In hindsight, I have to hand it to my parents. Maybe they knew what they were doing by not snagging a game console when I was younger, and instead feeding me a steady drip of educational games. Guiding the ClueFinders to thwart the vile dragon Mathra or stop an ancient Egyptian apocalypse, helping Botley the robot pull his robot friends back from the far-flung annals of time, or even just collecting stamps with CJ the frog. The ClueFinders and various mascots of JumpStart helped give me a weird leg up in grade school, whether I realized it or not.

But thinking back, many years out of grade school and way too deep into a love of video games, I got to wondering, was there any specific rhyme or reason to games like that? Turns out, yeah, these educational games are a bit more than just rote drills and challenges you could find on your homework sheets, splashed against a colorful, interactive backdrop. To figure out the full extent, I’m going to look back at my old educational video games (referred to as Edutainment from here on), the JumpStart series and the ClueFinders (grade-level entries only), to find out what makes them tick both as video games and as educational tools. By examining both aspects of Edutainment separately, we can see the potential they not only had back in the/my Golden Age of Education Games, but the medium’s potential going forward.

Parallels in Plain Sight — Educational Games as Games

Mechanics Make the Game

The most important part of any game, above story, above characters, above the neat little doodads players can acquire in-game, is the actual element of interactivity, or of gameplay. It is, after all, what differentiates a game from other forms of media. Plass and co. (2015) theorize that, in Edutainment, “activities can primarily have a learning focus (learning mechanics) or an assessment focus (assessment mechanics),” although, “in many cases, they focus on both.” I’ve read this as Edutainment having a twofold goal for players: learning how to play the game (understanding the material AND the game mechanics), and learning how to win the game (showing you understand the material).

Plass and co. go on to say that “the game mechanic represents the essential behavior that is linked to learning or assessment activity in a game.” To win, you must both understand how to play to select the right answer (mechanics), and select the right answer by knowing how to play (assessment). You can shoot marbles on the playground math activity, but if you keep shooting the wrong marble to solve the equation, the gameplay element doesn’t matter, you have to shoot the right marble. Players don’t normally acquire points for wrong answers. Likewise, if you can’t manipulate the game to shoot the right marble, the game will never know you have that knowledge.

Luckily, most Edutainment games from my time were played with a mouse, and occasionally graduated into an arrow key/spacebar control scheme. But even if they’re simple and rudimentary to control, Edutainment games aren’t there to challenge players on gameplay mechanics and mastery. They’re there to reinforce educational practices. By lowering the skill barrier to interact with the game and still making the activities “games” of various sorts, Edutainment games can lean on the advantages of gameplay elements while maximizing educational exposure and challenge to players.

The short version: gameplay makes learning less boring, and learning makes gameplay more accessible than it would be in traditional video games!

Continue?

Ask anyone who’s played an arcade game in the last few decades, or anyone who’s picked up a side-scrolling Super Mario game since the 1980s, there’s always a mention of “Hi Scores,” or tracking one’s score somehow. Nowadays, there are achievements, trophies, leaderboards in all sorts of different games. Objectives push players forward, whether plot-related or not: collect these things, overcome this obstacle, rescue these people. Even in-game, there is something daunting, but ever so satisfying, about filling out a vast upgrade tree for one’s player character. Games motivate players in a myriad of different ways, sometimes changing and adapting with the times, sometimes carving out new ways to do so, but they always push players forward.

Edutainment games do likewise. From as far back as JumpStart 1st Grade, players collect points by playing games and interacting with the world, which eventually become designer milk caps, the hot commodity of a mid-90s 1st grade classroom. Similarly, JumpStart 2nd Grade uses points to build up to a stamp collection, and challenges players to receive postcards from pen pals across the fifty United States.

In 3rd and 4th Grade, players must accumulate enough points to progress in the story, and even as a younger learner, I remember there being something uniquely satisfying about watching those numbers go up as I solved math problems. As the grade levels ascend, motivation and progression becomes more and more tied to the story and its objectives; solve this problem, advance the story towards its conclusion. The ClueFinders series, similarly, was all about overcoming obstacles and challenges in pursuit of an endgoal and the end of a narrative.

Plass and co (2015) surmise that Edutainment titles “have been shown to be able to motivate learners to stay engaged over long periods through a series of game features that are of a motivational nature.” By using these different motivators, Edutainment motivates and similarly incentivizes players to keep playing by tapping into their gamer brains, however young they may be. Numbers go up, rewards get collected, story progresses; these cover both intrinsic and extrinsic forms of reward, although the case can be made that Edutainment games excel with extrinsic rewards (points, in-game rewards; things that have no effect on gameplay).

Intrinsic rewards are more akin to power-ups or abilities, things that do have an effect on gameplay. In games designed to challenge, teach, and reinforce educational topics, having power-ups might be more counterintuitive; it wouldn’t be educationally helpful to just be able to blast problems away. All the same, Edutainment games maximize their appeal to players by dangling the potential for (digital) rewards in front of them and incentivizing them along the path, same as we do in traditional video games…just with more math problems.

Once upon an Edutaining opportunity…

From a young age all the way through our lives, we as people are fascinated by stories. Plots and stories as a potential motivation for players in video games, and are reported to lead to increased positive arousal (mental arousal, of course) compared to games without narrative. Plots and narrative have had their place in Edutainment, as well; from 3rd grade onward, JumpStart and ClueFinders provided adventures with a narrative to follow, instead of the simpler “play activities, get points, get rewards” model of earlier grade levels. Plass and co (2015) note the following:

“Narratives provide contextual information for learning, connecting rules of play, characters, tasks, events, and incentives. They have a strong motivational function by contributing to a game’s stickiness, that is, the desire it generates for people to return to play.”

Aside from serving as a motivation on their own, narratives can tie all sorts of different aspects of a game together, even Edutainment. It answers why players are doing what they’re doing, who they’re doing it with, what they must do…let’s look at JumpStart 3rd Grade as an example.

The rules of play are to venture throughout Mystery Mountain, collecting mission clues to rescue robots that have been sent through time to alter history. Players are accompanied by Botley the robot, one of the robots not subject to this chronological catastrophe. Each task or activity is relegated to a different themed area: the kitchen works with fractions, the lab tests reading comprehension and science facts, and the training course uses logic and programming puzzles. The story’s antagonist will occasionally pop up and taunt the player and Botley in the most consistent set of events in the game. Lastly, it incentivizes players by giving them a goal to work toward: rescue twenty-five robots from different points in history and, in doing so, re-rewrite history back to normal.

Green and Brock (2000) posit that the amount a student is absorbed in a narrative would affect the amount they were persuaded by such a narrative. Granted, their research was on written narratives, but a narrative is still a narrative; who hasn’t entered a flow state when watching a movie or playing a game that they enjoyed? Consumers of narrative find themselves absorbed and, in the case of Edutainment, can find themselves more motivated to learn or attempt the material as a result of their absorption.

Lastly, Jimenez (2016) conducted a study of fun with educational games, using two conditions: Characters, which had characters interacting with players through a story as they solved problems; and Abstract, which presented problems in an interactive, albeit more narratively-sterile, setting. Jimenez found that “students who were in the Characters condition had significantly higher ratings of fun than students in the Abstract condition,” suggesting that a story seems “to make an educational game more fun, which may lead to more engagement and motivation.” Plots hook us, draw us in, and make Edutainment’s learning process more fun and engaging than it would be without the plot.

The narrative pervades so much that we enjoy. It is central to our society, our stories, our essence as people. Even for something like Edutainment, narrative encompasses the who, what, where, why, and how all together, forming a singular, cohesive experience for players. It makes sense of the goal at hand and how you can achieve it, even in small part, by solving school-style problems in wacky ways.

A Character Is You!

In any story, game or otherwise, there are characters. In games specifically, there is generally a “player character,” or an avatar that players control in some form or fashion. Sometimes, characters and player characters overlap, giving players established characters to control: Super Mario’s eponymous Mario, The Legend of Zelda’s warrior Link, or Metroid’s bounty hunter Samus Aran. Other games lean more heavily into the “player character” dynamic: this gives players a slate upon which to impress themselves, whether through narrative choices, mechanical build, character creation, or a combination of all three: the Dragonborn in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or the Warden/Inquisitor in the Dragon Age series. It’s easy to overlook the Edutainment characters as simply mascots, but they pull important duty as characters all their own.

JumpStart games were never at a loss for characters. Frankie the Dog would move around the 1st grade school with you, and guide you through its many puzzles and challenges. CJ the Frog and Edison the Firefly took you under their wing in the 2nd grade as you explored the caves and activities around and under the school. Botley the Robot enlisted your help set the timeline straight after meddling from a bratty 3rd grader. But they were more than mascots or screen-fillers; these characters acknowledged you, the player, as you ventured through their various activities.

McClarty and co (2012) believe that “having students experience the game firsthand, as if they were truly in the situation or by having a tutor speak directly with them, students were able to learn more than being in neutral, 3rd person situations.” It’s the same science one can see in TV shows like Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer: engaging directly with viewers (or players) yields more involvement and investment. In the case of games, it yields a higher level of involvement to engage in the activities, because the characters are encouraging you.

As time went on and players graduate to more advanced grade levels, the characters start to step back from the player. Flap the Bat was always around in 4th grade, but would only show up to teach the mechanics of an activity or when called, unlike the earlier characters, who were always around and visible to help. The separation was fully realized in 5th grade, where players were no longer “themselves,” but instead controlled the character Jo Hammett as she skateboarded around Hooverville; Jo never acknowledged the player directly, instead speaking in monologues, like a detective would in a mystery. Though this character design may clash a bit with McClarty and co’s research, it picks up the slack from the narrative department (there’s a mad scientist trying to blow up buildings. We’ll want to stop that). The ClueFinders were more player-characters, as well; they never acknowledge the players themselves, but pull more weight from the narrative end of things as characters with goals, generally rescuing someone from their group or family.

The characters in JumpStart grew with and to accommodate their players as they, too, grew, eventually handing the reins to players. Moving from 4th to 5th grade (in my day) was like a graduation of sorts, from one form of storytelling and independence to another.

A Brief Note on Difficulty

Difficulty will be covered more exhaustively in the next section, but note: games, especially since becoming commonplace in households, tend to have the option of adjusting difficulty. Easy, Medium, Hard are the old standbys, and Edutainment games use this to full effect, but on a per-activity basis. Players start at a baseline difficulty, and can increase or decrease it based on how much trouble they’re having or how much they’re burning through an activity. Oftentimes, to revisit motivation and incentive from earlier, higher difficulties yield more points, yield more in-game goodies! A number of traditional video games are only just adopting this dynamic, that of allowing players to adjust their difficulty partway through a game…but that’s a topic for another day, and another set of ramblings. But all the same, Edutainment reflect difficulty tiers in traditional video games, giving those experiencing mastery a bigger challenge and the chance for more rewards, and likewise able to adapt if a player is having difficulty with a section.

The Rest of the World

Visual Aesthetic Design (or simply “aesthetic”) in Edutainment, per Plass and co (2015), “constitutes the information representation of the multimedia learning aspects of the game. It is also linked to the narrative of the game by expressing its aesthetics.” Put more simply: first, it visualizes the learning challenges throughout the game as more than problems to be solved; second, it helps define and cement the narrative through use of visuals. Using JumpStart 3rd Grade again, the game takes place within Mystery Mountain, a high-tech, science-centric inventor’s dream world, occupied by any number of robots and androids. The general aesthetic marries the natural formation of the mountain with the scientific and technological augmentations made by its residents, reinforcing the high-tech, high-science plot of “we need to get these items to activate a time machine and pull these robots back from messing up the timeline.”

Similarly, the aesthetic pervades the gameplay, as well: exploring and manipulating the many rooms, galleries, and labs throughout the mountain in order to triumph over their challenges and acquire critical items or points. There is no point where the game simply tells players, “hey, solve this problem because you gotta,” there’s a reason for doing so. Saving a clue from getting sucked into a black hole, recharging the mountain’s power supply, feeding a robot friend in exchange for his help, needing to open doors, all of it is presented visually in the game as a challenge to overcome, not just drills of problems.

Musical score and sound design are also big contributors to games, educational and traditional. Plass and co (2015) note sound design’s major boons in Edutainment as to “provide background sounds that are often used to direct the player’s attention to specific important events or moments in the game, signal the presence of danger or opportunity, induce positive or negative emotions, or acknowledge the success or failure of a specific task.” Sometimes, it’s as simple as a positive-sounding “ding” on a correct answer, or a buzzer for a wrong answer. The “hooo”-ing of ghosts as they chase you through a maze, or the skittering of ice beetles signal a threat or danger, something to either avoid or defeat (depending on the activity’s mechanics). The music composition, similarly, may get players amped up for a time-sensitive activity, forebode some kind of threat, help to reinforce the aesthetic of setting, or be absent completely, if a situation calls for it.

Voice acting is also a crucial aspect of sound design, both in games and Edutainment. As noted when talking about characters, having characters talk to and refer to the players directly helps to draw them into their learning potential. But, as can be expected, not just any voice will do. Characters interacting with (or being controlled by) players should have a relatable quality to them, be this in tone, gender, or acted age. The mascots in JumpStart are often portrayed as older guides to the players, dropping down to the player level by the time they play as Jo Hammett in 5th Grade. The older guides have an air of knowledge about them, but approachability, as well. They are smart and able to help, but not authoritative. With Jo and other characters, like the ClueFinders, they are given personalities that shine through in their voice acting, establishing them as believable and (for a school-age player) compelling characters. Another phenomenal example of voice acting (and acting in general) is Lynne Thigpen’s Chief of ACME in the Carmen Sandiego series; a demanding, but encouraging, authority figure for players, celebrating in their victory and picking them back up in their defeats. Voice acting, in an experience full of such interactions, is crucial.

Lastly, there is something to be said for the non-game, non-educational elements of Edutainment games, largely the earlier grade levels: the exploratory elements. Other games catered towards children at that era (think Humongous Entertainment’s lineup: Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, etc.) prided themselves on the world as a whole being interactable. Just click on something on the screen, and something might happen! The results often silly and had nothing to do with advancing the game, but for a curious and inquisitive player, they’re a fun break from the usual. They encourage and reward exploration and curiosity. Even in Edutainment games, it’s important to consider that not everything needs to be, or should be, educational all the time. Learners need a break. Why else would we have recess in school?

Game Over

As an audience and consumers, we can fail to notice certain aspects of our consumed media. Long takes, lighting, angles in TV shows and movies, even word choice and sentence structure in books. Same with games; it can be easy to get immersed and lose oneself in the atmosphere, the overall narrative, the aesthetic, and the gameplay elements, and lose sight of the minutiae of what makes it properly tick, what makes it all flow together. It’s all the same with Edutainment titles (or, at least, well-designed Edutainment titles). It’s easy to overlook those cohesive elements when players are being bombarded with parts-of-speech matching and geographic trivia, but if those elements weren’t tying the experience together, the titles wouldn’t hold players’ attentions. Short version: games need and thrive on certain elements to be games, and by using those, Edutainment titles put a foot in the door to engage young players and learners.

Individualized Experience — Education Games as Education

The Golden Ratio

When I attended college, I was in a secondary education program for most of said program. If I can boil down everything I learned in that set of classes, it would be that education thrives on smaller student-to-teacher ratios. The fewer students each teacher needs to work with at a time, the more individualized their attention can become. This (theoretically) gives teachers a chance to zero in on student’s particular learning quirks and struggles to help them excel as much as they can. As it stands in my own K-12 education (and many others’ in more recent years), we have yet to start properly applying that dynamic, forcing educators to be more generalized in the hopes that the skills and information sticks with the largest number of people.

Edutainment games are a tricky alternative: on the one hand, they lack authentic and personal human elements that (in theory) make in-person learning so well-suited for younger students. On the other hand, they excel at the one student-to-one teacher concept. This is an experience designed for one learner at a time, through difficulty levels, engagement, and individual attention.

Assessment and Guidance

Plass and co. (2015) lay out four functions of games, each describing what learning goal the content of a title covers: preparation for future learning; teaching new knowledge and skills; practicing and reinforcing existing knowledge and skills; and developing 21st-century skills. Most of the Edutainment titles I’ve encountered tend towards the latter three elements, and heaviest on the second and third. Even behind the veneer of plot and progress, Edutainment games are still very much about the transfer and reinforcement of knowledge and skills. Activities, fun as they have the potential to be, are still drills in a particular subject area.

Just as one would experience in traditional schooling, assessment comes into play with these activities, but not so much in the traditional letter grade or percentages of right & wrong. McClarty and co (2012) touch on assessment, which “occurs as the game engine evaluates players’ actions and provides immediate feedback. Players make progress or they don’t.” One can see this simpler style of assessment in the noises that often play in Edutainment activities; affirmative “ding” noises for right answers, negative buzzing noises for wrong answers, or the guide characters commenting on both right and wrong answers. Plass and co. (2015) elaborate, discussing Dynamic Assessment, that “games for learning are often designed intentionally in ways that require players to engage in specific activities that will provide information about the learner’s knowledge or skills.” If a player is having trouble with a particular activity, the game may constructively intervene, whether to provide assistance and explanations outright (as in JumpStart games), or remind players that they can reach out for help (the ClueFinders’ video phone). Again, the perks of being able to individualize learning through games is that the player gets their own personalized learning experience, even if they have to stop and have concepts reinforced to progress.

Plass and co (2015) go on to note the Cognitive Foundations of Game-Based Learning: Situatedness and Transfer of Learning. Concentrating on Situatedness, Edutainment is also perfect for the age-old student question of “When will I ever have to use this?” Situatedness as a foundation is described as follows: “Through games, learning can take place in a meaningful and relevant context by providing information at the precise moment when it will be the most useful to the learner, for example, by giving information needed by learners to solve a problem at the time they are trying to solve it.” Situatedness can pop up through the aforementioned Dynamic Assessment elements, or (especially in earlier grade level titles) the explanation of learning elements. The most salient example is in long addition: characters will explain when to carry numbers over, why they do that, and move onto the next column, guiding players as needed until they understand. As an aside, this was a fun surprise when I revisited my old Edutainment titles; I had to revert back to an older style of learning, the basics, instead of my angry-old-man mental addition.

That learning information, whether in the form of teaching or guidance, is provided contextually, only as players encounter the need for it. This prevents them from being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information the game (or the educational system at large) wants them to retain at once.

“Show Your Work”

Though the bane of many math-focused learners, earlier grade level Edutainment titles rely on players, in a sense, showing their work. They move piece-by-piece, not necessarily solving an entire problem at once, but solving its parts before it comes together as a whole. Long addition, again, is the most salient example: the game asks you to solve for each column, not the entire problem. Noemí and Máximo (2014) discuss this concept of step-by-step tutoring, and its importance: “first because it facilitates the learning process, secondly because tutoring guides users in fulfilling their aims during the game, and thirdly because it provides a monitoring mechanism for preventing inappropriate behavior on the part of users.”

As strangely phrased as it is, the “inappropriate behavior” could be something like using a calculator to solve the problems. The game, as noted, can effectively force players to slow down and take each part one step at a time. It’s not the solution, but knowing to get to it that matters the most in such teachings.

Difficulty: Challenge, Scaffolds, and Failure

Difficulty and challenge are the key to an inclusive educational experience, full stop. Too often in general education, students are either left behind as the average learning speed overtakes them, or they’re left to stagnate as the average learning speed trails far behind them. Difficulty bridges the gap between those who need more guidance and those who need more challenge. Difficulty and challenge options make education more equitable for everyone.

To explore difficulty in more tradition terms, consider the gold standard of adaptive difficulty in traditional video games: Capcom’s Resident Evil 4, in which players control a member of the Secret Service on an assignment to rescue the President’s daughter from parasitic zombies (and other things). When players begin, there is only a standard difficulty, no sliders, no options. But the game adapts to the player’s skill level behind the scenes: if the player is having trouble on a particular section, fewer enemies appear, they wait around longer (allowing for easier shooting), and are generally less aggressive. Conversely, if players are burning through the challenges it sets forth, RE4 ramps up enemy aggression, the damage they deal, and the number of enemies players must contend with.

Now, translate that same dynamic to Edutainment games. Plass and co. (2015) describe adaptivity as “the capability of the game to engage each learner in a way that reflects [their] specific situation. This can be related to the learners’ current level of knowledge, to cognitive abilities, to the learners’ emotions, or to a range of other variables.” As players demonstrate their respective skill levels in challenges, the game may adapt itself one way or another; lessening the difficulty to ensure that struggling students understand the core elements first and foremost, or ramping up the difficulty when they’ve demonstrated mastery over a certain level.

Traditionally, though, the older titles are locked into the Easy/Medium/Hard trichotomy. This still leaves room for a learner to adjust the difficulty to their needs, if the game won’t adjust itself. However, if you ask some gamers, lowering the difficulty is a sign of weakness; they would rather struggle than concede. Similarly, if you ask a student point-blank, “do you understand?” and leave it in their hands to adjust their own difficulty, they’re just as likely to struggle in a position they’re not equipped for or, worse, stop trying. Luckily, most Edutainment titles start off on a low (or the lowest) difficulty for all activities and challenges, escalating when players decide to challenge themselves further or when they’ve demonstrated mastery in a certain difficulty (for example, in JumpStart 2nd Grade, I watched as my difficulty icon went from “Scout” to “Explorer” when I completed an activity with no errors and little effort). Edutainment titles also permit some leeway for students still struggling on that standard difficulty, allowing the ability to decrease the difficulty lower than the starting point.

In traditional education, scaffolding is a method of a teacher demonstrating how to solve a problem, and then allowing learners to solve the problem with support only as needed. Plass and co. (2015) go on to discuss scaffolding and relevant feedback in Edutainment, that “appropriate support is given in areas of game play where the player is having trouble, thereby providing dynamic feedback to scaffold learning of game play.” Edutainment games, and arguably games in general, rely on scaffolding: presenting a problem and instructions on how to solve it, and then loosing players on a similar problem to solve, providing support as needed. In traditional games, they just call it a tutorial.

In the search for one’s individual challenge level, one must come to grips with the certainty of failure. Eventually, players will hit a wall that they can’t overcome with their skill set, and they will fail. Plass and co. (2015) posit the concept of Graceful Failure as a more positive alternative to a red-marker “See Me” on a bad assignment. Failure, as they describe it, is both an expected and necessary step in the learning process (no matter what traditional education might have had you believe). Games, both educational and otherwise, can also operate from a place of lowered consequences, which encourages risk-taking and experimentation, elaborated on by Pivec and Kearney (2007). Whereas risk-taking in traditional education might result in a lower grade, risk-taking in Edutainment means exploration, trying new things, finding your way individually. In granting learners a safe and graceful way to fail, they put more control back into the hands of the player, encouraging them to persevere in a way they might not otherwise get in a traditional classroom. In terms of the games, players don’t suffer point penalties, or negative ramifications to the story. They just try again. Safe and graceful.

Lastly, there is the concept of mastery or, at the very least, comprehension in Edutainment games. McClarty and co. (2012) note that “in traditional classroom settings, a student that does not master a concept could be left with a gap in their knowledge foundation that challenges later attempts to build to more complex concepts. In contrast, digital games inherently force the player to master a concept in order to advance (e.g., the double jump with a dash in mid air to get across the pit of lava). Players are able to repeat the same scenario until they master this concept.” Similarly, through the use of Graceful Failure, individualized difficulty, and scaffolding, Edutainment games force the need to master into its design. Many activities (and, as such, educational topics, like fractions or environmental science) require some degree of success in order to fully “win” the game. Mission-specific clues or necessary items are hidden behind certain activities, or a pen pal is asking a question you can only get the answer to by overcoming certain challenges. In effect, players are free to play around in other areas of the game, but they are locked out of progressing until they can demonstrate some grasp on whatever they’re struggling with. In time, they’ll have demonstrated a comprehension, if not a mastery, of all the subject matter the game has to offer.

Malcolm Bauer, former professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, notes that “…rewards [can] go way beyond simple stars. Variation can be a reward for good work. Better questions, in other words, and more difficult tasks.” Edutainment thrives in its variety and its individuality. Learners can take whatever time or resources they need, in any number of subjects, to gain an understanding without fear of being left behind by the collective.

Final Bell

Edutainment games, as far as I recall and have experienced more recently, are all about building up students and laying solid foundations. Scaffolding, adaptive difficulty, and breaking down each part of the target information all come together for a solid learning experience, but what keeps separating Edutainment from traditional education is the grading report. Players are not given letter grades because Edutainment holds itself as a long-term process.

Students mastery of a subject is given in terms of their successful attempts against their total attempts. Even if a learner is absolutely tanking in some particular subject, they’re never a failing student. The game just continues to shift to accommodate that student’s needs, so as to steadily narrow that gap. There are a number of things that Edutainment games flat-out cannot replicate in a game that need to be covered in traditional education (longform writing chief among them), but traditional education can take some pointers from these games, as well.

Good, Smart Fun: Educational Games as Education and Games

Sawyer (2007) says that a serious game (the same that I’ve referred to as Edutainment) must include two dimensions: the serious dimension and the playful dimension. If Edutainment games are solid, both as games and as educational ventures separately, that leaves us with the blending of the two: the true Edutainment/serious game. The combination of both strong gameplay (for their target audience) and strong educational qualities come together to create something that may last much longer in a learner’s mind than the thrill of a traditional game or the lessons they receive in school.

At school, students’ lives are planned out by the minute. Different periods, different subjects, all scheduled out. The rigidity can be good in some senses, but Edutainment titles give learners more slack in their approach. Players may have long-term goals they want to achieve in-game that require them to complete a certain activity/subject, but they are not forced to do so if they don’t want to. If a player is more interested in something else, whatever their reason, they can partake in that! McClarty & co. (2012) discuss how this gives students control and choice over their learning, a sense of agency and autonomy. Almost all of the JumpStart titles (1st to 4th Grade) and all of the graded ClueFinders titles allow players to play in any activity (and subject area) they want to, whether freely in-game or as a separate Practice Mode. Especially for younger learners, it can be paramount to help them feel like they have some degree of control in their lives.

That autonomy comes back to the difficulty settings in such titles; players find their ideal experience by adjusting the difficulty according to their skill level. McClarty & co. go on to note that “well-designed games, as with well-designed education experiences, are challenging but achievable.” The rewards of education, of a great many games, come from the struggle of challenge giving way to the release of achievement. Too difficult, and it feels unfair. Too easy, and it feels unearned. As previously noted, this is where we lose any number of students in traditional education: they either can’t keep up with or are bored by the collective speed. This autonomy in Edutainment titles could be something (a small thing, but still something) that can keep such students sustained in the grand scheme of traditional education.

Noemí and Máximo (2014) run parallel to this point of a player/learner-centric experience: by making the learning experience such a positive one, Edutainment titles greatly increase the potential for training and learning. By introducing educational elements in simple, dynamic ways and “turning them into the protagonists of their own learning processes,” learners are more apt to engage with and learn from the titles. They continue, “the aim of serious games go beyond pure amusement: they seek to be a mechanism that reinforces learning in a dynamic, interactive, motivating, and entertaining way.” The hook is the gameplay and narrative elements, and the line is the educational elements along the way, combined in this constructive way.

Kasvi (2000) lists seven requirements suggested by Donald Norman (1993) in Things that make us smarter. They are as follows:

1. Provide a high intensity of interaction and feedback;

2. Have specific goals and established procedures;

3. Be motivational;

4. Provide a continual feeling of challenge, not too difficult to be frustrating nor too easy to create boredom;

5. Provide a sense of direct engagement on the task involved;

6. Provide the appropriate tools that fit the task; and

7. Avoid distractions and disruptions that destroy the subjective experience.

After everything discussed in this project, you may agree with Kasvi’s take that video games in general fulfill all of these requirements, and that they “satisfy them better than most other mediums.” The difficulty is in developing a learning curriculum appropriate for different schooling levels. It’s in a lot of Edutainment titles: JumpStart 2nd Grade; ClueFinders 5th Grade. The titles are designed for a snapshot point in a learner’s educational journey, not designed to accompany them from grade level to grade level. One can argue that a developer (like JumpStart or The Learning Company) can accompany the learner from earlier grade levels on up as they progress, providing varying titles as the learners advance in grades (and, in a gameplay sense, growing with the students). To date (as far as I know), there is yet to be an all-encompassing, monolithic Edutainment title that attracts learners in a multi-grade spectrum (ie, 1st to 6th grade). One can also argue that this is why education has leaned away from the singular schoolhouse model, in which all learners are in the same building, and why we operate on a more rigid structure of grade levels.

Pivec and Kearney (2007) draw a parallel between all types of education: that motivation begets achievement. If a student in school is motivated to learn, the likelihood that learning outcomes are achieved increases. Same vein, Plass & co. (2015) discuss the Motivational Foundation of Game-Based Learning, both in terms of Intrinsic motivation (challenge, curiosity, and fantasy; core elements of game desing) and values and interests (game mechanics, modes of play, the use of collectibles, etc.). Games and Edutainment titles are able to work the motivational factor easily: whether to collect in-game items, to progress a narrative, or whatever the motivation of the game is, Edutainment titles provide that motivation to learn through “providing experiences that [players] enjoy and want to continue.”

I wondered for some time, what is the full scope of those Edutainment titles I’m so fondly attached to? Were they learning and teaching instruments all their own, or were they supplements to traditional education? I believe, given their state both in my memories and after revisiting them, that they were strange hybrids, depending on the grade level. With the JumpStart series as my prime example, it seemed as though earlier titles (1st, 2nd Grade) concentrated more on the “teaching” aspects, with heavy emphasis on reasoning and “show your work.” They were extensive, but by no means exhaustive in their subject coverage. Higher grade levels (4th, 5th Grade) concentrated more on the supplemental aspects, seemingly less interested with teaching the material and more interested in making it a challenge for learners. Both sides of the spectrum are emphasized depending on the grade level, never providing a full educational experience like in the classroom. McClarty & co. (2012) elaborate on this, that “video games can be used to create deeper learning experiences for students, but they do not provide the entire experience.” They cite other sources in positing that games are more powerful as a tool within education, rather than an entire, contained education. Games, they note, are not likely to replace teachers and classrooms, but may, in time, replace some textbooks and laboratories: a powerful supplement to a traditional education.

The more I think of my original question now, it becomes less of an either-or binary. Edutainment titles were a powerful tool for me to have as a young student, but it was all relegated to home, to after-school time. How much more powerful could they be if the allure of games, combined with the rigor of academia, could be properly harnessed, sanctioned, and used within schools?

An Entertaining, Educational Future Awaits

Douglas Clark, a professor of learning sciences and science education at Vanderbilt University, said:

“There’s been this emphasis on whether games are better than traditional instruction, but that’s not really a helpful distinction because it’s not an either-or concept. The research shows that games as a medium can be effective, but not always. Design is really what matters. Nobody assumes that all lectures, labs, or books are good simply because of their medium.”

A well-made Edutainment title can make a genuine difference in a student’s time in school. It can grow with them at their pace, in terms of grade level and difficulty. It provides some form of motivation to keep learners coming back again and again. It is, when done well, a game. And if you talk to anyone, kid or adult alike, I imagine most of them would prefer to play a game than to not.

Resources:

Virtual CloneDrive, to run ISOs (CD-ROM data)

Archive.org, where one can find and download ISOs for old Edutainment titles

All images captured in-game