We are pleased to announce the launch of a program that is designed to support collaborations between Microsoft Research Connections and major research institutions to build the foundations for a unified game layer for education. Our first official project is Just Press Play (opens in new tab), an experiment to craft gameful experiences for the students of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) undergraduate game design program. (Gameful experiences incorporate the use of game play mechanics that focus on the user’s intrinsic motivation, engaging the user in a way that can produce long-lasting and powerful results.) You can learn more about the project by visiting the Just Press Play developer blog (opens in new tab).
Just Press Play: Students bringing gameful experiences to education.
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Microsoft Research has a long-standing commitment to games for learning, which began more than a decade ago with our support of Henry Jenkins and the MIT Education Arcade through programs like Games to Teach (opens in new tab) and iCampus (opens in new tab). This work complemented games research that was being performed by Michel Pahud (opens in new tab), Andy Wilson (opens in new tab), and other Microsoft researchers. More recently, we founded the Games for Learning Institute (opens in new tab), a consortium of 8 universities, 14 principal investigators, and a small army of graduate students whose mission is to find out what makes games fun, what makes them educational, and to develop patterns that assist developers in the creation of effective educational games.
One of those principal investigators is Andrew Phelps, director of the RIT School of Interactive Games and Media (opens in new tab). Andy began his experiments with games for learning in 2003, when he created the Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study (MUPPETS) (opens in new tab) to teach computational thinking through 3-D graphics and animation. More recently, he and Jessica Bayliss began pushing the boundaries of games in the classroom by conducting an experiment to award experience points to students in lieu of grades (opens in new tab). In collaboration with Elizabeth Lawley, director of the RIT Lab for Social Computing (opens in new tab) and creator of the citizen heritage experiment, Picture the Impossibl (opens in new tab)e (opens in new tab), he began to develop a much more ambitious idea: create a “frame game” that wraps around the most common activities that are inherent to student life at RIT. In other words, he is developing a platform that deeply integrates with the school’s core student information systems in order to create gameful experiences for students that pervade their online experience, versus their person-to-person interactions. By using this platform and the resulting experiences, he can gather data on student activities, improve student motivation, and reduce attrition in the IGM freshman class.
The Just Press Play experiment is an important first step in bringing gameful experiences to education, but it is only the beginning. Throughout the year, we intend to announce additional partnerships with other researchers and organizations to build out the foundations of a unified game layer for education. This layer is similar to the social layer developed in the first decade of the twenty-first century to support a unified representation of identity and social networks across websites and applications. The social layer is arguably complete with the creation of the Open Graph protocol (opens in new tab) and applications such as Bing Social Search (opens in new tab). Now we need to begin work on another layer, one that will instrument our everyday experiences, transform these experiences into gameful experiences and, by doing so, provide the inputs to entirely new capabilities such as e-portfolios, adaptive learning, and project-based learning.
Intrinsic motivation is a primary goal of the game layer, but there are other benefits as well. Because a great deal of data is needed to power these gameful experiences, we are encouraging participants to instrument their the online experience versus person-to-person interactions in a way similar to how Foursquare (opens in new tab) encourages players to keep track of the places they visit. This instrumentation provides entirely new insights into the worlds of students and educators. It enables large-scale longitudinal studies that span the many institutions of learning that we travel through over the course of our lives. It is the promise of true lifelong learning environments to teach twenty-first-century skills and guide our students along a rewarding journey of lifelong learning. We look forward to inviting you to the game!
—Donald Brinkman (opens in new tab), Research Program Manager, Games for Learning, Digital Heritage, Digital Humanities, Microsoft Research Connections
Learn More
- Unified Game Layer for Education (opens in new tab)
- Just Press Play (opens in new tab)
- Just Press Play developer blog (opens in new tab)
- School of Interactive Games and Media (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Research Connections (opens in new tab)
- Can’t play, won’t play. Hide&Seek – Inventing new kinds of play (opens in new tab)
- Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents (opens in new tab)
- Games for Learning Institute (opens in new tab)