Interest amongst educators in gamification and game-based learning is on the upswing. However, designing a compelling product that makes a meaningful impact on learning, and proving its role in doing so, is no simple proposition.

Dan Schwartz established his Awesomely Adaptive and Advanced Learning and Behavior Lab — usually just called AAALab — to advance these efforts. Here's a quick snapshot of what's going on at his shop, where he and his team of researchers are developing and testing these education technologies and theories of learning.

Three projects out of Schwartz’ Lab — Stats Invaders, Critter Corral, and Teachable Agents — are being used to clarify whether games can develop informal experiences that prepare students for learning and how digital technologies that provide specific feedback and social interaction can teach and motivate.

AAALab’s Stats Invaders, a game in which users face alien attacks occurring along a variety of probability distributions, has contributed to the research about when to use gameplay. Intended to complement a class, Stats Invaders offers students experiences and opportunities to develop intuitions about statistical concepts — a domain in which many people have misconceptions — in preparation for learning explanatory content with a teacher.

“Here the attempt is to look at what games are good at: building up lots of experiences and interactivity,” said Schwartz. “We don’t ruin the game by dropping in a paragraph about ‘this is called the normal distribution.’ We save that for the school part. By developing the experience, the debriefing that happens afterwards is much more powerful than if we had just said ‘these are the rules.’”

In order to test this theory on the role of the videogame, AAALab conducted a study with several conditions, including (1) videogame only, (2) reading passage only, (3) neither, and (4) both.

They found that Stats Invaders prepared students to learn about statistics; students who played the game and then read a passage about statistics (4), showed much greater learning than students in the videogame only (1) and passage only (2) conditions.

“The game gave students normative experiences and lifted out patterns in ways for them to experience it, which in turn prepared them to learn from formal instruction on the topic,” Schwartz said.

Whereas Stats Invader is intended to complement a class, Critter Corral, a game designed by AAALab’s Kristen Blair, is designed for standalone play.

Critter Corral teaches early mathematical concepts to preschoolers, and is unique in the particular brand of feedback it provides where, if users make a mistake, they get to see how far off they are. (Contrastingly, most games for early learners allow unlimited guesses and give no performance feedback beyond ‘wrong’ or ‘right’).

Students in 14 Transitional Kindergarten classes in San Francisco Unified School District are using Critter Corral on iPads for a few minutes each day, as part of AAALab’s research on whether the game and its feedback approach can help children develop a flexible understanding of, and see relationships between different kinds of quantities. The game is described in a story on the Stanford Graduate School of Education website.

Preliminary results indicate that Critter Corral is helping student progress (assessed on an external measure).

Schwartz said that he wishes that there was more software like this for kids. “A lot of the stuff that’s out there just isn’t very good pedagogically,” he explained. “This is a really adoptable model, and the idea is that if students play it in preschool, it will really give them a leg up with the formal instruction they receive in Kindergarten.”

Within their efforts to examine social foundations of learning, AAALab has developed Teachable Agents, an online software that students use to teach a computer character by creating concept maps.

The Agent then answers questions posed to it by traversing the links and nodes of its concept map, while the path of reasoning used is animated in order to visualize its model of thinking and provide feedback for students. They apply this feedback to revise their Agent’s “brain,” who can then compete online against other Agents.

By organizing, observing, and refining their Agent’s knowledge and reasoning patterns within the social role of “teacher,” students build their own ability to integrate concepts and draw inferences.

Teachable Agents can be used with any curriculum and is designed to be a complement to most models of instruction.

AAALab has worked with the Menlo Park School District to use Teachable Agents with their Full Option Science System (FOSS) hands-on science curriculum.

Using Teachable Agents was found to improve children’s scientific reasoning; students teaching their Agents within the FOSS curriculum performed better on both FOSS assessments and external measures of student learning than those teaching their peers or those in other control conditions. These students were also more prepared to learn new science content from regular instruction, even when they were no longer using the software.

Teachable Agents demonstrates how a learning technology can motivate students while being rooted within teacher practice.

“Kids love it,” Schwartz said. “The teachers can use it the ways they want. It’s really a good technology, and in every study it has worked well.”

Through their design of and research on digital games and learning technologies such as Stats Invaders, Critter Corral and Teachable Agents, AAALab is clarifying whether, when, and how gameplay can provide informal experiences, foundational understanding and social interactions that prepare and teach students.

“We view ourselves as starters,” said Schwartz. “We develop ideas and models that others can use.”

To learn more, visit aaalab.stanford.edu.

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This article is reprinted from Digital Initiatives, a GSE newsletter produced by the Office of Innovation and Technology.