p.1 Prof. Jordan Shapiro David Cutler: Professor Shapiro, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really a huge fan of your work, and I think what you do is so awesome, and so necessary. Not just for education at today, but where it's going forward into the future. I'm so interested in your recent article that you published about game-based learning. If you could try to dispel that myth, that games are bad for learning. Professor Joran Shapiro: Yeah, basically you're asking about the kind of myth that games are bad, that they do all these bad things. I did recently, I covered a study they did in the UK that did show they couldn't really find correlation between behavioral problems. They found other things, and people have shown other things, but in terms of the kind of anti-social behaviors, there's not much of a correlation, according to that study at least. The truth is, games, they're just a technology. They're neither good nor bad. It's more about how you use them. Certainly, there are some games that I think are pretty rotten [laughs] and I can't imagine they're doing anything good for people, especially some of the really violent first person shooters. I don't think they're making people into horrible people, but I don't just understand what's positive about them in any way. It's not as simple as video games are good, or bad. In fact, there's lots of work, lots of research, lots of people are writing about this. About how what's essentially happening to the video game is, kids are learning a system. They're learning a system of thinking, of behaviors, rules, things they have to do to execute a task. That's essentially what reading is, that's essentially what math is. All of these things are systems, whereby we learn different components of the systems, and we have to put them together in some kind of positive way, in some kind of constructive way. You look at your kids, and [inaudible 02:02] go, "OK, they have trouble with some things, and yet my eight-year old, the things he has learned how to do on Minecraft, from watching YouTube videos, and fooling around and figuring out a system, I know he can learn." What is it about games that enable learning to happen so easily for kids? The real question, when we get to game-based learning from a school standpoint, is "How can we learn the lessons that game developers have learned, and apply to not just 'How can we teach you to kill the zombies?' but how can we teach you to solve a complex equation the same way?" A great example of this is the DragonBox app. I don't know if you've seen DragonBox? David: I have not.
p.2 Professor Shapiro: DragonBox is a game that what the developer basically does is he takes basic algebra operations, and he teaches them in the same way you learn to play Angry Birds, or Plants vs. Zombies. He gives you one power at a time. The first power will be, "How can we replace variables?" but he does it with pictures. He does it where these are powers, so that you have to learn to keep isolating the single variable at the end, and he does a great job of doing it in step-by-step. Once you've solved seven of the puzzles, then he gives you the next power that you can add, and then gives you some puzzles that include both. This is a perfect example of how someone took a system that already existed, and instead of going, "Let's create a game, let's build the mechanics, and then let's teach kids how to operate those mechanics," he took algebra and said, "How can I imagine algebra as game mechanics by itself, and then teach kids how to operate them?" David: A second ago you mentioned Minecraft, and I've got to ask you about that. Why do you think Minecraft is becoming so popular? What can educators learn from it? Professor Shapiro: I can't say much about why I think it's so popular, that's not something I speculate much about. What I will say to you is I have been watching my eight-year old, who will play...he'd play 24 hours a day if I didn't actually cut him off sometimes and say, "OK, time to move away from the computer for a while." What I think is really amazing about it, there are two things. Minecraft is popular both in its mechanics in the first place. There are kids who just play it on "Creative" mode, at just building things. It's like virtual Lego, and in that sense they can play for hours, because it's unlimited. Unlimited Legos, they have an unlimited amount of Legos, they have an unlimited space in which to do it, and it becomes visualized in three dimensions for them. I think the openness of it, the lack of clear objective in the creative mode is what appeals, at least, to my children. Now that he's started to play the server-based multiplayer chat-based Minecraft, I sit there and I watch how what it basically is, is this giant sandbox game. Only the kids are building the role playing games themselves, for each other. It in some ways turns them into developers. I'll sometimes walk in and go, "What are you doing?" and he'll say "I'm building an obstacle course, and I'm putting signs for how to do it, and then I'm going to invite people to come play it." It gives them a chance, they're creating the game world, and participating in it together. I don't even know how to start to think about what that means for how they'll grow up, having built their own role-playing games, and then being able to watch strangers go through it. David: One of the criticisms that I often hear, people that are, they don't understand game-based learning, or ed-tech in general, they say "What void is it filling? What is it doing that we don't already do?" I'm wondering if you can answer that.
p.3 Professor Shapiro: I'm not sure it's doing anything that we don't already do, but it's doing something we already do, in a really impressive way. I do a lot of work with people who develop games for schools, so I'm going to use that as an example rather than Minecraft. I was talking to a guy named Dave McCool, who runs Muzzy Lane Games, who develops a whole bunch of educational games. One of the things he pointed out is, a lot of the stuff that they build, these things already existed. They were role-playing games like "Dungeons & Dragons." Schools would show up with it, they're nine binders and the cards, and the whole class would learn Civil War history by playing these simulation games with cards and boards. You'd get four points, and therefore you could conquer another village or something, and that's how they would learn about how the world works. The real amazing thing is, games just do that faster and more efficiently. [laughs] All you have to do is turn it on. You don't have to lug seven binders, you don't have to hand out all the cards, and you don't have to teach the rules to an entire class before they can start to have fun. David: It seems like it's self-directed in a large extent, too, at least from what I've looked at, too. That students can learn just through playing the games, that oftentimes a teacher, in the traditional sense, isn't necessary. Professor Shapiro: Yeah, I think that is true, although I think the best games that are being developed for education...i can't remember the name of the studio now. I can't think of his name either. The NPR math guy, he started putting together a game studio. One of the things he talks about his how a good math game is like a musical instrument. What you do is you create a game where what you're doing is enacting math, you're actually doing it. He points out that "When I put a kid in front of the piano and they twiddle around with it, they learn something about music, no matter what," because they make music as they touch it. Now you add a teacher, and it's fantastic. Some of the best games are these games that require you to learn something, and to enact something while you play it. Then if we can add the teacher in there, to say, "Now let me show you how you can go deeper," now we have some really, really unbelievable, powerful learning. That's basically what we've always done. I would agree with the people who say, "We've always done it," but this is an efficient tool to do it more quickly, in a way that's more exciting, in a way that's got better graphics. Just going back to idea of those giant role-playing games, lots of teachers did them for a long time, but it took an extreme amount of work from the teacher to make it work, and too much sometimes. This allows every teacher to do it. It becomes a scalable way to do simulation. Every teacher that you'll ever talk to understands that experiential learning works much better, but that takes an enormous
p.4 amount of investment of time and energy to make it work. I think the best game places are just scaling the ability to do what great teachers already do. David: Do teachers have to know what's up with video games that can actually help their curriculum? Is that a necessity, this day and age? Professor Shapiro: I don't want to say they all need to go out and take a thousand courses on it. I think there's people like me, and people like you, who are doing the surveys and making sure we filter out a lot of the noise, so they can find the good stuff. That's great, but I do think they need to do it. My response to teachers who say "I don't really like tech in the classroom" is, "You use a chalkboard, don't you?" This is a technology, was not around forever, the chalkboard. Somebody invented it at some point, and you had to learn how to use it, and you have to learn how to use it the best way for your classroom. David: One of the things that I was curious to hear your thoughts of, there's been this huge surge, as I'm sure you're very, very well aware, of ed-tech. People trying to get money from venture capitalists. Do you see a boom and bust cycle with this? Are you at all concerned about the business aspect of this? Professor Shapiro: I do. I think the negative I see right now is the idea that we think that ed-tech is going to save anything. Again, it's a technology, it's a tool. The pencil didn't make anybody smarter, the chalkboard didn't make anybody smarter. It was about what people did with it. A lot of that noise is going to dissipate in the long run. What's going in with venture capital right now is everybody understands how huge a market it is. In the end, what's going to matter is what teaches the best, and those are the ones who are going to win. Not the ones who get the most adoption, necessarily. They always do win, to some extent but we're just throwing a lot at the wall right now. I'm skeptical of anyone who says they're creating something that's going to fix schools. Technology is not going to fix schools, but technology might empower more teachers. David: Getting back to what you said earlier, how do you sift through the junk applications? Is there a resource that teachers can go to, to find a game-based education source that's good? Professor Shapiro: Yeah, the best resource I know of right now is graphite.org. Graphite.org comes out of Common Sense Media, and it is currently, I think they're still doing most of it themselves, and it's editorial, but their plan is to have it much more crowd-sourced, so that it's more of a teacher's community. When I look at what they do, it's mostly been on from what they say about different kinds of things. Different games, and whether they're good or bad, they do that really well. It's really hard, there's so much noise and it's hard to sift through. I certainly have an advantage, being well known as an ed-tech guy that most of the stuff gets sent straight to me. I don't have to go searching for it.
p.5 [laughter] Professor Shapiro: I hear about a lot of it long before it's out, because I have so many friends in the industry. This is true all the time. How do you filter out all the bad textbooks to find the right one? It's a hard process. I'd recommend [inaudible 12:38] teachers use tools like Graphite. The great thing about Graphite is they're a really good company with good intentions. This is not like the Google Play Store, or the Apple Store, where their goal is to sell, their goal is to profit. Graphite's goal is to create better resources for schools, and so their motivations are in the right place, and I think they're trustworthy, at least to that extent. As with anything, we need to be a little bit always mindful of who are the people behind it? Are there people who, yes, have good intentions, but also stand to make a profit? This is one of the things that we all tread very carefully with amplified learning, who are building fantastic games, but we also wonder, "This is NewsCorp. Is there another agenda underlying it?" So far, I haven't seen any other agenda underlying it, but that doesn't mean I'm not watching them carefully. David: Where do you see, not just game-based learning but education in 20 years from now? In 2033, or 2034? Professor Shapiro: I think the question of game-based learning may dissipate, to some extent, because we'll just have embraced interactive learning, adaptive learning through technology in a way that's so commonplace that we don't even...it just becomes the platform. Not where we're going, "What are the good games?" It's more, "What are the good exercises?" I think we're going to see amazing things happen, like the standardized testing is going to go away. Because it's going to be possible for my child, if we want him to be tested on math, that we put him in front of a math game, and we see what level he got to. How he succeeded on different equations, and we're going to get data about where he's strong, and know where we have to fill in holes, instead of just a score. The games already are capable of, I play for 20 minutes and it can say, "You are able to do quadratic equations this well," "You are able to do this kind of thinking this well," and I think that's great. The danger then becomes, how do we identify those categories that we're collecting data on? That's one of the really big questions that I think we all need to ask. We already had problems in the education system in the way that we separated and divided criteria, I think. The fact that we have independent disciplines like math, science, art, literature, history, instead of them all being integrated. My hope is that the games will allow us to do all of those things at once, because in reality, those things are not separate. The separation [inaudible 15:36] that's gone on for the last 150 or so years is what creates kids who say things like, "I think I'm bad at math." "I think I'm not a good English
p.6 student." Those things aren't separate. Any adult knows that in any given day we have to write complete sentences and do math, and think about the historical context, and be creative in an artistic way all at once, all day long. David: I love that, it's all interconnected. Anything that compartmentalizes the students' ability I really don't like, so I love what you just said. [crosstalk] Professor Shapiro:...say one other thing to answer that, which I also think a lot of the grade-level separation is going to dissipate when we get more interactive in game-based learning. Because we don't care anymore whether or not you've reached the level you should be when you're in the second grade. If you can play the game, then you're ready. We say things like, "This kid hasn't quite achieved second grade-level English, even though he's on fifth grade-level math." This is crazy, because this is what makes kids think they're bad at English, even though in two years they might have been able to make a huge progression. But they've already internalized this idea that "I'm failing math," or "I'm failing English," or "I'm failing science," and I'd like to see that disappear. Any developmental theory, in my opinion, any developmental theory about where kids should be is political in nature. You have to come up with what you think an ideal fourth grader should be.