Is FarmVille Educational?

This blog has followed social gaming juggernaut Zynga’s progress for a couple years now. One of its most popular gaming apps is FarmVille, which runs on Facebook and touts an estimated 70 million players, making it one of, if not the, most popular games ever. Testaments to the game’s popularity abound. On the radio station I listen to on the way to work, the morning guys brought up the game recently. One complained he introduced his mother to Facebook, and now she spends hours playing FarmVille. Another said he avoids Facebook specifically so he won’t get caught up playing games like FarmVille all day.

Many players have noted the “work” in FarmVille seems somewhat educational. This, in fact, is what intrigues educators about video games in general. They are so interactive and require focused attention to progress. So, the thinking goes, if we can have students play with educational elements perhaps they’ll absorb some pedagogical content in ways they can’t through books or television.

Could FarmVille be a tool leveraged for classroom use? In November I was invited to sit on a panel of school district tech directors at a regional technology conference to discuss the educational value of social networking. One fellow tech director indicated her school board suggested the district open their network to Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools to students as well as staff. She described the various issues involved, how teachers treated the new access as a classroom management issue, and ways in which the tools were being incorporated into the school day. Then, she said the high school Ag teacher was investigating ways to bring FarmVille into the classroom.

So, is FarmVille educational? Can it be used effectively in the classroom to teach useful things? I turned to the net to see what the hive has to say and also try to find some academic research on the issue.



Math and Organization Skills
Like many games, there are things you can count in FarmVille, and a modest amount of math skills might prove helpful in the game. An eHow article offers six steps in using FarmVille to teach math. Here’s a sample:

Teach fractions using the Chicken Coop and Dairy Barn. There are 4 windows in each building and each building can hold 20 animals. For every 5 animals a head pops out a window. So you can show them how 4/20 is 1/5 of the animals.

CommonSenseMedia.org, which purports to rate video games for parents and teachers, notes that FarmVille requires “simple math and organizational skills.” Later in the review author Carla Thornton writes:

The game itself is clean, safe, and loads of fun, if not especially educational. In FarmVille players plow, plant, and harvest crops to earn virtual coins, raise animals and improve their farmsteads with fences, windmills, and other objects. The more Facebook friends a player can convince to become FarmVille neighbors, the bigger and more successful the farm will be.

Lisa Russell, writing over at the home schooling section for Suite101.com, shows how players can exert a little more math effort to figure out the fastest way to earn money in the game:

Initially, the only seeds available are strawberries, eggplant, wheat and soybeans. Strawberries cost 10 coins and after 4 hours are harvested for 35 coins, a ROI (return on investment) of 25 coins, or 6.25 coins an hour. Using the same method of calculation, it can be seen that the eggplant is worth only 1.31 coins per hour, the wheat breaks down to only 1.1 coins per hour and finally, the soybeans are worth 2 coins per hour. Clearly, the strawberries are a better investment for the player who has time to return in 4 hours to harvest.

Later, she offers a formula for the calculation:

H=harvest value

C=initial price

T=time (in hours)

ROI=(H-C)/T

Players can use a similar formula for comparing the value of their trees (both purchased and gifted) as well as their animals. … FarmVille may have absolutely nothing to offer on a scientific level. In fact, if an entire generation of humans were to learn farming skills from this game, humans might starve to death. However, for math skills and virtual applications of algebra, as well as estimation and strategic planning, FarmVille is more than just fun and games.

So the general consensus seems to be, FarmVille requires a little math skill and some attention to organizational details, but it was made more for fun than education, as are so many popular games.



Academic Interest
As far as academic consensus, a lot of the research interest in FarmVille has revolved around the game indirectly. It crops up in lists of popular social games in academic papers, for instance, but specific studies focusing on the game itself are rare if not non-existent.

A great example of FarmVille serving as a framework for a presentation is one loaded onto Slideshare.net by Sidneyeve Matrix over at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It is titled Pedagogy Inspired by FarmVille, or Seeds of Engagement, From Social Games to the Classroom: Educational Design Inspired by FarmVille.

In it, she highlights three videogame design principals that can be extrapolated for classroom courses. They are derived from a discussion at the recent Social Games Seattle meeting led by Amitt Mahajan, who is part of the core team and lead designer for FarmVille.

First, instructors should design games with broad appeal. FarmVille succeeds because playing farm is something many kids have grown up doing, sometimes using plastic toys provided by companies like PlaySkool. In the classroom or lecture hall, Dr. Matrix suggests this can translate to humanized case studies, current events, and pop cultural references to widen the appeal of the subject matter to apathetic students.

Second, FarmVille uses something Mahajan called “microsociality,” meaning social connections become painless. Players don’t have to go out of their way to keep up with contacts; they’re all easily accessible in the game. This has become “a viable alternative to offline face-to-facetime,” according to Dr. Matrix. So, for classroom incorporation she suggests instructors build or use existing social sites where students can share and divide workloads and resources.

Finally, FarmVille succeeds because it adds “visual pleasure.” There is a certain graphic appeal to the game, common among most successful commercial titles, that enhances player engagement. Instructors should be sure and incorporate visually appealing graphics in lectures and discussions to help focus attention on the subject matter.

Conclusion
All told, FarmVille is a major hit, sure to be popular for years to come. Educators, as well as perhaps classroom students, can certainly learn a thing or two from the game. But, ultimately, it was designed more for fun than for teaching essential knowledge.