6. Recommendations
6.1 General recommendations
It is clear that Racing Academy has potential application either as a standalone classroom tool to be supported by teachers working within the curriculum, and/or as an out-of-school application for use by independent players operating in an informal community of practice.
In either case, there two clear imperatives for further development if Racing Academy is to have educational potential:
- consultancy from experts in the teaching of mechanical engineering with young people, such as those working on modern apprenticeship initiatives, such as at the ITE training centre in Bournemouth, or those at initiatives such as Buckmore Karting Park in Kent
- ongoing consultancy with a network of young people, and practising teachers, in order to balance engaging, challenging gameplay with complex science and engineering.
In more general terms, the project helps us to understand several things about the design of computer games for learning:
Young people like to be able to personalise aspects of games, such as cars or characters. This is important in terms of lending them some form of 'ownership' or sense of 'belonging'. Much of this is superficial, but essential to engagement.
It is possible to design engaging and challenging tasks that feature real data and real physics, and in which successful play depends on developing some understanding of those features. A more fully designed game, however, would need much more explicit attention to content and to the ways in which the simulation is revealed than in this necessarily constrained prototype.
Games for learning should not be developed in such a way that their educational content is delivered 'by stealth'. These games are for learning; they should be labelled as such. The reason to develop games in learning is to help engage students with complex material and processes, not to pretend that they are 'having a break' from the hard business of their education.
In developing games and simulations such as Racing Academy, it is essential to ensure that the underlying simulation or model is realistic if the game is intended to help develop understandings of real things; alternatively, if the game is fantastical but aimed at promoting process skills, it is essential that these skills are mapped closely on to the skills needed outside of that fantastical world.
It is likely that it will be important for much of the engineering content of Racing Academy and other games like it to be more clearly visualised, for instance, being able to 'play' with a dynamic 3D diagram of a gear box.
It should be possible for players working with such simulation games to be able to replay and review the actions they have taken in the game environment.
In a classroom environment, it will be important for students to be able to generate meaningful data from the models with which they are experimenting; for example, generating representations of down-forces, or of power and torque. Some of this is in evidence in prototypical ways in the existing Racing Academy demo, but would need to be made more explicitly available.
The design of online communities for education is always going to be difficult. At the very minimum, it is clear that it will be necessary to enforce a code of conduct that ensures young people do not simply turn any messageboards, chatrooms, etc., into verbal boxing rings.
Young people should be able to choose their own usernames and passwords, both to protect their anonymity and to give them a sense of their own online identity.
It is clear from the experience of Racing Academy that most young people will only use an online messageboard if they absolutely see the point of doing so. If the activity/game privileges individual performance and offers a messageboard just as a trendy addition then that forum will fail. The activities must to some extent be predicated on the idea of collaboration, sharing, and exchange. It needs to be more than just a forum for letting others know how you have done.
6.2 Possible applications in a formal classroom setting
There are already applications which might be found for the prototype as it stands - the teachers present during our short sessions all individually requested a copy of the prototype for use within their science and engineering lessons. The experiences within the prototype have already provided the jumping-off points for thinking about kinetic energy, friction and graph-reading - it seems plain that the standalone game could be a valuable classroom tool when supported by input from a teacher
The prototype as it currently stands was designed for use within the trial settings described above, with all their limitations: for a classroom tool based on Racing Academy to be valuable would require giving focussed attention to the content, working closely with educators and students to ensure that the motivation and engagement already demonstrated could translate into some kind of rich understanding of general engineering and physical principles.
With new sites of engineering for young people appearing across the UK, too, it is possible that the game could have application at these locations, or even to provide a forum for young people at multiple engineering sites to collaborate or compete.
However, if Racing Academy is envisaged as an online game for use in schools, it will be necessary to liaise with LEA staff to prevent technical issues such as firewall security measures and so on from disrupting the game.
6.3 Possible applications outside the classroom
Racing Academy was envisaged as something that could grow into an MMOG, with an expanding set of groups coming together to race and tweak cars in the ways they found most appropriate, and supporting a developer community by making the parameters of the games engine transparent to advanced users so that it can be modified and extended. This would be a revolutionary and ground-breaking achievement: for this to happen, there are a number of areas which would need significant attention:
Networking capacity would need to be an integral part of the game, in order to allow player-versus-player racing, messaging at a speed more in keeping with the kind of conversations people want to have, true integrated persistence and other tools to support the formation of groups on a formal and ad hoc basis.
The online safety of the target user base would need careful consideration in order to make their time online safe and rewarding. This would take effort from technical, promotional and design perspectives: making an online game safe without limiting the players' experiences unduly is a non-trivial task.
A relationship with the game community would need to be carefully managed, and issues such as balancing commercial IP requirements with the benefit of having a modding community, for example, or allowing game item trading on sites such as eBay, would need to be dealt with: while strong community support can save on investment in some areas, maintenance of this community is a crucial and resource-hungry part of running a sustainable MMOG.
There would need to be a clear vision of how the game would progress and expand in order to continue to be relevant to the community supporting it: most commercial MMOGs release updates and new playing areas on a regular basis in order to maintain community interest.
7. References
Gee, JP (2003). What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan
Lave, J (1991). Situated learning in communities of practice. In L Resnick, J Levine and S Behrend (eds) Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Washington DC: American Psychological Association
Lave, J and Wenger, E (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press
Sang-Min Whang, L (2003). Online game dynamics in Korean society: experiences and lifestyles in the online game world. Korea Journal Vol43 No3 Autumn 2003 pp7-34: www.ekoreajournal.net/archive/detail.jsp?BACKFLAG=Y&VOLUMENO=43&BOOKNUM
=3&PAPERNUM=1&SEASON=Autumn&YEAR=2003)
Steinkuehler, C (2004). Learning in massively multiplayer online games. In YB Kafai, WA Sandoval, N Enyedy, AS Nixon and F Herrera (Eds), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp521-528). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/papers/SteinkuehlerICLS2004.pdf
Wenger, E (2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization 7(2) 225-246
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