The Top 5 Platforms for Creating Educational Video Games

Several games out there claim to be educational. Some are more or less so, depending on how one defines “educational.” The list of potential platforms for creating educational videogames is long. Many a fine game has been coded in a variant of BASIC or C, for instance. This list tends to focus on platforms for games created by university researchers and governmental organizations. In that regard, I make a value judgment by inferring that, in general, a game created by a governmental entity, a museum, or university personnel tends to be more “educational” than others.

Anyway, that’s my bias in creating this list. I’d love to hear additional ideas or justifications for inclusion regarding a platform I’ve left out.

1. Neverwinter Toolkit

Commentary: Many solid educational videogames have been developed to run on one of the iterations of Neverwinter Nights using the Aurora Neverwinter Toolkit. Many of these have been designed by teachers for their classrooms, and not released to the general public.
The game itself is completely modifiable, making it fairly easy to manipulate for desired educational outcomes. Teachers can insert dialogue, send students on quests to hunt for artifacts or other virtual ephemera, and set up pedagogical situations within the game. Although it’s a full 3-D virtual interactive environment (VIE), complete with anthropomorphically correct avatars, its runtime requirements are relatively light.

Example: Revolution continues to be the defining mod for Neverwinter Nights, showing what’s possible on the platform. Although it’s getting old (ca. 2004), Revolution continues to draw interest from academics and others.

Main Site: http://nwn.bioware.com/builders/

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2. Civilization III

Commentary: Professors and teachers have long been enamored with the idea of using games in the Civilization series for teaching history and social studies. Even better is the idea of modifying the game so that students can garner specific objectives. Nebulous concepts such as characteristics leading a people group toward dominance over their neighbors, as well as more concrete concepts such as locating settlements near water to help ensure success, are transmitted to players in the game. Modifying Civilization III is encouraged by its parent, Firaxis Games, with players urged to upload their maps and mods to the main site.

Example: The History Canada Game from Canada’s National Historical Society and The Historica Foundation shows how a country’s history can be explored through gaming.

Main Site: http://www.civ3.com/mods.cfm

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3. Flash

Commentary: When it comes to creating an educational game for a museum or government agency’s online site, Flash is the program of choice. As popular as it is, there are beaucoup sites with Flash games, some purporting to be educational. Unfortunately, many are very low on learning quotients, requiring little more than thoughtless arcade skills. On the other hand, many museums and governmental agencies have added excellent educational games to their sites that teach kids something, and promote the organizations’ goals at the same time.

Example: America’s CryptoKids is a collection of Flash games and activities from the US National Security Agency. The site shows how government and museum sites can create games in Flash to attract younger audiences online.

Main Site: http://www.adobe.com/

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4. Java

Commentary: If you’re going to make a serious game for the Web or other applications, and you don’t want to use Flash, then Java, the cross-platform language from Sun, remains an excellent choice. A major plus is the language is ideal for mobile phones and other devices, as well as for many types of computing platforms.

Example: The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives from Utah State University offers a variety of online Java applets designed to convey mathematical concepts. Originally funded with an NSF grant, the site now offers a CD version by mail.

Main Site: http://java.sun.com/

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5. XNA for the Xbox & Windows

Commentary: A relative newcomer to this group, Microsoft’s XNA is designed to create games for Windows and the Xbox. In a huge usage boost late last year, Microsoft released XNA free to universities and college students. According to their promotional department, over 300 universities worldwide have adopted XNA as a platform for teaching programming skills. Although it has only been freely available for a few months, look for this platform to become heavily used by universities to create educational games in the future.

Example: The XNA Creators’ Club has a role playing starter kit, Role-Playing Game, that allows developers to easily drop in content.

Main Site: http://www.xna.com/

Universities Turn to Gaming and Entertainment to Enhance E-Learning

US News & World Report has a nice trio of articles on online learning this week, including one about Dr. Walter Lewin over at MIT, who has created the world’s best online video lecture series on college physics; the increased use of Web 2.0 and gaming apps in online courses; and the increased use of Second Life for educational purposes.

While Dr. Lewin doesn’t use educational videogames per se, he does engage viewers with online lectures that actively illustrate the concepts covered in the lecture. The series ran about $100,000 to produce, and cover Physics 1, 2, and 3 at MIT. All are free to watch by anyone, and Dr. Lewin has garnered international praise for his work. Other professors now use his lectures in their own courses as well.

The SL article is by Lucia Graves, who wrote an article I discussed in October 2007 on dissecting virtual frogs. Graves interviews Jeremy Kemp over at San Jose State’s SLIS, opening the story with an anecdote of students showing up for class in SL as avatars resembling Jell-O or butterflies (no mention was made of the infamous flying phalli SL is sometimes known for).

SL is becoming something of a phenomenon in college online education. Harvard Law opened a course to SL netizens; Princeton owns an island there; and the state of Louisiana is funding a 5 island initiative studying the value of 3-D virtual interactive environments (VIEs) for education. Merrill Johnson over U. New Orleans asserts that even if the hurricane-prone state loses classrooms to disaster, virtual conference rooms can allow classes to continue.

The remainder of the article is devoted to pros and cons of using SL for education. On the pro side:

Educators say Second Life is an effective teaching tool in part because it provides a social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment. But perhaps the most touted benefit of Second Life is the opportunity it gives students to interact with people around the world—there are users registered from more than 100 countries. It also allows students to visit places that no longer exist, like a townscape reconstructed to look like Elizabethan England in the late 16th century.

On the con side: behavior issues, including griefing, have resulted in Ohio U. shutting its island down after a virtual gunman shot the place up and Woodbury U. permanently closed its island following unabated student misbehavior. Robert Vernon, over at Indiana, is quoted as indicating SL requires a certain level of proficiency to navigate. Peter Ludlow at U. Toronto notes the lack of affordances in the environment negatively impact teaching. This is a point I made in a paper published last year, BTW.

Finally, Kim Clark writes a nice article entitled “New Answers for E-Learning.”

Some professors and schools are redesigning their courses to take advantage of the Web’s interactive and visual possibilities, adopting some bleeding-edge technologies such as gamelike simulations and digital avatars to make online courses more exciting and more effective than traditional classrooms … A growing number of online courses are requiring students to participate in blogs, wikis, or gamelike simulations.

Clark includes a list of university initiatives that focus on these “gamelike simulations”:

Barbara Christe, who teaches biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University- Indianapolis, uses simulations that allow students to scroll over circuit diagrams to see how changes in current affect resistance, for example. Michigan State University has developed a Jeopardy!-like website, packed with quiz questions that science and math students can answer to see how well they’ve mastered key concepts. The University of Maryland-University College has developed a gamelike simulation of a crime scene for students in its criminalistics class. And a growing number of teachers are experimenting with presenting lectures and information as avatars in Second Life.

Although the quiz show study format is an old way to review multiple choice test items, the simulations seem well suited for online format since students aren’t traveling to a physical lab. Open source simulations may be a good way to incorporate these across a wide spectrum of college classes since it seems that good ones would be rather expensive for each university to create. If not open source, perhaps a version developed elsewhere that prevents each university from re-inventing the wheel, something along the lines of the K-12 simulation-type software for math found at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives over at Utah State. Finally, the crime scene simulation sounds like something that might be able to delve into higher order thinking, if done right.

References:
Clark, K. (2008, January 21). A new Physics superstar. US News & World Report, p. 48.

Clark, K. (2008, January 21). New answers for e-learning. US News & World Report, pp. 46-49.

Graves, L. (2008, January 21). A second life for higher ed. US News & World Report, pp. 49-50.