| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Kids as game designers |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription |
Yasmin Kafai |
It's such a pleasure to hear about so many projects that are happening all over the world and in despite of what John said in the beginning of the session - that he has looked around hard and found very few example, it's very hard to see - actually there are many examples around and our hope is that those are growing. I'm going to talk about kids as game designers, a topic which Stephen Heppell already explored. I'm heading a small but important research group at UCLA, the Kids Interactive Design Studios. And I want to situate first the idea of children as game designers. If someone were to write the intellectual history of childhood - the ideas, practices, the activities that engage the minds of children - it is evident that the chapter on the late 20th century in America would give prominent place to the phenomenon of the video game. The number of hours spent in front of these screens must be surely in the order of hundred of billions. And what is remarkable about this time spent is more than quantity. Psychologists, parents, sociologists and educators are struck by a quality of engagement that stands in really stark contrast with the half-bored performance of watching television programs - and the totally bored performance of school homework. Like it or not, the phenomenon of video games is clearly a highly significant component of contemporary American - and probably also European - children's culture, and a highly significant indicator - of something that we may not fully understand what - that is about the energising of behaviour. Most commercial software designers and companies have thought of capitalising on this energy of behaviour by making educational games. Building on the motivative nature of games, they hope to make the learning of hard-core academic matters such as mathematics and reading more fun, if not easier. However, we really have scant evidence that this really is happening. Far fewer people have thought to turn the tables: making games for learning. If children are so motivated about playing games, maybe we can capitalise on the interest and the knowledge in and about games and ask them to make and program their own games. Actually a colleague of Mitch and myself, Sherry Turkle - a very prominent sociologist and researcher about computer culture, pointed out the similarities between playing and programming computer games. The idea is then that children are also able to create their own mysteries and create their own worlds. This is what I'm going to talk about today - the idea of turning children from consumers into producers of interactive technologies. Why should game designers and programmers have all the fun in making games? About 12 years ago I set out to turn this idea into a reality, first at MIT Media Lab and now at UCLA. But what does this really mean when we ask children to design their own game, especially when we talk about 9, 10, 11-year-olds? Isn't this too difficult, and most importantly, will girls be as interested as boys in making video games? It is very well known that the majority of video game players are boys and not girls. All my researches have been situated in a school context: what can, and do, children learn when they're engaged in making games? I decided to work with the local elementary school ten years ago, with a classroom of students aged between 9 and 11. As part of the mathematics classroom, I worked together with their teachers to make computer games for learning, actually to teach fractions to younger students in their school. We were making this an integral part of the classroom and turning the classroom into a software design studio, and to illustrate to you what this actually means, I'm going to show you a video recorded on the last day of the project, after the students had spent five months programming and designing their video games to teach fractions to younger students. And in true Media Lab fashion at the time, we invited parents, other students and teachers to come and look and have the students demo their games. I hope this gave you a flavour of the kind of games which were designed. This was an environment in which not just computation and new media was used but also paper and pencil and all kinds of activities. You notice that these games were programmed on very simple machines - IBM PC Juniors - which some of you know were already antiquated when they came out on the market. But the point I want to make is that you don't really need fancy technology to do these kinds of projects. What you need is a lot of hard work and imagination, which children usually have. So to sum up a period of six months, the students transformed their classroom into a software design studio. They learned about programming, how to make animations and test their players. They considered interface design issues, they developed graphical designs, they wrote stories, they learned mathematics, they made advertisements - and all this was part of their regular schoolwork. I hope you also noticed that these games were of a particular type of kind, they were all drill and practice games. I mean, most students conceptualise learning as essentially asking questions and giving answers. This was also in the examples which were shown by Stephen Heppel. We were actually quite shocked in the beginning. We were given this kind of free-floating and constructionist environment for students, and we had all these students turn into little instructional designers. So nowadays when I work with students - and I have worked over the past ten years with hundreds of students, in different classrooms and with different configurations - we decided to focus a little bit more on simulations, because what is really important about games are the animations and the kind of simulation character. These are some sample screens made with software that is more up to date, in which students were designing simulations about ocean life representing a food web. These are just static images. Many of these animations also have manipulative features where you can move things around, like for example on the bottom half of the screen where you clean up the beach, and then something happens. As an example of the kind of thinking the reflective character Nobuyuki mentioned engages in: at the end of one project, when I asked a student who had designed a game in which the player could adopt one of five fish characters which were represented in a food web. These were some of his reflections about the interface design issues he considered while making the game. I think it gives you an idea that this wasn't some simple putting text and pictures on the screen, but the students were actually actively engaged in considering the potential users of their games, and struggling with the very same issues most of you as professional designers are struggling with as well. Here's some examples of more updated faction screens. In the upper right corner you see a Titanic screen. This was done a few months ago in the wake of the gigantic commercial success of the movie, and the idea was that you would navigate the Titanic ship through the ocean. And you have to hit the right iceberg, otherwise your ship would sink - the story of Titanic was slightly modified. Actually what's interesting here is the idea of the fraction representation is reflected in the size of the icebergs. As part of the project, these game design activities, once a month or ...(unclear)… generation of software designers. At the same time, students also engage in collaborative planning, because as you all know, it takes a lot of work and co-ordination to make computer games and their different aspects of, for example, graphical design, the kind of research you need to do and the programming to bring this all together. I want to just very briefly address a question which I raised in the beginning and which also ties back into the presentation which Brenda Laurel gave yesterday. I mean are girls actually interested in becoming game designers? As I pointed out already, most boys are the prominent video game players. It's not the girls which you find in the arcades or are playing a lot of video games at home and I think what you saw on the video and some of the sample screens gives you an idea that girls are interested in making games, it's just that they make different games. This is a quote from one of the students who participated in a project in which we were designing games about the solar system explaining to other children what it actually meant to make her own game. And she says: 'I made a game, it's called Mixed Up Planets, and it started very slowly at first. It's very hard to put together your own game. You may think it's so easy to do because of all the video games people play. They look so simple.' And she goes on explaining about the different features she included in her project. So these are examples of more recent fraction games. So when you look at the games, designed by the girls compared to designed by boys, you will find that most of them don't have violent feedback in their games and that the games are more situated in familiar worlds. But by no means are those games less sophisticated in terms of their programming and other features. So to sum up, students enjoy and work hard on designing their software and games. Girls as well as boys. We kind of like to call this 'hard fun', because in contrast to what many commercial producers of educational games would want us to believe, learning is not easy. It is hard work, but this doesn't mean it can't be fun when you care about what you're making. and I believe when you're part of a generation for which interactive technologies such as video games, digital paths and the Internet are the dominant culture, then making video games or any other kind of interactive technology is a meaningful activity. And I would leave you again with the insights of Rosemary, a ten year old game designer, about what she told in addition about making games and learning. She said 'I hope next time you may play a computer or a video game you may think about its maker.' And I hope that will be true for many other people. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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