Lotherington, H. & Sinitskaya Ronda, N. (2007). A study of classroom use of educational games and simulations for literacy skills development: A qualitative sub-study of two schools. Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, Technical Report 2007-4.
Saracho, O. (2002). Family literacy: Exploring family practices. Early Child Development and Care, 172 (2), 113-122.
Yin (1993) notes that the richness of data in a case study calls for multiple data collection methods. Across the January to May period of 2007, both researchers made nine half-day visits to the two schools. We visited each class together, separately collecting data on participant perspectives, experiences, and attitudes on the implementation, efficacy, enjoyment, and problematics of game development and play for geography learning via non-participant field observations, photography of daily activities, and informal conversations with both students and teachers. Directly after each school visit, we had an informal meeting in a local coffee shop to transcribe both sets of observations and merge them into a single record, which facilitated recall, discussion and comparison of observations and incidents of particular interest.
This comparative case study of two Grade 4 classes engaged in gaming geography in the suburban GTA created a nuanced portrayal of the game-by-game implementation of an experimental educational game development unit for advancing literacy and curricular learning. Researchers observed children creating, programming and playing Tic-tac-toe, Trivial Pursuit, Snakes and Ladders, and Mother Goose digital board games based on specific geography content.
Boyd, D. (2008). Why youth ♥ social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, identity, and digital media (pp. 119–142). The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
The children had not learned to touch type (at either school), though touch typing is a basic literacy “skill”, especially in schools with a vested interest in technology. Therefore, a great deal of time was spent in typing questions created on paper in the classroom into the game site, which reduced the games project to a typing exercise on numerous visits. This caused the children some degree of boredom and frustration, and reduced the learning potential of the unit. However, both teachers noted that the students’ keyboarding skills improved during the unit because they had to type in their questions.
Figure 6: Excitement in game playing - Boys playing their own games at SPS.
For all but the first game (which was programmed in the classroom using a mobile lab), the children were lined up single file to walk quietly to the library-lab (see Figure 4), where they used the machines under the direct guidance of the teacher, who insisted on quiet work, and became flustered when there were problems.
Ms Green was visibly uncomfortable when there was a problem with the technology, and in one instance, rather that working on finding a solution to a minor meltdown occurring somewhere between the school’s system and the game site or giving the children the opportunity to play another of the games they had completed for this unit, she asked all the children to switch off the program and open either Kid Pix or another educational game that she was more familiar with. It is possible that system crashes at her school were exacerbated by the lock-step, linear organization of her class, which orchestrated all kids being at the same place at the same time.
Computer games offer a culturally familiar medium to young learners, and present a novel and engaging means of bringing contemporary digital literacies into the curriculum. Prominent theorists argue that digital games provide immersive contexts motivating players to engage in a wide variety of activities that stimulate situated literacy learning (Beavis, 1997; Gee, 2003; Johnson, 2005; Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004; Prensky, 2006; Shaffer, Squire, Halverson & Gee, 2005). Digital game play fosters active engagement, motivation, and high levels of persistence in game play (Beavis, 2002; de Castell & Jenson, 2003; Facer et al. 2004; Garris, Ahlers & Driskell, 2002; Johnson, 2005). New digital environments, particularly game sites, combine traditional textual reading and writing with new literacies that pertain to accessing and evaluating information, constructing complex narratives, decision-making, and navigating rich multimedia environments (Beavis, 2002; Lotherington, 2003; Squire, 2008). Playing and (especially) developing online games invites students to access and engage with digital media and explore them, both independently and cooperatively. This exploration fosters the emergence and development of digital metaliteracies—skills that include navigating and ‘reading’ digital environments, as well as developing an understanding of the digitally-connected audience, and searching for information online (Lotherington, 2003).
Rosenblum, D. (2007). What anyone can know: The privacy risks of social networking sites. IEEE Security & Privacy, 5 (3), 40-49.
The nature of the games themselves became an interesting issue. Since the online games were based on existing board games, it was interesting to see whether they would lend themselves to an online environment. Children varied in their familiarity with the board games in question: some had played them with parents; some had never been exposed to them. Several children were not familiar with Mother Goose, indicating both generational and cultural gaps in relating to the games.
A game shell that combines elements of familiar board games with the interactivity and appeal of contemporary online games was used in this study. Board games are recognized as tools for early literacy development (Lyle, 1999; Saracho, 2000, 2002). Researchers argue that forming a positive attitude towards reading and literacy through playful and entertaining activities, such as board game playing, helps develop avid readers (Sonnenschein, Baker, Serpell & Schmidt, 2000). Lyle (2000) found that student literacy skills were enhanced by teaching geography using a range of literacy-specific activities including creating a board game. She argues that writing game instructions and creating game cards fosters development of writing skills and engenders student enthusiasm. In a project focused on literacy development in an after-school playground that combined electronic and board games, Blanton, Greene and Cole (1999) found that playing board games is associated with developing literacy and essential learning skills, including language comprehension, social skills required for collaborative learning, and task persistence.
There are opportunities for improving language awareness using a game site, by employing spell-checkers in the game structure to remind children to proof their work, and by involving more bridges to multilingual access. In this study, problem-solving across languages was seen to be challenging and fun. This was one of the most successful elements of literacy learning in this exercise, though an unintended outcome resulting from a translation glitch in the game shell. Curiously, problem-solving across technological glitches was reacted to anxiously. Consequently, valuable hands-on opportunities for computer literacy through collaborative problem solving were missed.
Owston, R. Wideman, H. Lotherington, H. Sinitskaya Ronda, N. & Brown, C. (2007). Computer game development as a literacy activity. Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, Technical Report 2007-3.
The participating teachers recommended the creation of an online forum for teachers who used games in the classroom where they could share observations, problems, solutions, and responses to technical problems. Greater technological support and pedagogical freedom is clearly needed for teachers to utilize online sites, such as the game shell, to greater advantage in their learning contexts. Schools and school boards need to be aware of their roles in facilitating conversations about and supporting use of digital technologies in the classroom. Teachers need opportunities to explore teaching possibilities without fear of technical collapse. These opportunities can be facilitated by a more supportive infrastructure both online between schools, and in terms of human resources within schools. Facilitating collaboration between teachers can support learning how to handle some of the technical support stumbling blocks that Ms Green, in particular, faced in her school context.
Ms Brown utilized technology naturally in her introduction to the game site and the unit exercises by demonstrating game access and question inputting on her laptop projected to a screen in the classroom. She asked children to bookmark the website on their laptops. Children were expected to know the site URL, class username and password. The teacher recorded the website address on the whiteboard behind the screen, and asked children to save their individual games immediately to prevent losing questions to game or computer crashes.
New media have invited an extensive range of literacy practices that are growing in sophistication with Web 2.0 interactive possibilities. Indeed the cultural reach of the digital world now includes ontologies such as Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) in which people engage in a variety of social pursuits in parallel social institutions, from schools to gambling casinos, using avatars. As the gap between social and school literacy worlds widens, it is critical that teachers, researchers and educational policy makers work towards revitalizing formal education towards social relevance.
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2006). New literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Maidenhead, Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
In Ms Green’s class, the game creation process was very linear. The children prepared their game questions on paper in pairs allocated by the teacher. They found their way onto the game site following blackboard instructions, and experienced myriad problems that the teacher answered to individually. Though these middle class children chatted about their home computers and digital practices, including games, they manifested poor computer literacy in the classroom, experiencing problems with the URL, and common functions, such as how to save, edit and find their way around the game site.
Though both schools were relatively new, each being less than 10 years old with good access to technological equipment, the computer equipment was approached, accessed and utilized quite differently in each school which, in turn, appeared to affect pedagogical practices and learning experiences. There were noteworthy differences in each teacher’s integration of technology in professional practices and classroom pedagogy, her comfort with the available machines, and her attitude to exploratory learning on the part of the children.
This project missed the opportunity to emphasize an important aspect of digital literacies: the understanding of the public nature of the Internet. There are important implications for how students approach the public Internet. In an age of online social networking, where young people are perceived as being at risk of divulging too much of their personal information (Rosenblum, 2007), opportunities to explore the public nature of the Internet sites and how to approach them become invaluable for media awareness and safe use.
Marshall, C. & Rossman, G.B. (2006). Designing qualitative research (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge.
The case study was instructive in identifying the contextual supports and pedagogical resources needed for efficient utilization of an online game shell as a pedagogical tool to advance children’s curricular and literacy learning. Online board game production was not seen to strongly influence traditional literacy skills in the form that it took in this research study (Owston et al. 2007); one reason for this is hypothesized to be the structure of the online games, which asked for yes-no and multiple choice questions, rather than higher order questions. Nonetheless, games creation was seen to be a promising means of fostering digital, cultural and multilingual literacies in both children and teachers, providing a useful, if challenging learning experience for participating teachers and students alike (Lotherington & Sinitskaya Ronda, 2007).
The purpose of conducting the case study was to draw a nuanced picture of the implementation and development of board game construction and play as geography and literacy learning in two different school contexts. Yin (1993) describes case studies as “the method of choice when the phenomenon under study is not readily distinguishable from its context” (p. 3). We were interested in the teachers’ reception to and implementation of the experimental geography unit in their respective classrooms, particularly their approach to and utilization of technology and their introduction of game programming and play as curricular learning. We also wanted to capture the children’s responses to the unit, and to observe the kinds of literacy skills being reinforced in game unit activities, which would add contextual and procedural perspectives to statistical test results in the multisite experimental study.
The mobile labs at NPS and SPS made for an interesting comparison. The mobile laptop lab at SPS was a mixture of worn Dell Latitude machines and a few old HP computers. The children recognized the different power cords, and utilized the lab with great familiarity. By the end of the project, the lab had been refurbished with small and flexible Acer notebooks, which the children quickly adapted to and were observed to be using with occasional keys missing from the keyboard: well-loved machines.
Lyle, S. (2000). Enhancing literacy through geography in upper primary classrooms. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 9 (2), 141- 156.
Blanton, W. Greene, M. & Cole, M. (1999). Computer mediation for learning and play. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 43 (3), 272-78.
Lyle, S. (1999). An investigation of pupil perceptions of mixed-ability grouping to enhance literacy in children aged 9-10. Educational Studies, 25 (3), 283-296.
A most interesting unintended learning opportunity arose with a game bug: Mother Goose was available only partly in English with French and Spanish variants that baffled, amused, then, interestingly, engaged the children in unintended learning (see Figure 3). They used a variety of strategies to figure out cognates for facile; facil [easy] and difficile; dificil [difficult], and were found to enjoy the experience though it had eventuated from an incomplete translation – essentially a game glitch. One little girl at NPS, where there was relatively little cultural diversity, had been very quiet up till the Mother Goose/Jeu de l’oie/Juego de la oca segment, when she suddenly became very talkative using to her group’s advantage the Romanian she spoke at home to form cognates in these fellow Romance languages.
Heather Lotherington
Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda
The research mission of the overarching study (Owston et al. 2007) aimed to combine the benefits of game play and game development described in the literature in an investigation of what learning and literacy development opportunities were offered through having students create and play their own games. By giving students a digital tool to develop their games, the research team envisioned a platform for them to engage with curricular content and gain skills in manipulating language and digital media while tapping into the appeal of digital play to create a sense of ownership, pride, and enjoyment from game play.
In this system, game developers have the option of changing the feedback a player receives when a question is answered correctly or incorrectly. They can also add links to web or textbook resources in the questions. Figure 1 illustrates a question creation page.
A comparative case study design was used to document the experimental game implementation in two public elementary schools located in the York Region District School Board. Two Grade 4 classes were studied to capture the process of implementation of an online computer game unit to teach Grade 4 geography in two different school contexts; this unit was being tested for effects on literacy development in a multisite experimental study in nine public schools across southwestern Ontario (Owston et al. 2007). The two schools were taking part in the quantitative study; both were in the experimental condition.
Both schools chose to be in this study because they were predisposed to the use of technology in learning, though SPS, as a pioneer in technology-enhanced learning (TEL), had teachers with greater experience in technology-infused pedagogical practice, and better organized in-house technical support. SPS’s deeper historical connection to TEL was obvious in Ms Brown’s teaching environment, which was technologically immersive.
Squire, K. D. (2008). Video-game literacy: A literacy of expertise. In J. Coiro, C. Lankshear, M. Knobel, and D. Leu (Eds.), Handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 635-670). New York, NY: Erlbaum.