Education Week - April 22, 2015 - 9

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Q&A: Journalist
Steps Into Realm
Of Digital Games
Tired of covering never-ending education
battles over standards, testing, and charter
schools, veteran USA Today reporter Greg
Toppo set out in search of a fresh story about
how children actually learn.
The result is The Game Believes in You: How
Digital Play Can Make Our Children Smarter,
a new book offering a wide-ranging take on
the ways classroom teachers and game developers
are reinventing school through (mostly)
digital games.
Nearly three-fourths of K-8 teachers now use
such tools for classroom instruction, according
to a recent national survey from the Joan
Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop,
a New York City-based nonprofit that studies
digital-media use and children. Benefits
include increased student engagement and, in
some cases, early evidence of improved student
learning.
Not everyone is on board, though. Worries
about children's screen
time, the quality of the
games (both commercial
and educational)
that often get played,
and everything from
violence to data privacy
still raise the hackles of
some.
GREG TOPPO
The USA Today reporter is the
author of a new book on how
students learn through
"digital play."
Even so, Mr. Toppo,
who is quick to acknowledge
that "a lot
of what's out there is
trash," has become a
believer.
In San Jose, Calif., he
sat with a 4th grader
matter-of-factly tackling
complex math problems with the help of
an animated penguin. In New York City, he
watched a group of 8th graders during their
final exam: playing Triple Turbo Ball, a game
they had invented that blurred the lines between
football, basketball, and soccer. In San
Francisco, he played an early version of Throw
Trucks With Your Mind!, a game being developed
in the hope of presenting a non-pharmaceutical
treatment for adhd, that rewards
players with super powers when they are able
to sustain calm and focus (measured through
an eeg headset).
The good stuff, Mr. Toppo said, can be transformative.
Following
is a transcript of his conversation
with Education Week Staff Writer Benjamin
Herold, edited for length and clarity.
What do you want people inside schools to take
away from this book?
There's this tool that's developing really quickly, but
it's kind of under the radar. Until I really looked into it, I
didn't know how powerful it was.
You describe your encounters with teachers making
innovative use of games as "a welcome break from
covering school reform." Why?
It actually really hit me when we all started having to write
about the [common-core standards]. It really felt like, "lather,
rinse, repeat," like I had stepped out of a time machine. That
was kind of demoralizing. I felt like we weren't talking about
learning in any big, substantial way. This was my attempt to
start thinking about some of those things again.
One educator you profile is Eric Nelson, a teacher
in the Minneapolis suburbs using the mechanics of
fantasy football to engage students in world affairs.
What I liked about that game was the students' willingness
to play along with a clearly contrived system. Everybody
going into it understands that it's an odd thing to be
doing: Choose your team of countries, and let's somehow
compete to see which ones are [in the news most frequently].
But it somehow did the trick.
Some people worry that"gamification" strategies
rely heavily on extrinsic rewards and penalties,
especially to encourage basic classroom behaviors,
rather than promoting"deeper learning."
A lot of people I mentioned this stuff to really didn't want to
hear about it. They felt like it was a misapplication of gaming
principles. [Using those principles to get kids] to class on time
or sit in their seat or raise their hands, a lot of people would
say you're going to pollute the waters. But in the end, I felt
like that's part of school, too. ... You can't ignore that fact that
teachers have to be in front of students every day, and they
have to leverage productive behaviors.
You were very moved by the experience of doing
math with Luis Zepeda, a 4th grader at Sí Se
Puede Academy, a charter school in San Jose,
Calif. Why?
When I sat down with Luis, I was blown away by the work
that was on his computer screen. The problems the software
was asking him to solve were really hard. I couldn't solve
them. But that level of math had become a natural part of
that kid's day. And I thought, "This is what we've been after
for years and years, raising the level of academic achievement
of poor and minority kids."
Sí Se Puede is part of the Rocketship Schools charter
network, which has used software to push class
sizes to 100 students or more, and senior Rocketship
officials have acknowledged that their students
sometimes struggle when given more independence.
How does the context in which games are used matter?
I
don't say anywhere in the book that games need to absolutely
overtake everything, [or] replace the curriculum or
the teacher (although I do think they would do a pretty good
job of replacing textbooks). I want to be careful to make sure
that people understand this is a tool, this isn't magic.
You also spent time at Quest to Learn Middle School
in New York City, which has a heavy emphasis on
game-inspired teaching methods. How optimistic are
you that games can be used to reinvent school in
these kinds of ways?
I'm guardedly optimistic, mostly because I still see the
conversation around me as being about pretty deadly boring
topics. We're still talking about standardized tests being
the measure of everything. One of the reasons I wanted to
write this book was to get people talking and thinking about
different things. Something like games can be a bottom-up
solution.
But you wrote very positively about Amplify, a large
ed-tech company that is taking a pretty top-down approach
in trying to bring its games to classrooms.
I make no judgments about [Amplify's] actual curriculum or
devices or customer service. What interested me was the fact
they were placing a big bet on games as supplemental material.
And what impressed me more was the way they did it, which I
consider a very smart way. They hired people like [prominent
game developer] Jesse Schell to do something I think is breathtaking,
essentially farming out all the game design to these
really remarkable studios. The people designing [Amplify's]
games for the classroom are the same people we turn to when
we're on the couch with our iPad. That, I think, is amazing.
[Editor's note: Larry Berger, the ceo of Amplify Learning, a
division of Amplify, is a board member of Editorial Projects in
Education, the nonprofit that publishes Education Week.]
You close the book with a chapter about "Surface: A
World Above," an opera built and performed entirely
within the virtual world of Minecraft by a group of
teenage boys in an after-school music program at
Virginia Tech University.
[What] was so moving to me was that marriage of something
that these students were already so excited about
with something they would never in a million years find
themselves doing. So when that overture is playing, and
you're staring at this Minecraft world ... my emotions sort
of got away from me. Who knows if those kids will go on to
love opera for the rest of their lives? But they had this vivid
experience, and they were in charge, and the teacher had to
really trust those kids to let them run with it. I'm still thinking
about that moment.
The Digital Education blog tracks news and trends on this issue.
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EDUCATION WEEK | April 22, 2015 | www.edweek.org | 9
Fourth graders take part in a lesson on figurative language in one of Rocketship Education's "flexible classrooms."
In a new book, Greg Toppo profiles a Rocketship elementary student's experience using a math software program.
Ramin Rahimian for Education Week-File

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Education Week - April 22, 2015

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