CHAPTER 6

THAT’S EDUTAINMENT!

One day in the fall of 2011 I decided to experiment by layering game mechanics into one of my journalism courses—a rigorous six-hour writing and reporting class that meets once a week and works on the fundamentals of hard news and deadline reporting, with a business focus, for newspapers, wire services, and online news. Over a fourteen-week semester students undertake more than twenty assignments, plus they work on a class publication, taking turns as editors, and keeping track of the site’s metrics and participating in social media.

It’s a tough class, the linchpin of the Business and Economic Reporting program at New York University, a challenging three-semester graduate program that leads to a master’s in journalism. Students take half their courses at the Stern School of Business, where they are thrown in with hypercompetitive MBA students, and the other half in journalism. More than 90 percent of our students land jobs in journalism, often at major news organizations—the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Reuters, Business Insider, PandoDaily, TechCrunch, and many other places.

As any teacher will tell you, it can be difficult to engage students for an entire semester, especially in a class with such a big course load. Burnout, in the past, has been a problem. After one particularly brutal semester, I decided to make a change, and as I started researching this book I figured the classroom would be an ideal testing ground for introducing game elements into the curriculum. What are grades in school but a kind of game anyway? And no less an authority than the Federation of American Scientists has endorsed video games as a potential means for teaching “higher-order thinking skills, such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.”

I wasn’t dumbing down the course for the millennial generation. Indeed, there’s evidence to support the use of game elements in education. A growing number of academics, led by James Paul Gee at Arizona State University, believe that gaming can drive problem-based learning, in which students develop skills as they work collaboratively to confront challenges. Gee is quick to point out that he’s not advocating for the likes of Call of Duty in the classroom.

“The problem is that our schools are focused on relating facts and how well students retain this info,” Gee says. “Teachers are teaching to the test.”

When Gee began playing video games seven years ago, he was struck by the fact that games are often long and demanding—not nearly as dumb as stereotyped—yet designed to be so intuitive that no manual is ever needed. You learn by playing. That’s precisely what students at Quest to Learn, a public school for sixth to twelfth graders in Manhattan, are doing. The school bases its entire pedagogy on game design. It seeks to have children assume the roles of truth seekers—explorers and evolutionary biologists, historians, writers, and mathematicians—and engage in problem solving. There are no grades. Students are rated “novice,” “apprentice,” up to “master.” A class might be devoted to engaging in a multiplayer game and working in teams to defeat hostile aliens or becoming immersed in a “sim” game and running an entire city. The kids even code their own games, which involves math, English, computer science, and art.

In Singapore, China, and Finland, where children do better in math and science than in America, problem solving is the key to learning. In America, we take the opposite approach. We teach math as a theory, then throw in problem sets as homework to reinforce what students have learned. The schools are in essence teaching the manual without exposing children to the game. Gee reasons that kids would learn more if they had to confront challenges that required them to use hard skills. Indeed, the 2006 Summit on Educational Games by the Federation of American Scientists found that students recall just 10 percent of what they read and 20 percent of what they hear. If there are visuals accompanying an oral presentation, the number rises to 30 percent, and if they observe someone carrying out an action while explaining it, 50 percent. But students remember 90 percent “if they do the job themselves, even if only as a simulation.”

This reminded me of perhaps the best educational experience I had attending public school, which happened all the way back in fifth grade. My teacher, Gary Crew from Elmsford, New York’s Alice E. Grady grammar school, had created a self-paced history curriculum. As twelve-year-olds we covered European history from Christopher Columbus through the beginning of the nineteenth century. To this day, decades later, I remember much of what I learned about Columbus; the conquistadors, including Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro and the terror they wrought on the Aztecs and Incas; Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who “discovered” the Pacific Ocean; Bartholomeu Dias, the Portuguese explorer who was first to sail around the tip of Africa; the Dutch East India Company and its chokehold on trade; the Lewis and Clark expedition; and much, much more. I can’t say that for any other history class I have ever taken.

The difference wasn’t what we learned. It was how we learned it. Because we had the option of teaming up with a friend, I worked with a classmate, who became as obsessed as I was. Today this type of pedagogy is referred to as social teaching, but back then I don’t think there was a name for it. All I knew was that we weren’t forced to sit down with old, moldy textbooks. Instead we read a chapter out of a book on, say, Cortés, and then took a multiple-choice exam to gauge our comprehension. If we earned 80 percent or higher, we leveled up to the next assignment, which might mean listening to an audiocassette of a brief lecture on mercantilism that Mr. Crew had taped, heading to the library to locate books on Pizarro, or reviewing an atlas reflecting the European sense of the world in the sixteenth century to plot out explorers’ journeys.

Every class meant exposure to a different medium and a different way of learning. In a sense, it was visual storytelling expressed as a treasure hunt that lasted an entire school year. And it wasn’t simply our thirst for knowledge that drove us. We were competing with each other. I didn’t want to slow my friend down by not scoring high enough on the plethora of exams we took and he felt the same. That meant being prepared and truly absorbing the material. But we were also competing against others in the class. There was a spiritual reward in being ahead of everyone else, so every time we worked on history, we focused. Best of all, it was fun. Three and a half decades later I wanted to bring this kind of approach, in a limited way, to my journalism class. So I contacted a local tour guide company in New York City called Stray Boots to see if it would help me out with a Wall Street treasure hunt, in which students learned the history of the area by playing a walking game.

In the second week of the semester I met my fifteen students in front of Manhattan’s Trinity Church, just a few blocks from Ground Zero. I divided them into three teams of five, and each chose a leader to operate a smart phone to receive each question. The students padded around lower Manhattan, collectively trying to answer questions, which ranged from how many floors below street level are the gold vaults of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (five) to the color of the World Financial Center’s roof (green) to who is buried in a particular pew in Trinity Church (Alexander Hamilton). They had to furnish their answers before receiving the next question. It took each group about an hour to answer fifteen of them. The following week I gave students a written test. I wanted to find out what they would better recall: the answers to ten questions from the treasure hunt from a week earlier, or a short reading passage (about 450 words that I cobbled together and distilled from Wikipedia) on the history of Wall Street, which they read twice in the span of four minutes. Then I took away the piece of paper.

The results, albeit unscientific, were nevertheless notable. Collectively, my fifteen grad students correctly answered 77 out of 150 questions (or 51.3 percent) from the reading passage but for the treasure hunt they got 89 of 150 right (or 59.3 percent). In other words, students had higher recall of a game they had played a week earlier than the short passage they read a few minutes earlier. Sure, 8 percent isn’t a huge difference, but I think it’s significant.

More striking, the students who operated the smart phones did the best on the treasure hunt questions. One student got ten out of ten on the treasure hunt but only six right on the reading passage; another answered seven correctly on the Wall Street game but only two right on the passage; the third did equally well on both tests. The people most engaged in the game had the highest retention rates.

Avi Millman, the twenty-eight-year-old cofounder of Stray Boots, told me he wasn’t surprised. A former math teacher of his used Stray Boots to help her design a mathematics walk. In one instance she took a group of middle-school students around Greenwich Village and had them, for example, measure the Washington Square Arch’s area in square feet. She also found that students were more engaged and seemed to enjoy learning more.

A Princeton graduate, Millman came up with the idea of gamified walking tours in the summer of 2008 while visiting Rome. Like many travelers he relied on a drab guidebook but realized an interactive tour would be much more fun. Today Stray Boots charges twelve dollars for gamified walking tours in ten cities, including New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and a tour of Portland, Oregon’s microbreweries. Millman and his cofounder, Scott Knackmuhs, initially bootstrapped the company and relied on some family money. Now headquartered in a one-room office in downtown Brooklyn with five employees paid “ramen noodle low salaries,” it’s profitable, and in November 2012 announced a series-A round of two million dollars.

Of course, my little test that Stray Boots helped me concoct is by no means scientific, but it does show promise for serious games. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, a company that offers interactive classes, takes this further. He views traditional methods of teaching with its reliance on lectures and fourteen-week semesters as relics of a bygone era. Instead he points to video games and Twitter as ideal models. Children are shaped by their environment and culture and learn quickly through the mechanics of video games while also gravitating toward smaller and smaller “slices,” as with Twitter and its 140-character limit. He wants to make video games the core of education, where students go at their own pace and bite off smaller chunks of knowledge, which would, he says, “transform the medium.”

GameDesk, a Los Angeles–based educational nonprofit founded by Lucien Vattel, has already been doing this. It has been building “the classroom of the future” at a high school for at-risk students. Supported by $3.8 million from AT&T, as well as donations from the Gates Foundation, Motorola, and Samsung, GameDesk, which touts Bill Nye the Science Guy as a board member, designs games to teach students subjects like geoscience, math, and physics.

Aero, a game Vattel and his team developed, focuses on aerodynamics and the physics of flight. Students strap on wings made of fabric and repurposed Wii controllers and soar through the sky, watching their activities on a large screen. When kids take off the first thing they notice is they start drifting down to the ground. This introduces the gravity factor. Then they fly through various different hoops and notice that no matter how they fly—straight up, down, or do loop-the-loops—gravity always pushes them toward the center of the earth. A student can also transform the air into thousands of tiny marbles that represent invisible molecules dancing around the plane. They express the interaction of the wings and various mechanics as they respond in space to forces of gravity, lift, thrust, and drag.

With another game, MathMaker, underwritten by Motorola, students design their own games and in the process of tapping into their creativity learn core mathematical concepts such as factoring, fractions, parabolas, linear and quadratic equations, and ratios. According to Vattel, 80 percent of students at a school where less than two-thirds ultimately graduate increased their math scores an average of 22 percent during the program.

“The best way to learn that is not by reading a stale paragraph or looking at a still 2-D image with a diagram,” Vattel says.

Lee Sheldon, codirector of the Games and Simulation Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has created courses that double as multiplayer games. In one he conducted at the University of Indiana, he instructed students to choose avatars and join “guilds” comprised of six or seven members. Sheldon divided class time among “fighting monsters” in the form of quizzes and exams, “completing quests” such as presentations or research, and “crafting” game analysis papers and video game concept documents. In the first week students began their semester-long journey as “Level One” avatars and leveled up as they amassed points. Just showing up to class earned one 10 points. The student received 50 points for writing a game proposal and 25 for presenting it to the class. Acting as a “guild leader” added 100 points. Completing the midterm exam, which entailed defeating a “Midlevel Boss,” was worth 400 points. Sheldon based final grades on students’ total tallies. A grade of C took 1,460 points, a B 1,660, and an A 1,860. Since turning his courses on games into actual games, Sheldon reports that students are more engaged, get more out of classes, and are far more likely to show up.

A course on games seems a natural fit for a semester-long game, but what about other disciplines? In his book The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, Sheldon shares examples of teachers in other disciplines—biology, computer science, education, history, and math—who have layered games into coursework. Denishia Buchanan, a biology teacher at a school in Arkansas where the families of 80 percent of her students live below the poverty line, created a multiplayer classroom, fueled in part by virtual currency that students earn for completing “quests,” after reading about Sheldon in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Questing,” Buchanan concluded, increases student motivation, attitude, and performance. “Students in my classroom are doing three times the amount of work that students completed in previous years,” she says, “and they are doing it with joy and without complaint.”

But not everyone is convinced that turning education into a game is for the best. “Who said education is supposed to be fun and not hard work?” says Alexander Galloway, a media, culture, and communication professor at New York University. “At some point, you have to buckle down and memorize facts.”

He’s right about that. I certainly wasn’t going to jettison my syllabus and create a completely game-based approach to journalism. I could just imagine the expressions on the faces of hard-boiled master’s candidates if I were to suddenly tell them they had to choose an avatar, go on quests, and slay monsters. If I inundated students with games, would they tune them out like, say, banner ads on the Internet? Would they grow wise to this manipulation and walk away?

“If you follow human desire and trigger dopamine response, everyone eats Twinkies all day,” Galloway says.

Library Treasure Hunt

The success of my Stray Boots experiment emboldened me to try another later that same semester, this one designed for library research. I make it a rule to push my students to conduct face-to-face and/or phone interviews with living, breathing humans (I require a minimum of two sources per story, and assign at least one a week) and invite a research librarian to class to run a seminar on research databases. In addition, students cover live events, go into the field to conduct reporting, and file stories on tight deadlines, and every semester I organize a press conference with an economist from the Conference Board, a private think tank. But I also want them to become experts at pulling up information quickly over the Web.

To teach them how, I have students conduct an in-class research exercise to underscore the wealth of information available to an enterprising reporter. Students have half an hour to pull up as much data as possible on a public figure. I usually assign the former CEO of Experian, the credit report company, because of a comment he once made. He was complaining about the government requiring credit companies like his to provide consumers one free report a year to check for inaccuracies and monitor for fraud. He called the legislation “unconstitutional” and said giving away reports was not “the American way.” Here’s a man whose company’s primary function is to amass and traffic personal information, and he was miffed a consumer had a right to see what was in it without being charged?

I wondered what kind of information about him resided online. Lots, it turns out. My students learn all sorts of things about the man. His work history (including salary, bonuses, and stock transactions), the boards he serves on, home address, value of the property, blueprints, and much more. Since his home is not far from Experian headquarters someone could, if he wanted, plot the best route to work, or use Google Earth for a birds’-eye view of his land.

Nevertheless, one challenge facing journalism educators in this age of instant-access Internet is prodding students to leave the warm glow of their computer screens to conduct primary-source research. It seems if they can’t find something through Google it doesn’t exist. I’d be remiss if I didn’t expose them to research beyond the Web.

This led me to team up with Alexa Pearce, a research librarian at New York University’s Bobst Library who works with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, to create a mobile, interactive treasure hunt. The idea behind the hunt was to send my graduate journalism students scurrying into parts of the library where they’d never set foot before, seeking bits of information that couldn’t be located online. In the process students would learn something about Bobst Library and its vast storehouse of knowledge—its 2.5 million books in open stacks, 500,000 government documents, and 80,000 audio and video recordings.

For the first seven years I taught at NYU, I assigned an in-class research test (the precursor to this interactive treasure hunt) that required students to answer ten questions without using the Internet. The test was not easy. Over the years I’ve posed questions such as: “How many nations are represented by the combined student body of New York City’s public schools?” (150.) “How many languages are spoken in New York City’s five boroughs?” (Anywhere from 180 to 200, depending on how you define a language versus a dialect.) And “What is the most popular T-shirt sold at NYU’s bookstore?” (Champion gray T-Shirt with NYU written in blue.) I’ve also asked what kind of reddish stone makes up Bobst Library’s facade (sandstone), the number of New York City council members (fifty-one), vice presidents who died in office (seven), and the number of countries represented in the summer Olympics (around two hundred, depending on the year). For each answer students were required to provide an unimpeachable source, either a person (with contact information) or a bibliographic citation for a book or periodical.

At the beginning it was relatively easy to create questions whose answers weren’t online, but starting around 2005 the rate of information migrating to the Web picked up considerably. It also became more common for the people my students called for answers to point them to Web sites. Then there were the complaints. The third year in a row I asked for the value of Columbia University’s endowment ($7.8 billion, give or take), an administrator, irked with fielding their queries, yelled at several students. After that I limited the scope to information sitting in the library. But I figured a treasure hunt would be more fun, and threw in an incentive: I informed the class that students with the top three scores could redeem their points for the right to buy their way out of a future assignment. This proved a popular motivator.

On a Tuesday morning in winter my students congregated in Bobst’s cavernous atrium. All of them were required to carry a smart phone with a preloaded QR code reader app. Alexa Pearce, a Bobst research librarian who helped me concoct questions for the test, had customized fifteen different tests because we didn’t want a horde of students inundating the same location at once and hoped to make cheating if not impossible at least very difficult. The test was composed of nine questions, each worth 1,000 points, and if a student requested help or a hint it would cost 250 points. They had three hours to complete it.

Students were given just one question to start. We had designed the game so they had to level up to advance. In other words, the only way to get to the next question was by answering the current one correctly. This way there was no looking ahead, which kept the mystery intact. For example, the first question could require a student to wade into the stacks to find a volume associated with a specific call number. When she found the book, there could be a note inside with the next clue instructing her to go to page 28 and locate the second word that starts with a “C.” The word could be “concomitant” and the student might have to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary and identify its first recorded use, then e-mail the answer to Alexa. She then replied immediately with the next clue.

We also threw in acrostics so students had to unscramble a set of letters leading to a specific periodical (say, the New Yorker), then have them consult the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature to find the right microfilm, which they would have to scan. When they came upon the article they were seeking they might have to create a PDF and e-mail it to Pearce, who would send back the next clue, which might entail listening to a speech by Amelia Earhart or Franklin Delano Roosevelt and filling in the blank to a phrase three minutes into the speech. Or perhaps they had to venture into a special collection of rare cookbooks and snap a photo of a recipe to text to Pearce, who would text back the next clue that could lead to a QR code hidden in the stacks, which might instruct them to head to the lower level of the library, where I was waiting with coffee, doughnuts, and another clue.

Over the years, scores on my research tests have varied quite a bit, and the students have, truth be told, expressed a sense of dread about them. On this particular Bobst Library Research Treasure Hunt, three students earned perfect scores—and gladly collected their free passes on a future assignment—while most of the others lost points by buying hints or making careless mistakes. One student, for instance, lost a hundred points because she located a book based on its citation but chose the wrong word to look up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, as a class, the scores were higher than they ever were for the static research tests I used to give. Subsequent classes have also excelled, with students telling me how much they enjoy the interactive element.

I imagine students could glean all this from a tour of the library, but that’s a passive way to learn and they likely would retain little. By adopting elements of game design, suddenly a challenging exam becomes edutainment. And you can discern from the questions it is by no means dumbed down: it’s a rigorous exam, but one in which the students have fun, gain knowledge, develop a greater appreciation for what Bobst Library has to offer, and tend to retain what they’ve learned.

And there’s no app for that.