Fun Inc. (23 page)

Robertson’s great opportunity came during his initial secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland, when, with the small budget he was given, he decided to create a physical space where he could bring all kinds of people – education managers, pupils, teachers – to get their hands on the actual games and discover that ‘it wasn’t all
Pac-Man, Space Invaders
and blowing up zombies’. He dubbed this space the ‘Consolarium’, and began to take it on tour. His mission was, in a sense, twofold: to take on people’s initial misconceptions about what video games actually were; and to change their perception of how games might be used within schools. Games, he emphasised, were not magical learning mechanisms designed to take the place of teachers. They were, rather, a powerful new tool able, in the hands of a good teacher, to ‘engage the most uninterested of pupils as well as challenge the best’.

It’s a field in which the results have begun to speak for themselves. In 2008, the year Robertson was invited to take on his official role as Scotland’s National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning, he oversaw the most extensive trial to date of what games-based learning might mean for schools. Extended across thirty-two Scottish schools and involving over 600 pupils, the study was conducted to the most rigorously controlled scientific standards. First, every pupil involved at every school took an initial maths test, and their scores were recorded. They were then split into two groups, with sixteen schools in each. The trial group used, under structured supervision, a game on the Nintendo handheld DS console –
Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training
, which contains a number of mental arithmetic training games – for twenty minutes at the start of every day for nine weeks. The control group simply continued their classes as normal. At the end of the nine weeks everyone was tested again. Both groups had improved, but those using the game had shown a 50 per cent greater improvement than those who had not. The time the games group took to complete the test had also dropped by more than twice that of the control group.

Equally significantly, the increases in the game group were most significant among pupils at the lower end of the ability spectrum. It’s a suggestive, and hugely impressive, set of results on a number of levels. But the most important single issue is, Robertson believes, one of attitude. ‘We find some pupils are disengaged from learning by the traditional fear they get from school. And the games are really powerful at dealing with this, at enthusing people, not so much in themselves as via the context for learning that the teacher manages to craft around them.’ I asked how many schools are now using video games in learning across Scotland? ‘I would say at least two hundred. I’ve given local authorities the kit to get them started as well as loaning it out, and I go out taking the Consolarium on tour, giving talks, bringing it all with me. And it has really kicked off now. Attitudes have transformed since I started in 2006. If you come to Scotland, you will see the computer game being treated as a valid learning tool: with teachers, by teachers, for teachers. We have repositioned games-based learning from being a left-field idea to something that is very much mainstream.’ Such has been his success that games-based learning has now even been listed in the new Scottish national curriculum documents.

In terms of the all-important ‘contexts from learning’, it’s not all maths games, of course. One of the most impressive examples Robertson gives of a games-based learning experience involves his use of the
Guitar Hero
games, and allows pupils to play along with their most beloved rock idols.

The games themselves are tremendous fun but not, outside of the musical skills of timing and listening, what you might think of as especially educational. What Robertson has done with them, however, is to use a relatively short amount of time spent actually playing the game as a ‘contextual hub’ around which other curricular activities are driven. Why has he taken such an approach; and why use a video game rather than, say, a real guitar or a CD? ‘Because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that learning through a context is powerful. And with a game like
Guitar Hero
, the children can let themselves go, forget they’re in school, forget there is some degree of image involved. And then they can, all of them, really start learning.’

In practice, this involves a term’s worth of detailed scenario and context-building. ‘The teacher who was organising this first got the children to write a biography of an imaginary rock star, after looking at examples. Then they looked at each other’s writing and got the best five into a virtual band for the class. The band then made an album. Then – with all this plot coming from the children – it was decided that the album had gone double platinum, and the band had to go on a European tour. And this meant that they had to plan an itinerary, research capital cities and transport routes across Europe, hotel costs, flights, times, currencies. In design and technology they made guitars out of card, paper and string; and then hung these up and created a guitar shop. Then they had to create a video for an awards ceremony.’

The list of tasks goes on. It’s an incredible, and somewhat overwhelming, itinerary. But did it work? ‘Absolutely,’ he tells me. ‘We now have places like East Lothian council using this as a transition project between primary and secondary schools: so primary pupils in their final term before they move to secondary school all do a
Guitar Hero
project, and then go for a “rock day” to their new secondary school and meet their classmates and take part in lots of activities.’ In fact, they even now have a national
Guitar Hero
challenge taking place in Scottish schools, with a national leaderboard operating on another jewel in the crown of Scottish learning, a dedicated high-speed broadband network for schools known as Glow. ‘I had parents and pupils send in their high scores last year,’ Robertson tells me. ‘And the top four went to Glasgow for our learning festival, and there was a stage, a PA and lights, and a prize. And this year we now have teams of pupils competing.’

Robertson’s passionate enthusiasm is infectious – and in Scotland schools, parents, local authorities and councils are now queueing up to participate in the latest wave of video games learning. Elsewhere, many Asian countries also take game-based learning seriously. Nintendo’s consoles and brain-training games were born in Japan, where their popularity dwarfs that found in any other country, and where educational titles are increasingly being used to keep the minds of the elderly population sharp as well as engaging youthful ones. It’s Scotland, however, that is for the time being the global cutting edge; and one country reaping the benefits of proximity is England, with initiatives based on Robertson’s work starting to spring up at a number of centres around the country.

One such centre is Oakdale Junior School in Essex. Game-based learning came to Oakdale after the borough heard Derek Robertson speaking about his work in early 2008. Like many others before them, the local education authority were so impressed by Robertson’s work and results that they bought thirty Nintendo DS consoles and invited all secondary and primary schools in the area to bid for them. Oakdale was one of the first schools to get their hands on the consoles and have for the last year been running their own trial version of Robertson’s scheme, under the aegis of form teacher Dawn Hallybone.

As in Robertson’s initial Scottish tests, the main game used is
Dr Kawashima
: a typical class, packed with thirty pupils aged ten and eleven, was buzzing with quiet activity soon after Hallybone gave out the Nintendo handheld consoles, with pupils striving to beat each other – and her – at twenty mental arithmetic questions. After a few attempts, she called play to a halt and asked pupils to recall the ‘tricks’ and techniques they had been learning to help them master mental maths: times tables, how to break big numbers down into smaller ones, how to deal with zeroes, fives and tens, and so on. Hands shot up eagerly and note was furiously taken of everything that would help them do the sums faster.

The pupils loved the competition because the machines kept score instantly and automatically, and were scrupulously fair; everyone could do a test at the same time and then compare results. They loved the presentation and interface (‘you get to see one sum ahead, and it scrolls so smoothly,’ one girl commented), perhaps unsurprisingly, given that several billion dollars’ worth of corporate research and development have gone into making the consoles as child-friendly as possible. They loved the touch screens, the neat snappy cases, the visual and verbal rewards every time they got something right. Although, one ten-year-old boy explained with an extremely serious look on his face, ‘I’d like to do more games in schools, but I think it’s not like a good idea to be on this all the time. In the future I will play games, but it won’t be like an hour and a half a day, I won’t be mad.’ There were also, a girl sitting next to him added, benefits beyond maths skills to be gained: ‘I have this world records book, and it says that games improve your eyesight if there’s a tiny thing and you’re trying to aim at it.’

During this class and several others, a central point about game-based learning gradually became obvious. For teachers and parents, using games consoles as part of a lesson may still sound a little like science fiction, or at least like gimmickry. For pupils like those at Oakdale, however – a good local state school representing a whole spectrum of abilities, ethnicities and attitudes – the presence of the consoles in the classroom was a natural and familiar extension of much else in their lives. As pupil after pupil patiently noted, this was a welcome slice of their ‘real’ lives transplanted into the sometimes-daunting world of the classroom. With this kind of technology in their hands, even the weakest member of the class felt entirely at home. So at home, in fact, that they competed to come back in break times to take more maths tests.

Oakdale’s head teacher, Linda Snow, is philosophical on this point. Had parents been cynical, even hostile, to the idea of her school using video games as a learning method? ‘No one has complained, quite the reverse. I know my husband, who is a head at another school, has had parents asking why they aren’t doing this too. There has been a lot of competition to have the machines.’ And what about the pupils? ‘Children now see everything in fifteen-second bursts. Gone are the days when they sat for thirty minutes copying off a board: they expect the world to be singing and dancing. Dawn uses Twitter live in her class, live links with Australia for geography, posting stuff on websites: this is a world that even five years ago wasn’t there. And the DS consoles are part of that package. For the pupils, it’s not like, gosh, this is something new. They grow up with this technology. It’s part of who they are, now.’

C
HAPTER
11

Future Inc.?

Here is one prediction for the future that can’t be repeated too often: people won’t change. What they do, how they do it and who they do it with will change, but if there’s one lesson that video games in particular should remind us of, it’s that the most powerful aspects of our natures are both very ancient and very hard to alter.

What video games do, like most technology, is amplify particular human tendencies: our innate hunger for learning, our delight in solving problems and challenges, our sociability and rivalries, our pleasure in escaping the uncertainties of the world for more predictable rewards. Then, too, there are the ways in which games as interactive systems increasingly connect to the ways in which we work, communicate, plan and express ourselves in a digital age, a process that is making the world more playful, and where the business of play is becoming ever broader and more profitable. The very term ‘video game’, although it is likely to linger for historical reasons, will increasingly be stretched by the multiplying sub-genres and expanding boundaries of all that it encompasses.

When it comes to specifics, predicting the future of a medium whose defining characteristics are the disruption of established business models, regular transformative innovations and an increasing proliferation of sectors is almost impossible. Yet the coming years, and even decades, do hold at least a few near-certainties. For a start, there’s the demographic observation that the world now hosts its very first generation of ‘digital natives’ – a slightly sinister pseudo-anthropological description of those born into the age of the internet, the mobile phone, the laptop and the console. Over the next half-century, video games are going to become as much a part of everyone’s daily experience as television, radio, automobiles, refrigerators, type and the written word; and this means their audience is going to go on growing for many years yet, and will continue to mature and divide into genres for all ages and situations. ‘Grandma gaming’ is a joke phrase today; tomorrow, it could be one of the most profitable sectors around.

Another certainty is money – lots of money. From its current value at $42 billion and double-digit annual growth rate, there’s no reason to suppose that the video games industry will stop at the $50 billion or even the $100 billion mark. Video games already possess both successful and robust models for making money from their users, online and offline; and the kind of service that virtual worlds can offer is likely to remain at a premium for years to come, even if it shifts towards funding via advertising and micro-payments rather than the subscription model currently dominant in the West.

Apart from shared virtual worlds, one other sector with huge growth potential is the somewhat ill-defined area known as casual games: short, sweet, low-commitment doses of high engagement delivered to everyone from busy working bosses on commuter trains to pensioners waiting for their hair to set. With mobile computing platforms only just beginning to show what they’re capable of, this kind of rapid on-demand fun may well offer a more accurate image of the ‘gaming’ of everyday life than that of high-commitment virtual worlds, where immersion and effort put severe limits on when and how people are able to play. So far as technology is concerned, convenience and instant satisfaction have a far broader potential for growth than highly sophisticated, demanding products that on paper appear far more impressive.