A research agenda for developing and implementing educational computer games

Video games have exceeded U.S. box-office in the annual sales (Tran, 2002) and emerged as the most frequently used interactive media among children (Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2003). Game-based learning advocates (Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2001a) argue that this powerful medium can and should be utilized for laudable educational outcomes. However, although teachers and administrators acknowledge the positive effect of computer games on students’ collaboration, discussion, and thinking skills, they are not convinced that games can be used as part of the school curriculum (McFarlane, Sparrowhawk, & Heald, 2002). Instead, the type of educational games that schools are familiar with is edutainment, which usually focuses on the motivational effects of games typically employing game-like drill and practice activities to achieve lower level learning goals. Many of the edutainment endeavors, which use the entertaining elements in video games to make learning fun, failed to produce anything either educational or entertaining (Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2003; Okan, 2003; Prensky, 2001b). Additionally, researchers have limited experience designing or implementing effective game-based learning, especially with educational computer games. Although there exists 40-years of research on educational games, the research community is small and many research issues remain unresolved. What research should be conducted to build a knowledge base that supports the design and implementation of educational computer games? Hannafin and Kim’s (2003) critique of web-based teaching research can inform researchers interested in educational computer games. They criticized web-based teaching research as being too diffuse and contradictory; many studies reexamined design issues that have already been investigated in similar media in the past. They argue that web-based teaching research should explore whether existing theory and research provides guidance to web-based learning, which principles are relevant, and which inquires should be conducted to build a knowledge base for web-based learning. They advocate that researchers should examine the unique attributes of the web to develop teaching and learning processes that are philosophically different from traditional approaches. We believe this advice is valuable for researchers interested in educational computer games as well. As a research community, we need to examine relevant learning and instructional theories to identify guidance for designing and implementing educational computer games. We should also review previous research on educational games, whether they are electronic or non-electronic, to determine what has been studied and what issues remain to be addressed. In addition, rather than focusing on all design issues related to educational computer games, it is probably more productive to examine educational affordances unique to computer games. It is in this spirit that we initiated our own research on educational games and developed a research agenda to guide our future work. To provide guidance for our own development and implementation of an educational computer game, we examined current learning and instructional theories and the affordances of video games to identify design guidance that leverages the strengths of video games and various theories such as problem-based learning (Barrows, 1996), situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991), to name just a few. We distilled several main principles for designing our own educational computer game (Ma, Williams, Richard, Prejean, & Liu, 2006): 1). situating problems in a rich context in order to engage students in scientific inquiry that reflects the way experts work; 2). present problems in all their complexity and offer tools, resources, and scaffolds to make complexity manageable; 3). provide learners with increased power of agency; 4). provide opportunities for authentic assessment of student performance. How do these guidelines work in educational computer games? What new strategies or new theories should be developed and tested to guide educational computer games? This paper presents a research agenda that explores these issues.