Gorilla, gamified research series

https://gorilla.sc/category/insights/gorilla/game/

Investigating Language Development

What people were doing was going straight from what was done with adults to doing it with children the same way, and it was incredibly boring! You needed an awful lot of trials and you had these adaptive procedures where it got harder as you went through, so the more you succeeded the harder it got. You typically needed to get adults to do about 100 trials to get through this procedure and after about three or four trials kids would say, “Is there much more of this?”.

The main thing I learned was that to make the task into something the children would want to do you need sounds. Because we were testing sound discrimination, people were very nervous about putting in any auditory reinforcement because they thought, “Well, they’re listening to sounds, it’s going to confuse them if they get other sounds.” But actually it didn’t, because the reinforcing sounds were much more complex — more like the sorts of noises that are used in games. When the kids got a question right they had a gliding sound that went ‘broop’, and as they got more and more answers correct the sound got higher in pitch. At the end of a block you got much more exciting things happen with cartoon characters jumping around saying, “Well done!” and so on.

Well the other thing we then moved onto was trying to train comprehension. In these training tasks, there are two key things: there’s the reinforcing sounds, which really make a difference, but the other thing is you have to keep them wanting to get to the next level. The trouble with most experiments is they are very repetitive. But we found that if you build in levels through which they progress as they learn, it doesn’t actually matter if the levels are arbitrary points in a learning sequence; the participant doesn’t know the change from level one to level two is actually just that you’ve done 12 trials or something. They see it as progress. The markers of the levels need to be something interesting, so we had characters appearing on the screen with a message indicating their progress.

The way we’ve been trying to test generalizability in our experiments is by changing the format of the of the task. So you might have a learning task where you hear a sentence and move things on a screen to match the sentence. We also give them a pre and post test which is simply a multiple choice test where you have to match a sentence to a picture. That way we can look at two things: does the child show learning in the course of the training, but also, does it generalise to a different format? I hope that if we get better at designing games that capture children’s attention, we might also find we can get generalise beyond the game, but that is the really big challenge.

Constructionist Gaming

Could you give us a bit more of an idea of what constitutes a constructionist game?

The principles are that you’re creating a world in which the conceptual nature of what you’re doing is represented in actions and transactions within that world. It’s not like having multiple choice questions when you say which of these combinations will make five and they pick one. They are actually constructing the goal themselves, so it’s a very different kind of learning experience. They’re never told they’re wrong, it’s just, ‘Whoops, I didn’t make that. Let me try again!’. The feedback is informational feedback in the way that you get informational feedback in the world. If you’re trying to kick a ball into a goal and it goes a bit too far to the right, you’ve got to angle your body in a different way. It’s that kind of immediate intrinsic feedback on your action in relation to a goal that helps you judge for yourself how to improve that action.

Could constructionist principles be applied to areas outside of mathematics, language for example?

Absolutely. You’ve got a lot of construction going on in making words out of syllables, sounds out of phonemes, graphemes which relate to phonemes, sentences that build from words and from clauses, and so on. There has certainly been work done on how to help children understand the relationship between graphemes and phonemes. For example, you might get a sound of a phoneme and you’ve got to identify which letters you have to put together to make your phoneme sound the same. Then you might use phonemes to make up a particular word sound that you’re given, and try to construct the right phonemes to match the sound. Things like that can certainly work for the context of language.

You mentioned that the purpose of creating a game for your intervention was to create a world which the child could manipulate, enabling constructionist learning. Did you consider using aspects of gamification to increase attention and motivation?

One of the principles we had right from the start was that we stripped down the visual aspects of the game as much as we possibly could to just the things you’ve got to focus on to get the conceptual idea. So there was no background, there were no pictures, there were no floppy bunnies or hopping frogs or anything else! There was also no virtual environment or the kinds of things that games typically have where you’re in a place and you’re doing something in that place. And the children were fine with it. In fact I remember one little guy who was talking to himself and the beads saying, “Okay, you red guys, you’ve got to come over here and meet these purple guys, And you’ve got to get together.” And then he said, “This is the best game ever.” He was contributing his own imagination for the context, and just got so excited by succeeding; that’s all they need.

There’s a lot of distraction in all that detail in the virtual game environment and I don’t think it’s necessary for children. Motivation should always be in trying to achieve this goal, and the goal should always be something which is conceptually driven. An awful lot of games make the goal extrinsic to the game itself, so you get some kind of reward if you’ve done the multiplication correctly or something. There’s no internal relationship between the reward and getting the multiplication right. For our constructionist games, the reward is matching the goal. That’s all there is to it and that’s how we learn in the world. The goal when you’re a toddler is to walk across the room without bumping into the chair and it’s satisfying when you manage it.