First things first: design principles for worthwhile educational videogames

Three design principles are advanced for multi-user educational videogames. First, they should support situative embodiment in academic knowledge, where personally meaningful activities and coherent narratives foster collective engagement. Second, they should offer multiple levels and forms of meaningful assessment and the opportunity to succeed, fail, and try again. Third, they should provide useful feedback that is used to enhance participation, learning, and curricula. These principles were developed in three annual design-based refinements of a 15hour ecological sciences gaming curriculum in nine upper elementary classes. Across years, the situative embodiment afforded by the curriculum was refined with informal assessment, and innovative virtual formative feedback was incorporated around a key curricular activity. Results across years revealed incremental improvements in participation, understanding of key concepts, and achievement of targeted standards. The ultimate gains in understanding and achievement were larger than those in comparison classrooms that used a conventional text-based curriculum covering the same concepts and standards. The worldwide success of commercial multi-user virtual environments (MUVES) is arguably the result of the amount of learning those games support. While the knowledge learned is often dismissed by parents and educators, games and the gaming industry support unprecedented levels and types of learning. Games like World of Warcraft allow novices to quickly develop sufficient skills and understanding to become an increasingly central participant. Game-based and emergent social scaffolding defines a remarkably strong trajectory towards sophisticated collective activity, requiring thoughtful communication and sophisticated insights about the thoughts and actions of other participants. Arguably, this level of learning is unprecedented in designed learning environment. This has profound implications for advancing and supporting learning more broadly. The success of commercial games has fostered an explosion of interest in educational relevance, fueled by books (e.g., Gee, 2003; Shaffer, 2006), articles (i.e., Squire, 2006; Schaffer, Squire, Halverson, & Gee, 2005), reports (Federation of American Scientists, 2006), and initiatives (e.g., The MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning Initiative (1) and the European Union’s ELEKTRA project (2)). While acknowledging the fundamental differences when considering educational content and contexts, most of the aforementioned scholars argue that educational researchers should examine the design features of commercial games that support learning, and study how those features are (or are not) related to learning academic knowledge. Most of these scholars also argue that newer situative views of teaching and learning are ideally suited for appreciating and enhancing the ways that videogames might be used to enhance learning of academic knowledge. This paper presents three design features that emerged across a three-year effort that used situative approaches to engagement, assessment, and feedback to enhance student participation, understanding, and achievement around on multi-user educational videogame. Quest Atlantis and the Taiga Ecological Sciences Curriculum Quest Atlantis (QA) immerses learners in a virtual environment where they can experience complex situations and participate in compelling interactive narratives.(3) QA affords a game experience while including sufficient academic content to warrant use by classes of school children, typically in close collaboration with their classmates and teacher in a school computer lab. Questers are asked to help resolve virtual dilemmas on Atlantis by generating and evaluating solutions. Students navigate the three-dimensional space via their avatars, interacting with other players via text-based “chat,” and with non-player characters (NPCs) via structured dialogues. Academic content is organized around “Quests” that students complete and submit electronically ingame, which are then reviewed by the teacher who inhabits the role of one of the NPCs in the underlying narrative. Quests are embedded in a mission, which make explicit the sequence of tasks Questers experience in accomplishing their goals. Authoring software makes it simple to add or remove features, and a sophisticated interface allows assignment of different features or versions to different students or classes. This makes QA an ideal laboratory for studying how different design features impact engagement and learning. Taiga, one of the many worlds in QA, is a park located along a river, populated by loggers, tourists, indigenous farmers, a fishing resort, and park administration. Taiga was designed to support 15-20 hours of