechanic that drives the progression of the game. You have to take your evaluation one step further and come up with ways to allow your players to demonstrate their knowledge other than just answering "Do you know this? Yes or No."The testing can be the inspiration for the final game mechanic, but that gameplay should take the concepts that need to be tested and force the student to use them.

In order to comprehend, you must first assimilate.
In order to apply, you must first comprehend.
Photo care of juliaec.wordpress.com/

I came to realize that I needed to come up with a structure for my players to demonstrate that they knew what they were being taught (fractions in my case) without having to answer questions about it. In educational terms, I needed to access a higher level of Bloom's Taxonomy - a concept for organizing how deeply a person has learned something based on how they use it. Bloom's Taxonomy says that the people who use their knowledge to create more knowledge, make connections, or build something unique are demonstrating that they have a deeper knowledge of that thing than they would if they were just memorizing it. By creating a design that required players to take their knowledge one step further and operationalize it in the game setting, I was able to come up with more complexity and depth for my fractions app. Also, once I had blueprinted a more "if you know it then show me you know it by how you play" method of testing my players, the game mechanics that I had been struggling with flowed naturally and logically as part of my following brainstorm sessions. In essence, I discovered that if I wanted to evaluate whether or not my players had learned fractions, I needed to put them in situations (not to be confused with word problems) where they would need to use fractions in order to win. By changing how I looked at evaluating student progress, I was able to break my game design writer's block and push my design up to another level.

And the really crazy thing is, it wasn't until I went to write about my experiences that I realized this is exactly why I named this blog The Same Footsteps in the first place - because I believe education is about getting people to do the things that make them learn rather than sitting and learning the things that they should know.

What do you think? Post a reply in the comments. Remember that I will be posting regularly throughout my game design process. If you or someone you know is interested in how educational games are made, subscribe or follow me on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter.