Motivating Children to Learn Effectively: Exploring the Value of Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games

The concept of intrinsic motivation has been considered to lie at the heart of the user engagement created by digital games. Yet despite this, educational software has traditionally attem pted to harness games as extrinsic motivation by using them as a sugar-coating for learning content. This paper tests the concept of intrinsic integration as a way of creating a more productive relationship between educational gam es and their learning content. Two studies assessed this approach by designing and evaluating an ed ucational game for teaching mathematics to seven to eleven year olds called Zombie Division. Study 1 examined learning gains of 58 children who played either the intrinsic, extrinsic or control variants of Zombie Divisio n for two hours, supported by their classroom teacher. Study 2 compared timeon-task for intrinsic and extrinsic variants of the game when 16 children had free choice between them. The results of these studies showed that childr en learned more from the intrinsic version of the game under fixed time limits and spent seven times lon ger playing it in free time situations. Together they offer evidence for the genuine value of an intrinsic approach f or creating effective educational games. The theoretical and commercial implications of these findings are discussed. 1) School of Psychology and Learning Sciences Research Institute University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK Email: Shaaron.Ainsworth@nottingham.ac.uk Phone +44 115 9515314 2) Department of Computing Sheffield Hallam University, Furnival Building, Sheffield, S1 1WB Email: J.Habgood@shu.ac.uk Phone +44 114 225 6709 Evaluating Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games 2 Evaluating Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games 3 The use of computer games and simulations in education dates back to the 1950‟s (Cullingford, Mawdesley, & Davies, 1979) when computing was still in its infancy and the commercial videogame industry had yet to emerge . Nonetheless it was the raw engagement power of 80‟s videogames like PacMan that inspired a new generation of educationalists to consider the learning potential of this exciting new medium (Bowman, 1982). These early protagonists were quick to identify the motivational power of videogames as their key asset (e.g. Lepper & Malone, 1987; Loftus & Loftus, 1983) and were able to apply a range of existing motivational (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Deci, 1975; Lepper & Greene, 1975) and behavioral (Ferster & Skinner, 1957) theories to their rationales. However, despite this romising start, the resulting gener ations of „edutainment‟ products have been widely recognized as failing to effectively harness the engagement power of digital games (e.g. Hogle, 1996; Kerawalla & Crook, 2005; Papert, 1998; Trushell, Burrell, & Maitland, 2001). So while the mainstream games industry boomed throughout the 1990s, the educational sector was left behind in terms of technology, revenues and commercial interest. However, the turn of the millennium has seen a rejuvenation of interest gamebased learning with a number of texts extolling the potential of games (e.g. Aldrich, 2004; Gee, 2003; Shaffer, Squire, Halverson & Gee, 2006), paralleled by commercial success of „self-improvement‟ titles such as „Brain Training‟ and „Big-Brain Academy‟ (Nintendo). This paper offers empirical evidence for the value of a design approach which may help to explain the failure of edutainment to fulfill its educational promise. This approac h hinges upon the ability of learning games to effectively harness the intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1975) of a game for educational goals by creating an i trinsic integration (Kafai, 1996) between a game and its learning content. Furthermore, we suggest that such an integration is created through an intrinsic link between a game‟s core mechanics (Lundgren & Björk, 2003) and its learning content. Zombie Division is a computer game specifically created to empirically examine the concept of intrinsic integration. The game integrates mathematics into the core-mechanic of a 3D advent ure through a combat system in which opponents are mathematically divided in order to defeat them. Three variat ions of this game were created for evaluation: an intrinsic version which integrated mathematics into combat, an extrinsic version which had non-mathematical combat and placed identical mathematical multiple choice question s between levels instead, and a control version which contained no mathematics at all. The first study compared learning gains between all three versions as a measure of the relative e ducational effectiveness of the intrinsic approach. The second study compared time-on-task between t he intri sic and extrinsic versions of the game as a measure of the relative motivational appeal of the intrinsi c approach. Evaluating Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games 4 Defining Intrinsic Integration The concept of intrinsic integration in educational games is rooted in the more familiar concept of „intrinsic motivation‟. It is commonly surmised that a person is intrinsically motivated to perform an activity when he receives no apparent rewards except the activity itself (Deci, 1975). Alt hough modern videogames can provide external rewards (such as those produced by farming virtual game resources: see Steinkuehler, 2006) they are largely autonomous pursuits which create their own internal motivations for continuing the activity. Game designers can create these internal motivations through the in clusion of aspects such as challenge, control, fantasy and curiosity, while inter-personal motivations can be added through factors such as competition, co-operation and recognition (Malone & Lepper, 1987). The inclusion of challenge in this taxonomy is derived from the work of Csikszentmihalyi (1988) into flow theory and optimal experience. This proposes that clear goals, achievable challenges and accurate feedback are all required to achieve a state of flow in an activity which requires “a balance between the challenges perceived in a given situation and the s kills a person brings to it ”, suggesting that “no activity can sustain it for long unless both the challenges and the skills become more complex ” (p.30). There are clear parallels between this and the way that game designers carefully structure the diffi culty curves of their games to provide the optimal level of challenge as a player‟s skills develop (Habgood & Overmars, 2006, p.158). It is perhaps unsurprising then that feelings of total concentration, distorted sense of time, and extension of self are as common experiences to game players as they are o Csikszentmihalyi‟s (1988) rock climbers and surgeons. There is also emerging evidence that, when measured correctly, flow is predictive of learning (e.g. Engeser & Rheinberg, 2008) The gaming literature provides an overwhelming number of different approaches to defining the essence of a game (Caillois, 1961; Crawford, 1982; Huizinga, 1950; Juul, 2005; Koster, 2005; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). Yet these differences only serve to highlight Wittgenstein‟s (1953) observation on games that “you will not see something that is common to all, b ut similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that” (aphorism 66). Therefore we in the interests of practicality we use a definition of a game which seeks to highlight the main differences between games and other forms of entertainment, rather than all the similarities between things we might refer to as a g me. This pragmatic definition defines a game as simply an “interactive challenge”, suggesting that games contain an interactive element that distinguishes them from films, and prescribed challenges that distinguish them from t oys (Habgood & Overmars, 2006, p87 ). We therefore see games as something which encompass es wide spectrum of digital and non-digital applications – including many simulations – and we hope this research could potentially have relevance to all of them. It should also be noted that our definition deliberately avoids assigning a motivational aspect to the definition of a game as the experience of intrinsic mot ivation is Evaluating Intrinsic Integration in Educational Games 5 subjective (does a game stop being a game if it stops being fun?). Nonetheless, the ability of games r simulations to create intrinsic motivation is clearly central to this argument and uninspi ri g games are not a good model for creating motivating learning games either. Although digital games may be capable of providing activities which are intrinsically motivating in their own right, it is critical to consider the effect of adding learning content to a intrinsically motivating game. Game designers have come to recognize the role of learning in good game design (e.g. Crawford, 1982; Gee, 2003; Habgood & Overmars, 2006; Koster, 2005). This is not about commercial games containing educational content, but how the enjoyment of games derives from the process of learning itself: i.e. “the fundamental motivation for all game-playing is to learn” (Crawford, 1982, p.17). Unfortunately edutainment products have traditionally taken a “chocolate-covered broccoli” (Bruckman, 1999) approach when combining learning content with gameplay. This is where the gaming element of the product is used as a separate reward or sugar-coating for completing the educational content. It was Malone‟s (1980) and Malone and Lepper‟s (1987) seminal work on videogames which first considered the problem of creating a more integrated approach to designing educational games. This originally proposed the concept of an intrinsic fantasy as providing “an integral and continuing relationship between the fantasy context and the in structional content being presented ” (1987, p.240). This was contrasted with an extrinsic fantasy where “the fantasy depends on the skill being learned, but not vice versa” and it was suggested that the learning content of extrinsic fantasies could