Monthly Archives: October 2014

October 31, 2014 · 7:27 pm

World Countries Quiz

Screenshot of World Countries Quiz, a free to play browser game by Michal Mrozinsky.

“Country Names” mode

World Countries Quiz is a free to play browser game by Michal Mrozinsky.

What does it teach?

It offers straightforward geography skill-and-drill. You will learn the names, flags and capitals of all countries in the world.

What do you do?

First choose one of the three game modes.

  1. Country Flags: The name of the country, its capital and its location on the map is displayed. Pick its flag from a selection of four flags with similar colors or patterns (note: could be 1 African, 1 European, 1 Asian and 1 American flag as long as they look similar).
  2. Country Names: The flag of the country, its capital and its location on the map is displayed. Pick its name from a selection of four neighboring countries.
  3. Country Capitals: The name of the country, its flag and its location on the map is displayed. Pick the name of its capital from a selection of four capitals in neighboring countries (note: not four cities of the country in question).

Then choose the continent you want to practice. You can also choose the European Union or the entire world.

“Country names” is the most obvious mode to practice. You will learn the flags and capitals there too, but it is more enjoyable to focus on the map. Each mode complements each other very well though.

If you for example choose Europe, the game will go through each of the continent’s 46 countries in turn. Their order is random but a country will never appear twice in a round.

The score simply represents the percentage you get right, e.g. 42 out of 46 countries earns you a score of 91 %. You will also be given the time it took you to complete a round but it doesn’t affect your score.

Do you learn anything?

Typology of educational games - far left

This is the kind of game were your score depends entirely on how well you know the subject being taught. It is also the kind of game where god is in the details when it comes to the design. And though by no means perfect, Michal Mrozinsky has made mostly smart design choices. You will learn; your score will improve as you learn; and you will probably find the process at least somewhat enjoyable.

While the lack of time pressure means there is no point in comparing different players’ scores, it allows you to take a good look at the map and the borders of the country you are considering. I appreciated this as I wanted to focus on geographical context rather than the (too helpful) hints offered by the flags and capitals. But I’d still welcome some additional factor that would allow for finer discrimination of scores. There could for example be more than four countries to choose from and a non-binary scoring system where bordering countries earned you half a point and non-bordering countries earned you zero.

It would also be useful if you were able to exclude the countries that you find too easy. Identifying UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries and some others quickly became a minor chore when I wanted to concentrate on the Balkan countries. But to let a player customize individual parts of a game inevitably leads to interface and accessibility issues. A more sophisticated workaround would comprise a mechanic that allows the player to use the easy countries strategically the way you use obvious pieces in jigsaw puzzles and easy words in crosswords to narrow down your choices and provide clues further down the line.

Pros

A complete package: all countries in the world with flags, capitals, area and population data translated in nine languages and presented on a stylish scrolling map. Very accessible: the different modes and continents allows for individual preferences without being the least bit overwhelming. You will learn geography in a time efficient manner.

Cons

No time pressure makes global high-score tables pointless but it would have been nice if the game at least kept track of your own best scores during a session.

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Filed under Geography, High School, Mid School

· 1:15 am

Rote learning in educational games

I’m trying out a bunch of geography games at the moment. There are countless alternatives out there, some quite good. This is not surprising: geography is a subject well suited for rote learning and rote learning is an activity well suited for gamification. I shouldn’t need to explain why. Rote learning is after all really boring (and pretty hard to some of us) but relatively simple to make more fun by introducing basic game mechanics.

Rote learning is also very important. Sure, knowledge without comprehension is worthless, but comprehension without knowledge is impossible. Critical thinking without comprehension is likewise impossible.

Rote learning is certainly better suited for gamification than “higher-order thinking” or “21st-century skills” and other buzzwords that are the subject of much low-order thinking from politicians and gullible slogan parrots in the serious games and educationalist in-crowd.

Furthermore, critical thinking is fun; it makes you feel smart and good about yourself. It is an intellectual adventure in itself and doesn’t need a superficial layer of point-and-click adventure mechanics to be exciting and inspiring. Still, an aid to improve your critical thinking skills would, of course, be very neat; but I am not sure games are the appropriate medium for that. Seems like buying yourself A rulebook for arguments and joining a serious debate forum online would be a smarter approach – cheap, uncomplicated and available for everyone.

To sum up:

  • Rote learning is hard, boring and necessary, but easy to gamify.
  • Critical thinking is fun and important, but depends on rote learning and is hard to gamify.

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Filed under Theory

October 27, 2014 · 9:09 pm

A typology of educational games

Educational games typology which tries to clarify the relationship beteween the skills required to score high and the knowledge learned about the subject being taught.

A sketch of a typology of educational games from the viewpoint of the relationship between game skill and subject knowledge.

The purpose of score in games is to provide feedback and motivation. The more your score reflects your skills, the more motivated you will be to improve your skill; and the more your score reflects how much you have learned, the more motivated you will be to learn.

In the rightmost category of our typology, your learning won’t affect the score at all. This is very common in all educational games that try hard to not be “chocolate covered broccoli”. They end up as “broccoli covered chocolate” instead: traditional game genres with a superficial educational veneer. Their main flaw is that they offer absolutely no incentive to improve your knowledge – you are only motivated to improve traditional gaming skills. Of course, learning might come as a byproduct, as it might in all games, movies and novels about real subjects.

Dressed-up quizzes are the archetypical “chocolate covered broccoli”/drill-and-skill of the leftmost category. If their design is sufficiently fine-tuned, they can work very well for some subjects. They will really motivate you to learn more, but will seldom be very immersive and will thus struggle to keep your attention for long stretches.

The middle category has the most potential to tackle a diverse array of subjects and to offer real entertainment as well as real education. Note that simulation games are included in this category. They can however be considered for the leftmost category if they are very well done and if they teach you ”mastery of a process” rather than mere facts.

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Filed under Theory

October 22, 2014 · 9:29 pm

Pandemic II

Screenshot of Dan Archibald's game Pandemic 2 for Dark Realm Studios

Nice clean vector graphics in the main world map screen.

Pandemic II is a free to play browser game by Dan Archibald of Dark Realm Studios

What does it teach?

It is first and foremost a pure strategy game about global disease transmission. It wasn’t designed with any educational intentions, so any lessons learned about epidemiology and medical microbiology are just bonus spillovers.

What do you do?

You create a pathogen (bacteria, virus or parasite) that you try to spread from country to country to ultimately kill every human being on earth before the planet’s scientists can come up with a vaccine.

To accomplish your mission you are able to change your pathogens properties that affect the three principal parameters under your direct control:

  • Lethality
  • Infectivity
  • Visibility

For example choosing vomiting as a symptom will increase lethality slightly by dehydrating hosts; it will increase infectivity significantly by exposing others to pathogen-rich body fluids and, finally, it will also increase visibility a lot as vomiting is a very noticeable symptom. Fevers, on the other hand, have the advantage of being deadly while barely being noticeable.

Your best strategy depends on which country you start in, but you should always try to keep the lethality and visibility low in the beginning. Otherwise other countries will shut down their borders by closing airports and seaports. It is better to infect every country without causing any deaths or conspicuous symptoms and then equip your pathogen with lethal symptoms to kill off all infected people (this is, to put it mildly, hefty artistic license as all of the pathogens of the infected individuals could never evolve a new virulence factor at the same time).

You also have to take account of the geography, climate and the natural disasters occurring randomly in different countries. If, for example, there is a flood in an area that you are already infecting you should choose “waterborne” as your pathogen’s route of transmission. This will make it spread much quicker throughout that region. And if you want to spread the disease from Russia to the Middle East, you should make your pathogen resistant to heat and perhaps pick insects or rodents for vector-borne transmission.

Do you learn anything?

An average player will very likely increase his awareness of how diseases spread and gain a better understanding of what role transportation and virulence factors play in that process. He might also gain new appreciation for the ways society deals with epidemics: closing borders, airports and schools; exterminating rodents, imposing curfews and martial law; hurrying to develop vaccines that may or may not work, etc. The player might pick up same basic geography too!

Pandemic II is in fact a very good example of an educational simulation, which I wrote about in my review of Conflict: Immunity. Simulation games are uniquely able to make the workings of systems clear and comprehensible. Epidemiology is all about systems; it is all about lots of interconnecting objects and processes and thus in some respects better explained by a game than by a textbook or a lecture.

You will certainly kill more people and increase your score the better you understand the principles of epidemiology as they are modelled in the game. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will gain greater understanding of real-life epidemiology as the simulation model is vastly simplified and perhaps even fundamentally wrong. True, textbook models might also be wrong, but the risk with games is the incentive to exploit the model: to search for weak spots in the algorithms in order to increase your score, rather than to focus on the sound foundations of the algorithms in order to increase your understanding.

Pros

Pandemic II is unusually ambitious for a free flash game from a small developer. The complex interplay between geography, communications and pathogen attributes makes for deep gameplay with lots of replay value and actual educational benefits.

Cons

If you don’t like strategy games or board games of the Risk variety, chances are it will bore you.

Additional information

Dan Archibald originally made the turn based Pandemic in 2007. It was quickly followed by Pandemic: Extinction of Man (2007) and then Pandemic II (2008), which was big hit in the flash game market and spawned the President Madagascar-meme. It was a major improvement on the first two games and served as a template for later infect-the-world games. The first one of those was Archibald’s own Pandemic 2.5 (2012). for iOS It was a relatively successful but eclipsed by the release of James Vaughan’s Plague Inc. for iOS and Android just three weeks later. While it was clearly a blatant clone of Archibald’s 2008 opus, it was also generally deemed more of an improvement than Archibald’s own 2012 effort and outsold it by a factor of two. More recently Vaughan has taken the genre even further with Plague Inc: Evolved (2014) for PC and Mac (Xbox One forthcoming) while cash-in clones like Infection Bio War (2014) has arrived on iOS and Android.

There have also been topical spin-offs like Archibald’s Pandemic: American Swine (2009): a role reversal where you fight the 2009 swine flu pandemic in the United States. Killer Flu (2009) by Ian Bogost and The Great Flu (2009) by Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam are two similar and institutionally sponsored browser based games.

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Filed under Biology, Epidemiology, High School, Medicine, Microbiology, Mid School

October 15, 2014 · 4:39 pm

Meta!Blast (in development)

Screenshot from the educational game Metablast developed by Eve Syrkin Wurtele and Iowa State University

Tardigrades strolling about on the last remaining plant in existence.

The Iowa State University developers of Meta!Blast may claim that the game “is a unique approach to an educational challenge” but it is actually cookie cutter similar to Immune Attack. You pilot a microscopic ship in an organic 3D environment, only this time it is a dying soybean plant rather than a defective immune system that needs to be patched up. And just like Immune Attack, scanning organisms, cells and organelles will produce an information box with text and pictures for your learning.

You begin exploring the surface of a leaf, then the leaf interior, a cell, a chloroplast, and the nucleus. Everything looks very appealing but like most games (not only educational ones) Meta!Blast’s environment are more akin to a film set than reality. Your journey feels like a guided tour through a virtual museum. There is little interaction between you and the environment, no interaction between objects in the environment, and no real freedom – for example, when you are instructed to bring water to a dehydrated tardigrade you must pick up the water in the specific spot the game points out for you even though there is water to be found all around on the leaf.

Still, taken as a purely visual 3D representation of a photosynthetic cell Dr. Eve Syrkin Wurtele and her huge team of students from departments of Art and Design, Biology, and Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction have done fine. Maybe they will in time also manage to breathe some life into the prop mitochondria and prop chloroplasts of the game, which has been in development since 2008.

The laughable claims that the game “encourages creative, non-linear thinking by engaging students in problem-solving via game play, role enactment.” is political speak not to be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain.

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Filed under Biology, Cell Biology, Fantastic Voyage, High School

October 3, 2014 · 4:10 am

Immune Attack

Immune Attack is a Fantastic Voyage styled game about the innate immune system.

Low flying over the macrophage, forcing it to emit the cytokine IL-8 (aka CXCL8)

Immune Attack is free downloadable game for Windows XP and later versions.

A number of very large institutions were involved with the game. It was funded chiefly by the National Science Foundation and developed over four years by the Federation of American Scientists, the University of South California, Brown University, and Escape Hatch Entertainment.

Garry M. Gaber (ex-LucasArts director of several Star Wars games) seems to have been the main creative force. It is also interesting to note that Jenova Chen of Journey fame is credited as one of the designers.

What does it teach?

You are introduced to various features of the innate immune system. The game is designed to appeal to mid school and high schools students but covers material that is normally taught in college.

What do you do?

Considering the Star Wars heritage, the game unsurprisingly joins the rank of biology games that borrows its concept from seminal sci-fi classic The Fantastic Voyage (1966). You pilot a miniature ship (a nanobot) through a 3D word of blood vessels and connective tissue on your mission to repair a defective immune system. You will mainly be teaching macrophages and neutrophils how to hunt and kill bacteria.

The mission is partitioned into discrete levels, for example:

  • Find the monocyte in the blood vessels (just follow the map while “flying” in tunnels of blood)
  • Make the monocyte transmigrate by activating cell adhesion molecules (“shoot” the selectins and an ICAM).
  • Make a trail of complement proteins to guide the macrophage to the site of infection (“shoot” the C3a molecules)

Do you learn anything?

The levels are introduced by tutorials in the form of scientists and military styled officers who hand out objectives, information and advice. This is really were most of the learning is taking place, but during the levels themselves there is also information represented in a more concrete manner: scanning the organs and cells with your reticle displays an information box with text and a picture. This is quite neat.

The gameplay is less congenial to learning. The mechanics are identical to any space flight game: move around in a 3D environment, find things and shoot them. You  don’t have to master the science to master the game, but you will certainly have to master the rather complicated controls and possess decent visuospatial skills to navigate the claustrophobic and confusing environments successfully. So the core of the game is as gamey as games get.

And yet there is not much depth to the game. Immune Attack is an exceptionally ambitious and big budget educational game, but it offers less of a simulation than a small amateur game like Conflict: Immunity. The levels are linear and straightforward. You don’t have to think; you don’t have to adapt to an evolving environment. You know what to do, but may not be quick and precise enough to do so. The challenge is physical, not cerebral.

Though the levels can be considered big minigames, they still offer a lot more than the game & watch-like simplicity of the minigames in Code Fred. Some are even quite engrossing – for a while. I initially enjoyed hunting bacteria in the connective tissue, which felt wonderfully organic and messy, but I rapidly got increasingly bored and frustrated as the task got out of hand and transformed into a Sisyphean game of Where’s Waldo. The more bacteria the macrophages engulfed, the harder it got to find the few remaining ones. At the same time they kept reproducing and put you back in square one. Thank god for the cheat code.

The game is in essence an interactive tutorial interspersed with spatial agility tests that you must pass before proceeding. The tests don’t have anything to do with understanding the (surprisingly advanced) biology but they might make some of the stuff more tangible and concrete. Flying around, trying to locate and shoot the selectins, and then watching the trailing monocyte attach and slow down, does hammer the process of transmigration into your head. It is, however, not a time efficient way of learning. I think it could work as a complement to textbooks and the developers indeed state that the game is “a supplemental teaching tool”.

Pros

Crammed full of facts and credible science in carefully crafted 3D-environments that evoke a sense of wonder.

Cons

Clichéd gameplay with superficial relevance to the scientific concepts.

Additional information

Clueless comments on Immune Attack and educational games in general in this article from the prestigious scientific journal Cell.

 

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Filed under Biology, College, Fantastic Voyage, FAS, High School, Immunology, Mid School