For the past several months, I have been concentrating on producing the iPhone game I designed, and job hunting.  I haven’t been doing much work on new designs.  But in late November, President Obama announced a STEM Game Challenge.  It’s part of a larger effort to step up Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education in public schools.  In recent decades, the United States has not scored well in international tests of science and math abilities.  We need to change that if we’re going to continue to be a successful nation.

President Obama’s live webcast got the design fires cooking again on the back burner of my mind.  Designing a STEM intensive video game is a truly challenging problem.  I recently came across this really excellent article that outlines all of the things one must consider in educational game design.  One line that rang particularly true for me was "Topics should not be forced--games should be one medium among many for learning in and out of the classroom." There are many attempts at games about topics like photosynthesis, but most of what results is not a game at all, but a more typical rote classroom activity.

For a game to succeed in a school environment, it has to fit the constraints of the school realities.  In most schools, that means limited internet access, limited work stations, and limited time.  Many class periods are under an hour, and when you subtract the time it takes to walk to the computer lab as a class and get 30 students settled at 30 machines that may or may not work, you’re left with a short play session.

The trickiest consideration though, is that you have to fit in an established curriculum.  Teachers are usually told exactly what to cover over the course of the academic year.  If you build the greatest science game in the world, a teacher may not be able to use it with her students if she already feels she doesn’t have enough time to cover the required curriculum.

Video games are a natural fit to teach STEM related skills, because many commercially produced games involve problem solving and collaboration skills.  (For more on this, see research conducted by EDC.)  When designed well, games help players hone the 21st century skills that employers look for today.  To be a successful scientist, you can’t merely follow established procedures 100% of the time.  Much of the student experience of STEM subjects in public school is about how well they can execute an established procedure, so video games are a great opportunity to let students do something completely different. 

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the STEM Game Challenge.  It's exciting that the President of the United States is acknowledging the potential of video games as a learning environment in such a powerful way.  This could turn out to be the best thing that's happened to educational games in a long time.

Picture of a game at the Museum of Science and Industry by croncast, shared via Creative Commons.

I recently received a request from zinc Roe Design to review their latest preschool apps; three in a series called Tickle Tap Apps.  It’s always good to keep abreast of the latest kids offerings in the App Store, so I was happy to oblige.  Here goes!

Sort Slider asks players to match full color objects with their silhouettes, one at a time.  You play by dragging the color picture with your finger, or tilting the device until it slides into the correct shadow.  Practicing the skill of observing the shape and characteristics of objects could come in handy in school, because standardized tests often include questions that require careful observation.  To me, this feels more like an academic activity than a game, but then kids in the target age range like school, so this may still hold appeal.
Sort Slider features an adorable dog mascot who provides positive feedback after each correct answer.  He doesn’t talk, but he does bark, and is obviously pleased with the player’s success.
I would place the target age range for this app around 3 years old.  The objects used in the app have distinct shadows that young children should easily be able to differentiate, but this may make it too boring for kids 4 and up.

Count Caddy is another app that features a good educational concept for preschoolers.  Counting games for kids are a dime a dozen, but they usually don’t take the challenge beyond touching items one at a time to hear numbers in sequence spoken aloud.  Count Caddy is a young child’s counting activity done right.  Instead of simply tapping an item to hear a voice count it, the objects appear one at a time, and the player drags it to move it into a collection area.  This allows the child a moment to process the fact that she is adding it to a group. 
What really makes Count Caddy first class among counting apps is that it introduces the concept of counting by twos and threes, sometimes called 'skip counting'.  Counting by twos and threes is a concept kids don’t usually fully understand until kindergarten, first grade, or even later, but I think it’s great to expose preschoolers to topics that are a little advanced for them.  A child as young as 2 could play Count Caddy, because the only action necessary is sweeping items across the screen to the collection area.  In counting by twos and threes, the objects are already lumped together in groups, and the narrator counts by two and three aloud.

Sound Shaker is an app I would only recommend for a very mellow child.  It’s more of a toy than a game, which is not to put the app down in any way.  It’s a noise maker that a child can customize.  There are 6 sounds to choose from.  Once you’ve selected a sound to work with, you tap the screen to make fingertip-sized balls appear that will chime the selected sound when they hit the edge of the screen.  The app has great physics, so you can make a pile of balls and slowly tumble them around.  The one that impacted to make noise gets a star on it so you can see which impact triggered the noise.  Another feature I didn’t discover until the third or so time I played is that you can hold your finger down on the screen to make items that sound at a higher pitch.  A narrator does say about 12 seconds in to "tap the screen longer to make new sounds," but I guess I was previously too busy playing to really listen to her.  I fall into the camp of people that try to tune any narrative I hear out as an annoyance, even though it may be providing helpful information.  That’s OK though.  Discovering this feature on the third play made the game novel again.
I haven’t observed a child play with the app, but it is my fear that the game encourages you to shake the iPhone / iPod Touch vigorously, because sounds are only made when objects collide with the edge of the screen.  To their credit, you can use your finger to fling balls into each other or against the wall, and shaking the device fast does not make the balls move fast.  They seem to have selected a reasonable top speed to discourage rough shaking.  That doesn’t mean a child won’t want to try, though.  It would be all too easy for the device to slip right out of the hand and go flying across the room.  I would recommend this app only to those parents who have a rugged grippy rubber case on their device.

Each of these apps is currently priced at $1.99 in the iPhone App Store.

When I tell people that I design iPhone games for preschoolers, some people ask me, "Who would give an iPhone to a preschooler?"  Now usually these people are not parents, or are not into the latest technology like smart phones.  Other people don't question it, because it makes sense to them.  Perhaps they've seen small children on the train, or sitting at a restaurant, playing with Mom or Dad's iPhone.  A lot of people are concerned, as I initially was, that a child would break an iPhone.  But as I and many others have witnessed, children are actually quite careful with the devices.

But a question many of us still have is, "What does a preschooler do with an iPhone?"

Marc Prensky gave his 4 year old son his old iPhone when he upgraded himself to a new one.  He profiled his son's usage of the device in a recent article.   As one might expect, he plays educational games on it.  But he also uses the iPhone as a prop in his imaginative play.  Marc said his son likes to pretend he runs a taxi dispatch service, and he uses the voice recorder to act that out.  That must be adorable, and now Marc could save those recordings on his computer.

Perhaps most notable is how quickly his son tired of the educational games available, which Marc described as activities that included forming letters and recognizing words.  He said his son requested "fun" games like they have on the Nintendo DS.  Designers, take note!  Games should be games, and not activities kids would do sitting at a desk in a classroom.  Even 4 year olds know the difference!  Game designers must catch up.

Picture of 12 month old girl using iPhone courtesy of gnta, shared via Creative Commons.

This past Saturday, I attended the second annual Boston GameLoop, a small game industry unconference hosted by Darius Kazemi and Scott Macmillan. Instead of a normal conference where speakers plan their presentations months in advance, the schedule was decided the morning of the conference. There was a large wipe board with a grid of available meeting rooms and times. People simply wrote in session ideas that interested them, and then attended what they felt like attending. Some sessions featured a speaker, but many of them were roundtable discussions that everyone in the room participated in. For me, the best part was meeting gaming industry people from all over the northeastern United States, and seeing some familiar faces from New York.
The discussion in many of the sessions centered on MMORPGs, which I found both frustrating and interesting at the same time. I don’t play any MMORPGs, so some of the language goes over my head. On the other hand, MMORPGs are a big part of the gaming industry, and those of us that make casual and kids’ games have some similar issues, like appeal and balance.

Here are my notes from the Kids’ Games Roundtable, a session where about 10 gaming industry people sat in a room and discussed children and videogames.

• Children’s games are largely sold to parents, though in some cases children do ask for a certain title. Because parents make the purchase decision, children’s games are usually marketed to increase a skill parents could observe, such as math or reading skills.
• Johnny Richardson recently developed an XBox/PC game called Buddie’s Busy Day. The game focuses on issues like self-identity and respect, partially because kids get enough basic math and literacy learning in school. In testing the game with kids in the target age range, Johnny discovered that kids became upset as soon as they detected that the game was being too overt about the educational message.
• There was general agreement and discussion among several attendees that the best educational games are those that weave the entire game experience around the curriculum. For example, The Oregon Trail effectively communicates the complicated experience that settlers had finding and managing resources, and making decisions about whether it was worth risking survival to cross a dangerous river. Another person cited a game about homeless shelter management and how some players get upset that they don’t have enough resources to serve all of the ‘people’ in the game that need shelter. Such games can create more effective learning experiences than students would have reading a book.
• Some games incorporate math equations or other factual problems in an otherwise non-educational video game format. Someone at the session likened this to chocolate covered broccoli and said that children still see this as broccoli. The point was also raised that such games often don’t help a student learn the material. Either the player already knows how to solve the problem, or he doesn’t.
• Lemmings was a great educational game. Why isn’t it available on any current gaming platforms?  UPDATE: Hold the phones!  Lemmings is available on PSP.

Notes from Content on a Shoestring session:

• To save money on music, you can layer music in multitracks, and then alter different layers slightly so you’re not boring the players with the same music all of the time.
• Practices that are good for big business companies may not always be the best practice for you.  For example, just because some companies like to spend lots of money on fancy graphics to attract players, that may not be the best course of action for you.
• Foreign language college students looking to gain experience in translation can be great sources to get your game translated to a different language. You can do a machine translation first and ask the student to check it for accuracy to save time.
• Eleanor Robinson of 7-128 Software makes games that are accessible to people with disabilities. Her company strives to make reusable components that can be used by several different titles. For example, they developed a dictionary that could be used by many games. They develop a character for one game and then reuse that character in future games. She also mentioned a mystery series that featured several different mansions, and each mansion had a unique cat with his own set of sound effects.

Notes from Achieving Flow State session:

Evan Nikolich of Demiurge Studios led a talk on Flow State. I should state that not all of my notes are from what Evan said. Some are comments made by session attendees. Also, the room diverged some to the topic of keeping the player hooked, which is a similar idea in some ways, but is not the same thing. Flow is the area between the feelings of boredom and anxiety. Game designers generally strive to create an environment where players achieve flow because then they are really “in” your game. The idea of flow was first proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and we spent the first moments of the session deciding how to pronounce his name. Wikipedia says it is “chick-sent-me-high-ee.”
Evan had this list of flow state characteristics on the board:

1. Clear Goals
2. Concentrating & Focusing
3. Loss of Feeling (in other words, loss of awareness of other things going on)
4. Distorted Sense of Time
5. Direct & Immediate Feedback
6. Balance between Ability & Challenge
7. Sense of Personal Control (as opposed to the game being in control)
8. Activity is Intrinsically Rewarding
9. Player Becomes Absorbed

• Unlocking things quickly in a game can be motivation to continue.
• Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment is when a game can automatically adjust to a player’s skill level.
• A ‘Game Over’ screen with improvement stats can be motivation to continue.
• Personal goals of individual players can vary, and may not be what you had intended.
• Flow state is not synonymous with performing well. If a player is doing really well in your game, they may be growing bored.

Notes from Game Balance Methods & Practices:

• Look at how player is going to use the things you put in the game.
• After release, you can’t change things players have gotten used to. They get upset.
• Pay attention to feedback, whatever it is. (For kids games released to PC or console, there is a wealth of parent feedback in Amazon.com reviews.)
• Study metrics of the game, and make sure no one weapon or strategy is too powerful.
• Remember that playing a game is about developing strategies and feeling powerful.

“The question is not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television.” - Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of Sesame Street

In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney grew tired of making documentaries about educational inequalities. She could make a film that showed how children from low-income families were getting a raw deal from public education, and she could make her audience care, but she couldn’t compel them to ignite change. That’s when she decided to harness the power of television to speak directly to the children themselves. Children were spending a great deal of time watching television, even when the programming wasn’t designed for someone their age. The children were surely learning something. They were learning about how adults behaved in the situations presented. They learned the commercial jingles and sang them after the TV had been switched off.

Today, children’s consumption of video games is the focus of concern as much as, or perhaps more than television. We recognize the educational value of certain games that focus on reading and arithmetic skills, but what about the rest of games? What do they teach?

Without going to the extremes of considering games children shouldn’t even be playing, such as Grand Theft Auto or God of War, there is plenty to be learned from just about any video game. I’m not so naive as to say kids don’t play M-rated games, but that’s a different discussion entirely.

Video games are environment simulations. There are experiences you can have in video games that you can’t have anywhere else. And just about every experience a person has is bound to teach her something, or enrich her life in some way.

Take, for example, role playing games. To the eye of a non-gamer, a Zelda game might be about slaying foes with a sword. But there’s really much more thought involved. There’s a great deal of story reading, there are riddles to be solved, and decisions to be made. When you aren’t sure what your next move should be, and nothing you’re trying is helping you advance in the game, you face the decision of sticking it out on your own, or consulting the internet or a book for help. What teacher wouldn’t love an activity that has children eager to research for more knowledge?

It’s also important for children to have an environment where it is safe to experience failure. Failure is an important step in the process of learning. The real world can be a harsh place to experience failure. If you fail in context of school or a team sport, the consequences could include embarrassment, ridicule, or punishment. Sometimes, failure in school is often flat out unacceptable. Students are simply expected to study and memorize until they can perform well on exams.

In video games, failure is a very natural part of the learning process, and it is expected that you will fail at a given task several times before you succeed. What better way to learn resilience and perseverance?