The Pixel Parenting Podcast
Every Game Teaches Your Child Something: How to Tell If an "Educational" Game Really Teaches
with Dr. Erik Harpstead, educational games researcher at Carnegie Mellon
The "educational" tag on an app store is checked for age, not for learning. A researcher who reads the data behind kids' games shares the three-part check he teaches game designers, and the free library where the good games already live.
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About this episode
Your child wants a new game, and the app store says it's educational. That label is checked for age, not for learning. In this episode I sit down with Dr. Erik Harpstead, Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who studies the data behind kids' games to see whether anyone is learning anything, to replace the label with a check you can run in minutes.
Dr. Harpstead teaches game designers how to build games that teach, and he is part of the team behind The Vault, a free online library of learning games made by education researchers. He walks us through the check he trains his own students to run: what does the game want your child to learn, what does your child spend most of their time doing, and does the kind of learning in that loop match? Then he shows how play data separates learning from lucky guessing, and points parents to the place where the good games already live.
What you’ll take away
- What the "educational" tag on an app store listing is checked for, and what it is not
- The three-part check: learning goals, core gameplay loop, and the kind of learning involved
- Why a game that teaches makes your child do the thing it wants them to learn
- How researchers tell learning from lucky guessing in play data
- Where the learning lives in Minecraft: tiny actions, big projects, and the loop in between
- The Vault: free, browser-based learning games made by education researchers, filterable by age
- The two answers he gives parents who ask "what game should I get my kid?"
In this episode
Timestamps are from the final edited episode.
One reframe to keep
"If you want your learner to learn something from your gameplay experience, it should make them do that thing."
This is the sentence that does the work in the app store. Ignore the label and watch the loop: if a game wants your child to learn fractions, your child should be doing fractions most of the time, and if the math lives in a corner while the play is somewhere else, the label is decoration.
Moments worth remembering
"I think all games teach something, but it's whether or not you actually care about the thing being learned."
On the app store "educational" tag:"I imagine they probably are checked for age appropriateness, which is a relatively low bar, but not necessarily that they have a rigorous learning goal involved, or any evidence that learning goal is regularly achieved."
On why The Vault exists:"Your typical academically developed educational game, historically, would get a grant. Maybe you get a year to build it, maybe you get a year or two to do a couple studies on it, and then it would disappear off the face of the earth."
His shortest answer for parents:"My canned answer is any game you play with them is good."
And his deeper one:"What are they really asking my kid to learn, and does it seem like it supports the kind of learning that it claims to?"
About the guest
Dr. Erik Harpstead
Dr. Erik Harpstead is an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he studies how people learn from play, using data from real gameplay to see whether a game teaches what its designers intend. He teaches the Design of Educational Games course at CMU, is part of the Open Game Data community, and is part of the team behind The Vault, a free online library of learning games built by education researchers.
Resources and links
- The Vault – the free library of learning games made by education researchers; they run in a browser and filter by age
- Wake: Tales from the Aqualab – his pick: ecology and food webs wrapped in a rich story, by Field Day Lab
- The Evolution of Trust – the Nicky Case explorable he recommends for older kids and adults
- The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds – the other Nicky Case explorable he mentions
- That's Your Right – his civics pick from The Vault
- Field Day Lab at UW-Madison – the studio behind Wake
- Open Game Data – the open research community he is part of
- iCivics – the civics games group whose titles The Vault re-hosts
- The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell – the book behind the interest-curve idea he describes
- Dr. Erik Harpstead's website
- Dr. Erik Harpstead on LinkedIn
Keep the conversation going
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