To help teachers make the most of their summer break we’re making our course more accessible than ever, with a new lower price, and we’ve made Section 1 free for all! That’s 26 videos now free too get you started on your coding journey!

For those unfamiliar The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch Online Course is a learn at your own pace online video course that lets you code along to discover the amazing potential of the Scratch platform. Powered by the best, completely free, online coding platform developed by MIT and supported by MIT and Harvard, its the best way to learn coding and to teach coding in K-12 education!

Why Trust Us

Why trust us when you’re looking to learn code? Well if you hadn’t noticed, we’re an interactive studio! Coding is kinda important to us. But beyond being professionals in the field, we’re also recognized experts! Routledge, one of the top educational publishers in the world, published our The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch book series in 2024. The books have forewords from Harvard professor Karen Brennan, Scratch co-founder at MIT Amon Millner, and multiple Teacher of the Year winner Shawn Patrick Higgins. The online course has completely different content from the books, so each offer great ways to learn coding, or use both and see how they reinforce each other for even more learning and content!

Exceptional Learning

The courses go way beyond the usual introduction courses. They use our industry experience to delve deeper and give you intermediate and advanced skills, as well as the theory and concepts behind things, but all scaffolded for an easy and sensible journey. The course is built for teachers, speaking to your level and concerns, no needing to watch kid videos here! We address the teacher’s needs and concerns while providing a full learning path to mastering coding for education. Providing projects that you’ll be able to use in the classroom, we go beyond just follow along lessons and explain real useful code structures and practices. We provide a whole section just on pedagogy and classroom techniques to ensure you don’t just learn to code, but learn to teach with coding.

New Low Price!

The course (or the books) are a great way to get started with coding. It’s a great skill to know, a key transformation in education, and a lot of fun! It’s a wonderful tool to have to create, envision and bring ideas to life, whether your own or student’s. Now that it’s cheaper than ever, now’s a great time to get started, and get ready to be a coding educator for the fall!

You can check out the course directly here, or see our Teacher’s Guide to Scratch website for our other offerings. Still want to know more about coding and education, check out our article: How Teachers Can Succeed in Learning to Code!

The post We’ve Updated The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch Online Course! first appeared on Massive Corporation.

Building For Success

This was our second year running the competition and I’m glad to say we were able to grow the event. Not only did we have five teams of post-secondary competitors, but we also had a trial run of a high school level competition! It’s great to see not just an interest in game development here, but a significant attendance, skill and passion for it even extending to our high school students. And we were very impressed with what we saw!

With only 2 days to create a video game entirely of their own making we saw teams come up with not just programming, but graphics, sound effects, writing and music for their games. This is a grueling feat even for professionals in the field!

Why We Do It

A big reason for pushing for this event is it really helps develop new talent for the industry. Being able to make a game from scratch in just 2 days is an amazingly challenging feat. It helps push competitors to learn and practice skills, but it also ends with something they can show to people. In video game development hiring is mostly centered on portfolios – companies want to see what you can do. Events like game jams, which we based this competition on, help would-be game developers show off their talents and creativity to professors, industry professionals and the public. They’re intense, but short, ways to stretch abilities and end up with something that people can see and they can be proud of (hopefully). As a team event it’s also an important way to push students to work on their communication and teamwork skills – critical, and all too often overlooked, skills for digital careers.

We’ll be back next year for another year’s competitions, but we’re also hoping to expand the competition to other provinces and eventually to a nation-wide competition! Thanks to the Skills Canada Manitoba and New Media Manitoba teams, we also saw the first competition held in Manitoba this year! So we’re heading in the right direction!

The Games!

And last but not least, of course, you can take a look at this year’s competition! We had competitors post their games to itch.io, a great free hosting service for games, so the whole world can check them out!

Secondary Level Competition:
Gold – Lil Sparky’s Repair Shop; Alaxandre Chalifour, Ian Herperger, Kyle MacLean
Silver – Controlled Chaos; Anakin Aymont, Andy Hu, Dominic Trollope

Post-Secondary Level Competition:
Gold – Internal Spark; Na Wang, Alitha Good, Monchida Rujimethapas
Silver – Don’t Spark Something; Connor Legault, Mason Harding, Danae Hallett, Kieran Bute
Bronze – Cargo Pilot; Chin-Wei Lin, Oghenevwarhe Onosakponome, Oluwafemi Ogunrinola
Runner Up: Sparktacular Adventure; Melanie Adkins, Juan Pablo, Mejia Sanchez, Gerardo Luis, Sravya Kamineni
Runner Up: Camping Safari; Sudip Karki, Sujal Shiwakoti, Gaurav Kunwar, Gaurang Desai

Congrats to all the participants!

The post Skills Canada Saskatchewan Video Game Competition 2025 Success! first appeared on Massive Corporation.

But we’ve seen a lot of poor implementations of video game marketing strategies. I think these past failures are largely the reason why we haven’t seen the level of adoption that one would expect of a market this large. Advertising companies don’t understand video games and the public failures have made them reticent to try more. This is leaving a huge potential untapped, so hopefully if we can understand the subject more we can find a way forward for marketing and promotion with video games that can help everyone – developers, marketers, as well as companies and organizations looking to promote their products and services.

So with that, let’s look at some of the common pitfalls that promotional games suffer so that we can move towards a better understanding, and hopefully brighter future, for game developers and those they can help get their message out.

Bland

A lot of promotional games are simply bland. They end up being just a generic video game with some lazy branding overtop – just copy a default platformer and add in some logos. This might have worked in the early 90s, but we’re a long way from when rarity meant any game was a good game. Even promotional and educational games need to do more these days. The video game market is huge, that means lots of opportunity, but it also means lots of competition. You can’t just show up with something that’s been done a million times over, slap your logo on it and call it a day.

If you really want to promote yourself you’ll need to take advantage of the amazing opportunities we have with games, showcase something – amazing visuals, an interesting storyline, meaningful choices, the ability for players to design things and express themselves, unique mechanics, interesting and dynamic worlds, etc. There’s lots of angles to choose from, but try make sure you choose at least one to put some effort into. If there isn’t an obvious connection to pursue for your organization, then let the designers suggest some options.

If you want to be remembered take some chances. Go out on a limb. Wendy’s tabletop RPG, Feasts of Legend, is a great example (here’s a Forbes article on it). Why on earth did they do that? What a strange combination, but it works. It did something unique and unexpected, and put in the effort to do it right. Don’t just play it safe with the most generic concepts possible. Take a few leaps and you can come up with a design that will be memorable. That memorable quality is what’s going to make it work. In the creative fields we call this the hook, the concept you have for a project that can grab peoples attention and hold it. Do your own twist or take on this so that you have a hook. That’ll give the audience something to remember, something to talk about, something to engage with. And from there you can get your customer engagement, brand awareness and word of mouth. It doesn’t happen to bland projects, you need to be a little daring.

Cheap

People want to be associated with quality. Cut too many corners on your game and folks will notice. Unfortunately promotional games have often been notably and obviously cheap. Poor quality graphics, minimal content, untested or at least unpolished gameplay – especially poor controls, leave players quickly frustrated and disinterested. Budgets are a real concern, not everyone has the advertising budget of Coca-Cola, but games can and should scale to the budget, it’s better to shrink the scope and maintain the quality, than vice-versa.

Often promotional games are given too short a timeline, this is another form of cheapness. Games being given low priority, treated as an afterthought, and having the time required to do them right taken away from them. If you’ve treated the game as an afterthought, the players will likely feel like they’re an afterthought for you. Not being cheap starts with giving a promotional game the care and attention it deserves regardless of budget. A little extra time can make a world of difference, with testing able to lead to refinements so bad controls, broken logic, or unclear progression can be worked out in a way only time can allow.

Games take a dedicated crew of technical professionals to pull off, so budget is a big determination on what you can do. If you need to cut, don’t cut quality. Reduce the scope of the game, or if cash flow is the issue see if the team can work part-time to give you more time to bring in income to cover the cost to do things right. A polished good small game will make a much bigger impact than a larger or more complicated but poorly executed game. Ideally you’ll have enough budget, and that comes from recognizing the potential games have and treating it as the amazing opportunity to advertise that it is (or at least, can be when it’s done right). What other advertising can you do that creates a permanent asset? What other advertising can you do that the audience will spend hours with? Video game marketing simply can’t be beat on those two factors, take advantage of that opportunity and invest in it!

Meaningless

Too many promotional games aren’t trying to do anything other than advertise. They create meaningless games that slap the logo everywhere, but that no one has any ability to care about. Getting brand awareness is probably job number one when you think advertising but the depth of games, the amount of time people can spend on them is the better value proposition. Focus on customer engagement with games, its not just about grabbing them initially, or reaching that youth market, its about actually engaging with them. A game is a story, it’s the ability to talk with your audience more than anything else you can create, or hire a company to create.

A game should focus on creating meaning – why do players want to play it? What will they do? Why does that matter? If you can have compelling answers to those questions you can create a game that people will not just flock to creating that vital word-of-mouth or social viral marketing, but they’ll actually connect and want to associate with. That level of connection will outlive and outperform over time any other advertising you can create.

This can be one of the hardest aspects to deal with. What meaning is there to explore? How thirst quenching your brand of drink is isn’t going to cut it. With television, print, radio or internet advertising that’s probably about all you’ve ever had to think about for meaning. Unless you’re already working with high level longitudinal marketing, working with a good designer or design team is key to making this kind of decision. Meaning that will tie in with the game experience and your brand and organizational ambitions is the holy grail. You might not be able to come up with something perfect, but working with a designer you should be able to come up with a compelling concept. Maybe it’s a unique foray for your company but plenty of marketing campaigns come and go that explore an idea or approach that later changes. Don’t fear making something that will stand and be its own thing, it doesn’t have to be completely inline with everything you do. It can be its own story, giving some light to your product and services, or just brand awareness through being patron to an experience. The engagement and positive connection to your organization, product or services is the key. Let the game be its own work of art, meaningful and engaging and the respect for that can be enough alone to create a meaningful, lasting positive connection that will pay off for a lifetime.

Ignorant

Video games aren’t just a medium, for most of my lifetime they’ve been a subculture. A community of millions, mostly under the radar, with rich socio-cultural practices and understanding. Just like reaching out to a cultural community, reaching out to gamers requires some translation and guidance to do things right. Unfortunately most companies have no real integrated understanding of this subculture, and they’ve failed to reach it in an appropriate way to meet them at their level authentically. This is certainly improving rapidly with the rise of gaming to mainstream culture, but the ignorance of video gaming in organizations is still an important aspect to recognize and plan around.

While the cultural side of the ignorance problem is improving, there’s also the issue of not understanding what video games are and how they work. Often executives have had a poor understanding, outdated references or simply chased buzzwords and major titles, regardless of the meaning, viability or suitability of an idea. Companies can and should have flexible mindsets when looking to make a game. Game design teams are professionals in the medium, they should be engaged with to help understand options and consequences for designs. Just like directors for TV advertising, game designers need to be given some leeway and creative freedom to execute a brilliant campaign. You’re hiring professionals, you need to both respect their professional experience and put them to use. They’re not just technical staff, they’re visionaries and guides, rely on them to guide the experience and create a work of art.

Literal

Just because a game is advertising a product, service or organization, doesn’t mean it has to be literally about that product, service or organization. It doesn’t need to detail the exact function, history or process. They certainly can, but they don’t have to. When Nike puts out a promotional game (they often do), it isn’t about shoe manufacturing, logistics and retail. It’s inspirational. They’ll have it about a star athlete like Serena Williams, or be about being the best you can be, chasing those fitness goals and achieving new feats. They use games to explore aspirations and achievements, key concepts to their brand, not the products themselves.

This is where deep brand development can shine. Taco Bell doesn’t need to make a game directly about taco making. A taco making game will work, but they need to think more about the lifestyle of the target market, specifically the target market of the game. What is the lifestyle of that audience? What are the values that the organization can connect with that market with? How can those values be brought to life in the interactive art of a game? Being too literal creates a huge limit to what you can do, but it can also be a little on the boring side. People probably don’t want to handle the logistics and management minutia of a company, they want the adventurous or glamorous lifestyle that it portraits in its advertising. Get fun, find more adventurous ideas, even wacky or zany ones. Just like we said in Bland, go out on a limb. Create something memorable, find some unique voice, dive down a rabbit hole, sticking to the literal will sometimes work, but it boxes you in or runs out of potential quickly.

Inauthentic

Nothing turns people off like inauthenticity. If making a video game is just a gimmick to reach the youth demographic you might not want to make a game. Youth can smell inauthenticity a mile away and they are ready with all the relentless sarcasm a teenager can muster to call you out on it. While it’s hard to say what’s cool, inauthenticity is sure not on the list. While it might be hard to be truly “authentic” when making a promotional game, one can still aim towards some safer guiding principles.

You’re making a promotional game to advertise. There’s no hiding or denying that. And that’s okay, that in itself that isn’t inauthentic. Do you care about the game? Are video games something you care about in general? Do you believe in them as a medium? If you don’t, you need to hand the money and control over to someone who does. Not caring about games is going to sink you. If you only care about the marketing potential of games, then you need to not be the one calling the shots, otherwise you’re damned to inauthenticity and people will know. Find and hire folks who care about the game, care about what it is, care about how it works, care about whether it’s fun. Give them the power and money (whatever the budget is) to do it right. Thankfully game developers who develop not just promotional games are exactly the kind of people you need. If all they do is promotional work they might just be in it for the money, find people that love the medium and want to create. If they’re professionals, you’ll be able to trust them to come up with a game people will love and if they want your business again, they’ll work hard to make sure it serves your purposes in a way that’s authentic to you, them and the audience.

Conclusions

So that’s our list of the top problems that promotional marketing video games suffer from. Hopefully this helps you understand them, and help you to avoid these pitfalls. Of course all of them can be avoided with a good partnership with a great developer. Here at Massive Corporation we’ve got a dedicated team of thoughtful, creative, talented game developers that love the medium. We’d be more than happy to talk to you (email us at “info” at this domain) about your own promotional or education games and how we can help bring them to life! If you’re interested just drop us a line, and we’ll be happy to follow up with a free consultation. Commissioning a promotional game (here’s a previous post offering tips on that process) might be the advertising opportunity you need to jump to the next level. The opportunities are massive, and with the right partner, you can create an amazing ad that will engage people for hours and stick with them for life – you can’t beat that kind of engagement and awareness!

The post Pitfalls of Promotional Games (and How to Avoid Them) first appeared on Massive Corporation.

I firmly believe there are negatives possible and think video games can be used irresponsibly. Systems that have loose relationships with object permanence, are built to create exploitative action-reward patterns like a lot of free-to-play mobile games, or games with graphic violent content are all easy candidates for creating damaging effects in children (or even prone personality type adults). I think there’s a strong case for limiting screen times, especially in the young children. At the same time, we can’t deny the technology exists. I think schools have a powerful role in establishing healthy habits around technology, and to help guide students and parents toward healthy relationships with technology so that we can access and best use it’s positive effects and potentials.

Why Use Games

Since I recognize these downsides, why am I saying they should be used? Because there’s a lot of positives to tap into. The Entertainment Software Association, a US-based lobby group for video game developers, has a useful document on the subject. Not exactly an unbiased source, but the citations in the document are solid. The paper compiles the findings of many academic peer-reviewed studies on the subject to highlight the benefits of game use in education – https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/102621BenefitsofVideoGamesinK-12Education.pdf.

Games offer learning experiences, they aren’t just entertainment. Play is the heart of learning – adaptive, self-directed, exploratory trial-and-error self-expressive agency. Games are about perception, analysis, prediction, hypothesis, strategy, and decision-making. We simply need to recognize the value of games and find games that utilize this potential, and then utilize those games. Games are wonderful, accessible, desirable tools for learning. They can create social learning opportunities, can adapt and include different learners, provide safe risk exploration, allow self-expression and creativity, build resilience and leadership, and of course, are great for engagement and participation. With such incredible potential it’s simply foolish to ignore this rich multimedia tool for learning. What we need is best practices, good games, and open-minded and trained educators to take advantage of the possibilities. So how can we use games in classrooms?

Guided Use

The simplest way to start incorporating games into a classroom is to start with direct instruction. In this case playing a game and having students follow along in classroom. This guided use of a game can help introduce a game to students in a clear way and help you as a teacher become familiar with the tool as well. It’s important for a teacher to also be a user when it comes to digital technologies, to get hands on to understand a tool from the student perspective. Guided use is a great way to show off features, choices or concepts, but if the game is in front of students it can be very hard to get them to pay attention and follow instructions – you’ve handed them a big red button, they’re going to want to push it. You’ll notice that this happens anytime they have computers, it isn’t games that are the issue. Even if they have a spreadsheet program open, they’ll engage with it. It isn’t an inherent evil in games you’re fighting, it’s the inherent need to explore, understand and self-express you’re fighting, computers are just an amazing system to support and provide for those drives.

You may want to be a leader in game, position yourself as a scout. You’ll do something ahead of them, then they can do something to catch up. You’ll try things so they can see what happens before they make their own choices/attempts. This format, and explanation, can help students understand the structure and value in waiting. Another key technique is explaining that the students will be given free time to explore on their own. If they don’t have this understanding they can feel the need to exploit the time they have to explore, fearing they will miss out if they don’t. Addressing their fears and desires directly will help. Including an incentive “see what happens to me so you’ll be better informed” can be a useful angle. Consider how much they watch twitch, they’re quite willing to watch others play games and not play themselves, but it has to be contextualized. Sometimes it can be better to let them explore first, then once they’ve gotten that initial curiosity out of their system you’ll have better luck getting them to follow. Think of it like giving them recess so they can managed to sit still after – sometimes you need to let them run their character until they tire out first.

Free Use

More often its best to have students explore games on their own, aka free use. This can be either in class or as homework if they can access the game outside of class (you’ll need to consider the digital divide here). The bonus is if students can access the game, and have the means, they’ll almost certainly do it. Not a lot of homework will have the motivation like playing a game!

Free use will allow students to fully engage their sense of agency, exploring the game as they see fit. This can help them develop personal skills like motivation, drive, goal-setting, patience, and resilience as they come across the games choices and challenges and try overcome them on their own. You’ll often find even without any prompting students will begin to form social learning systems. They’ll share their experiences, give tips, tactics, challenges and consolations to their friends and fellow students. Of course, as free agents they may not do what you want or expect. Free use will require you to create learning guides or goals to help ensure students achieve what your goals are for use of the game. Thankfully there’s a number of options to deal with that.

Worksheets

A classic tool for student exploration, worksheets can let you define particular tasks you want the students to achieve, prompting them to provide perceptions or analysis of key moments or tasks. With games that have diverse paths and outcomes having students chart their progress can be great, useful to check their progress, but also great to prompt later sharing and discussion.

Discussions

Games can, and should, be interesting and unique experiences, offering players choices that create nearly unique end results. As students share they can discover each others strategies, theories, and luck and the experiences that resulted. This can encourage some replay as students hear about other potentials of the game and want to experience them themselves.

Captures

A great way to get proof from students playing games is captures. Screen captures, or depending on the game, high scores or achievements, can provide some in-game evidence of their interactions with the game. You can gamify this within your classroom too! You can have individual, team or classroom tracking of achievements and scores to create an extra level of drive and cooperation. Team spirit can be a great angle to explore through gamification, especially when cooperation is highlighted and encouraged.

Reports

The most long form student assignment or feedback method for games would be to write a report about their experience. It’s important to distinguish between the game, and their experience with the game, since their choices will create a unique profile of the experience. The uniqueness of their experience is a very handy tool for teachers. In an era where plagiarism is a growing threat, this can provide an added measure of protection against cheating. Most AI systems will not know recent or niche games, educational games will tend to skirt under their awareness. Even if a game is popular enough, with the different play strategies, randomized starts, changing end games, AI will always have a very hard time sensibly dealing with the dynamism of a game experience, as opposed to set experiences like books and movies. You can also add in your own twists through demands or framings that can further confound plagiarism.

The Bottom Line

Games are a rich and meaningful form of media, it’s silly to think we’d engage in every type of media but not this most complex and dynamic form. Understanding games is a powerful tool for education, especially as better educational games get developed and released. Educators can and should be embracing this new technology, as should developers who want to help shape the world. We need to put this amazing opportunity to better use, hopefully with one foot in the education world and the other in game development Massive Corporation can help bridge this gap and help usher in a new and amazing era of dynamic and engaging education. If you need help to understand this amazing and changing world we’re happy to help. We’ve got presentations and services to help educators and developers do more to create and incorporate smart digital interactive experiences into education. Drop us an email (email “info” at this URL) if you think we could help!

The post Games In The Classroom first appeared on Massive Corporation.

Request For Proposal (RFP)

Any government funded organization (including most non-profits) need to make any service they need go through a public bidding process. This lives up to an organizations need to respect their funders and the money they give. A public bidding process ensures the organization is aware of the possible ways a contract could be fulfilled, ensures potential service partners have the chance to bid on the business, and helps prevent self dealing, where an organization feeds its money into the board and staff’s own interests instead of the best interest of the community, funder or government.

RFPs are the heart of this system. They provide a clear and thorough description of the need of the organization that are publicly posted and contain information how service organizations or businesses could offer their services for consideration. RFPs are like job postings, but detail the work needed, the metrics by which submissions will be judged, and requirements of contractors. They will generally be posted on the organizations own website as well as others, such as government tendering websites, or in traditional media like newspapers.

The easiest way to know how to write an RFP is to look at previous RFPs from your organization if possible. If not you can check for RFPs from any local major organization as a relatively good guide of what is likely good enough. Of course, because of the financial and legal aspect of these documents you may wish to contact a lawyer in your jurisdiction. As a permanent online article, this article cannot constitute valid professional legal or financial advice, I don’t know when or where you’re reading this!

Tips for Finding a Developer

While RFP is a moral and ethical first step to getting the ball rolling, the truth is, not a lot of digital interactive (especially game development) studios are paying attention to your website or government tendering websites. This means your best bet is to prime the competition by reaching out directly to studios to make them aware of the opportunity. Directly emailing game studios / digital interactive agencies can be your best bet for finding folks. Of course, in the name of fairness, I’d recommend never reaching out to less than 6 studios directly, include your RFP. You’ll want to double check what studios do or don’t do contract work. Not a lot of game studios do, but it’s better to ask than assume not, they may have been thinking about it, but not announced it or known how to approach clients. If you’re looking for a true game experience I would recommend a game company over a digital interactive studio, as they will be specialists in a very deep and specific field you’ll be much more likely to get quality results. However digital interactive studios are much more likely to do contract work.

The following are websites you can use to find game studios across Canada:

• https://canadiangamedevs.com
• https://www.saskgamedev.com
• https://albertamakesgames.com/studios/
• https://www.digibc.org
• https://interactiveontario.com
• https://www.laguilde.quebec
• https://www.interactivenovascotia.com

How to Work with a Developer

Your first step to understanding the Developer-Client relationship is to read our article on How to Commission a Game Project. We detail different styles of relationships and their pros and cons there. This article will give you a good start to understanding the process.

Most of the work with a game development studio will be setting the initial development plan. This phase will require the most work on your part. Having submitted and gotten approved, a grant application, you’ll be able to hand that to the developer, along with your RFP, and they should be able to get a pretty strong sense of what you want, or are obligated to from the grant proposal. Depending on the working relationship you’ve got you can be more or less involved with this concept phase.

The contract you sign with a developer should include key outputs and phases which can help guide both of you in how you’ll relate and timelines involved. It should also have fairly clear requirements about deliveries. This can go both ways. You may need to develop and provide material for the developer depending on the contract. With any project they’ll need your branding materials to ensure logos are properly included, but learning-based attractions may need to provide text or diagrams for the information that is needed to be included in an educational game. Especially for cultural projects video or audio from sources acquired by the attraction or institute might be needed. Remember that any materials used need to have their copyright clearance ensured by whatever party is providing them. If you don’t provide materials as needed by the timelines in the contract, you might be waiving some right or responsibility on the developers part due to this failure. This isn’t just an awkward delay, but could cause hardship for the developer and further delays on a project.

Grant Responsibilities

Any grant-funded project has to put the obligations of the grant as priority number one. Failing to meet the obligations of a grant, could mean having to repay some or all of a grant, even if you’ve spent the money. So you need to double check that the grant checkboxes are getting ticked off by a projects design early in the process, and again throughout the process. Your project should be designed to the grant requirements, so following to the plan that you presented in your grant application is important. Changes always happen, but the major points should stay the same. If you need to you can check back with the Granter. It’s not uncommon to need some clarification. It’s better to do that earlier than later. Don’t let yourself develop based on a hunch, get things confirmed so you aren’t working on the wrong thing, or headed in the wrong direction.

Budgets and Cash Flow

We covered some basic contract and budget basics in our How to Commission a Game Project article. That’s a great place to start to get the basic structures used in commission hiring in game development. Of course different game studios will have different preferences for their project contracts, but that can be discussed as part of the hiring process.

In general grants are often for a set amount, often doled out in two phases – signing and completion or reporting. The bulk of a grant is generally paid out at the start of the grant contract to allow the grantee flexibility with managing cash over the course of the project. A portion, often around one quarter is often held back to ensure the grantee completes the project, or often a final report at the end of the project. This last portion basically as an insurance policy for completion. This means that a grantee needs to be smart with their money. At first they may be flush with cash, but they need to be careful with it so it’ll last to finish the project. The final portion will be a good incentive, but it can be difficult to pay out all the bills to finish before getting the final portion. This means good financial management is critical for a grantee.

Be sure to understand the grant funding schedule so you’ll know when your payouts will be available, so your contractor obligations are after you’ve secured the cash to pay them out. If you have to deal with a held back portion until after the project, ensure that your contract has that flexibility or you have cash reserves to pay out while you wait (and take the risk you don’t get final payment). Getting the funding up front is great so you can have the money in reserve for milestone-based payments throughout the project. If the grant funding gives you a overhead/admin percentage you can keep, I recommend using that portion as the withheld portion so you’ve got the most flexibility in dealing with your outsources first, so you can get your contractual obligations cleared first.

Results and Reports

There’s a few last considerations nearing the end of a project. As the project takes shape you’ll be able to start playtesting the game. Ideally you’ll put it in front of some people in the target audience and get their feedback. This can help inform any changes you might need to make before the project finishes so that the project lives up to its potential and serves its purpose. This might include needing tweaks to difficulty, timing, or clarity. You may have the game developer include some kind of analytics so you can capture gameplay experience data that can be reviewed to help inform the changes you make in response to feedback. Don’t think feedback is precise or entirely accurate, but take it as a guide that you can use with the developer to come up with a plan for changes that might be needed.

Depending on the grant, you might need to fill in a report of some kind at the end of the project. Make sure you’ve planned for this. Sometimes metrics might be requested that you can plan for early in the project. Sometimes these can tie in with analytics built into the project, sometimes not. The better you’ve planned for your final report the easier it’ll be to do, and the quicker you can be done your obligations (and get your withheld funds if that applies).

The Bottom Line

Developing games is hard, but if you’ve got a grant to pay for it there are professionals out their ready and willing to help make your ideas come to life. An expert team that know game development will help solve all your technical questions, if you can find a team that are also experts in education or marketing you’ll be able to trust their expertise to help bring your project to that next level. Thankfully Massive Corporation is here to help you with it’s professional game development and professional educational design team. We’re here to help. We can help you whether it’s production, concept design, or grant applications, we’ve got the experience and knowledge to help you succeed. With our free consultations what do you have to lose? Drop us an email today and let us know what project we can help you with!

The post We Got a Grant, Now What? How to Contract Out Digital Projects first appeared on Massive Corporation.

A key is thinking long term. This isn’t a simple task you can check off in a seminar or weekend. Like other sciences, in understanding computer science and coding, there is no end of potential learning. You wouldn’t expect to learn physics or geology in a one-hour intro workshop and be able to confidently incorporate it into your classroom, why do we have that expectation with coding? Coding combines a science with all its theoretical possibilities with a real tangible practical skill. Learning it opens up possibilities to do things with it. It’s a fun, interesting and helpful skill to have that can be incorporated into you life in a myriad of ways – enhancing admin skills, enhancing creativity, and expanding teaching methods. This makes it a powerful skill for teachers and worth the effort to learn.

The Three Stages of Learning Coding Education

As a teacher learning to code there are three main stages of skill development:

• Learning the system
• Learning to teach the system
• Learning to teach WITH the system

Learning the System

Here you need to understand the coding platform itself. This means getting to know the tool, how to access it’s components and what it’s abilities or limitations are. Even short introductory courses and workshops are a great way to quickly get a basic understanding. However, like any deep skill, you’ll return to this regularly, you’ll discover new aspects and potentials, dive deeper, expand projects and skills over time. Don’t view it as a one-time phase, but part of a cycle of continuous learning. This also means you don’t have to learn it all at once.

Learning to Teach the System

Once you’ve gotten familiar with the system, you’ll need to be able to convey that knowledge to your students. You need to reliably know the system enough to be able to guide students through finding components, using them, getting results, and most difficultly, troubleshooting, so that your class can use the system. This is both a great test of knowing a system, as well as a learning opportunity to better know a system. Students will often challenge you with wanting to know and do more and help push the knowledge of and engagement with a system.

Learning to Teach WITH the System

The real purpose of learning to code isn’t just to teaching coding. We don’t code for coding’s sake, we code for a purpose. Coding is a tool to use in your classroom. It doesn’t have to be a separate subject. With comfort and capability teacher’s can use coding projects to enhance the teaching of other subjects, bringing principles to life in simulations or encouraging recitation and integration of knowledge within projects. As one learns the system one can create projects that bring subjects to life to new and interesting ways. I wrote about how valuable coding can be to education in this post.

So with this in mind, how does one succeed on their path to coding education? Here are three major areas to consider that we’ve seen deliver better learning:

Focus

Coding is a vast subject and there is an ever-growing list of options or possibilities to work with. Unfortunately a lot of edtech consultants are just going to push continually more different things and endless spending and a cycle of unending adaption. This is exactly the opposite of what the education system needs. Teachers, and school districts, should FOCUS. We don’t need to cover all the wide-range of potential out there. We need to provide critical knowledge and training, and through it the deep knowledge that can adapt to whatever a student needs when they leave the classroom.

Learning more deeply in a few platforms gives far more meaningful results than having students juggle constant different toys and websites. Each time you shift, you reset the clock, have to reteach a lot of the basics, and you never get to the deep learning and deep personalization that gives the most meaningful results. We want students to achieve mastery, jumping around prevents that. They need the time to become familiar and comfortable with systems, and trust that they aren’t going to be pulled away, to invest in personal projects that let them explore, learn and motivate on their own.

This means its very important for school districts and teachers to choose to focus on a few very flexible powerful tools that offer open-ended exploration and development. Toy-based coding, and mission-based coding, are exactly the opposite of this. They may make it easy to start, but they hit hard walls early and often, giving a limited opportunity and limited perspective of the subject. Tools like Scratch (developed at MIT) are exactly what’s needed – open-ended, child-friendly, creativity-focused coding that supports investment from students.

Application

Motivation is the biggest battle when learning a skill, especially a complex and technical one. What you choose to code can make a big difference in whether you want to keep trying. The most common piece of advice to would-be game developers from veterans is always “start small”. Small projects and tempered ambitions are critical to creating a healthy and positive learning path. By making sure you’re taking bite-sized pieces when learning you get two very important benefits. The first is better scaffolded learning – by keeping things small you have less complications that can obscure any problems that come up, making you less likely to fail. Secondly, by having small projects you are more likely to complete them and gain that confidence and satisfaction of victory. It’s better to break things into smaller pieces and succeed at them, then have one big project you never finish because you get frustrated or run out of juice.

The other side of winning the motivation battle is choosing things that matter to you. Find, or create, practical examples, projects you enjoy, subjects you align with, or could make useful templates or lessons for use in class. By making a project you need or want, you’ll be more likely to succeed. By choosing topics, art styles, or appealing aesthetic choices, you’ll be more interested and enjoy the process more. You’ll find this is especially true with students – getting to make a project including their favourite animal, for example, will make a big difference to motivation.

Understanding

Mastery comes not just from following tutorials or plodding through a course. It comes from doing. It comes from doing over again. It comes from trying, failing, trying again and succeeding. Deep understanding of concepts takes practice. You need to work with them, see them in different contexts, repurpose them, adapt them, incorrectly use them, replace them. It’s a long and complex process to truly master something. We need to approach learning coding with an openness to this complexity, and the long process it demands.

We need to accept that learning coding and the concepts of computer science takes time. School districts need to know that teachers proficiency grows over years not days. We need to prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. Taking small steps gets us consistent growth and movement toward our goals. We need to scale expectations to years towards competency in such a new and obscure field. But we should also know that we can make progress. Even an hour of study and practice will leave you in a better situation than you were before it.

It may be complex and take time, but it’s also more accessible and possible than most people imagine. The mystique or prestige around coding isn’t deserved. It is a skill anyone can learn, and everyone should try. We don’t want everyone to be programmers, but we should have a base level of literacy around such critical technology. Coding is the opportunity to understand a lot about our modern world. Even a small amount of knowledge can be very important to enhancing a persons digital literacy and digital citizenship through understanding how computers work at a basic level. There’s a lot of reasons we want to fight through the struggle to learn and integrate this skillset.

Best Way How

So these are some general guidelines for folks on how to approach learning coding, but what about some direct practical steps?

Your best bet is choosing to learn Scratch. Out of all the myriad coding platforms and languages, this is the absolute best choice for learning coding for education. It offers the most flexibility, best accessibility, best support, it’s the most approachable, and here’s the real winner: it’s free! Scratch isn’t a proprietary scheme from a greedy edtech company, it’s built by educators, for educators under a non-profit foundation backed by MIT and Harvard. It is the best option, by far, for coding education. It does lean towards early and middle grades rather than high school, but that’s where fundamental learning begins. As an adult professional learning you might wonder, but shouldn’t you learn a language for adults? Well, even the Harvard CS50 course starts with students using Scratch. It is wonderfully capable and accessible. You’ll be able to jump in and get started quickly, but you’ll also be able to do an amazing array of things with it and cover years and years worth of learning with it.

What’s the best way to learn Scratch?

It just so happens that yours truly wrote the most comprehensive book series on Scratch for educators! It’s not a coincidence, after teaching coding in classrooms across the country for years, I know that Scratch is the best system. After years of experience as a coding educator, on top of my years as a tech entrepreneur, I know that Scratch is what classrooms need! So I tried to build the best resource I could for teachers to help them learn it.

The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch is a three-book series to help teacher’s learn Scratch inside and out. It provides 4 major projects in each book, with helpful hints on concepts, and teaching practice. Each book focuses on a different stage of learning, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. They also include a very useful troubleshooting chapter to help you handle the issues that will come up when teaching coding. I highly recommend it as a guide to learning Scratch, a guide to very useful learning projects, and a handy desk reference for theory and troubleshooting.

If you prefer learning from video, I’ve also produced The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch online course! With completely different content than the book series, it’s an alternative or an addition to your learning path. It has four major projects as well as over a dozen mini-projects that teach the fundamental programming “building blocks” to get you a well rounded understanding of working with Scratch – great to help you understand how to make your own projects. It also has sections explaining important computer science concepts and terms, as well as a section on pegagogy to help you introduce, design, review and grade coding lessons. It’s a big course, designed for you to work on in bite sized pieces, just one video a week and you’ll create a great learning habit, especially if you can work through it and review with others in a personal learning network (PLN) to review and reflect on what you’ve learned each week. Check with your school district for professional development funding to get started with either or both of these resources to help you succeed on your path to learning coding education and take your teaching career to the next level!

The post How Teachers Can Succeed in Learning to Code first appeared on Massive Corporation.

While I’ve had a passion for games and games-based learning as far back as I can remember, the first time I remember hearing about the corporate world taking it seriously was a news piece (https://www.hrreporter.com/news/hr-news/loreal-plays-games-with-training/311982) about L’Oréal, a major cosmetics company, using it for executive training. Not only was a company doing it, but the media were also interested in a company doing it. This was a watershed moment. Just before this came out a scientific study had announced that video game-based training for surgeons had shown increases in speed and decreases in errors (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17309970/). Unfortunately by the time the news got around the 2008 Financial Crisis had devastated the economy and corporations and government were in austerity mode. So much for game-based training having a chance to catch on.

Thankfully, even though there were significant delays, we do see a major shift towards game-based learning across government and corporations these days. The covid pandemic and the need for increased digital tools, teambuilding and presence has likely been a positive influence on adoption. We’ve seen global leaders adopt the concept with McDonalds using it for customer service training and Dominos for pizza-making training. As Fortune reported (https://www.aol.com/finance/kpmg-offered-video-game-training-130254129.html) global accounting powerhouse KPMG adopted it, and thanks to a study by Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School, they found the practice led to a stunning 16% increase in client acquisition and 22% increase in business with new clients! With 16% more customers the cost of the practice can pay off in no time!

There are many different opportunities for an organization to use game-based learning – the depth and breadth of games as a medium support just about any possibility. We’ll take a look at four of the top choices for internal use of games in organizations here. Of course there’s so much more that’s possible, these are just the most common choices in practice currently. Games also make great external tools for customer interaction and marketing, but we’ve got lots of articles on promotional games to cover that topic!

Hiring Assessment

We’ll lead off our look at corporate games starting with the first place new employees could find them – in the hiring process. Hiring is a major challenge for companies, with increasing job search requirements on social benefits, job applications for any position can easily range into the hundreds, or even thousands. Finding the right candidates can be a huge struggle. Some companies have turned to game systems to help sort through the crowd. Games can be used in screening or interview processes, having applicants play a game to assess their skills, knowledge or culture fit in addition to more traditional tools like interviews.

Games in the hiring process can be a more pleasant way for applicants to be screened than many traditional methods, though the time commitment needs to be balanced. Most application processes seem to leave game systems for a 2^nd or 3^rd tier of hiring selection rather than for the initial masses. Games can be used to both familiarize a candidate with the company, its procedures and its culture, while also assessing their choices for knowledge in a skill area, competencies, literacy, numeracy, or decision making. In an era of increasing automation, strategic skills and high-level thinking are becoming much more critical skills for hiring, games can be the perfect tool for assessing such hard to judge skills.

Operational Training & Onboarding

Selecting a candidate is only the start of hiring, onboarding is often a painful hurdle in getting to productivity with a new employee. Game-based learning has a lot of potential in this area. Mistakes are common with new hires, so why not allow them to make mistakes in a virtual environment where failure is a part of the learning process? That’s what games are all about. You get hit by a lot of fireballs before you manage to rescue the princess. Games anticipate and incorporate failure as a part of learning. By creating virtual (not necessarily virtual reality, but any not-the-real-world space like any game uses) learning environments we can ensure that new employees have a safe and efficient way to learn, mistakes included. We can easily and painlessly use these mistakes to reinforce learning, providing further instructions and opportunities to give clarity and skill development to avoid the mistakes in the future and in the real world. Games can also offer analytics, so where people fail could be tracked and analyzed for future training or process improvement!

Past the onboarding stage, games can still provide valuable training for any operations. Whether a process change occurs, jobs shift, new products are added, or whatever changes are happening, games can help showcase and train for operational procedure. Virtual reality has done amazing things for hazardous jobs training, but traditional 2D and 3D games can be just as effective in other roles.

Strategic Thinking & Visionary Practice

As the L’Oreal case shows executives can be a great target for game-based learning. Strategic decision making is one of the most fundamental purposes of games, from the flight simulators used to train military aviators and digital wargames used to train generals today we see boardgame naval simulators at the turn of the 20^th century, all the way back to chess as the original wargame of castles, horses and kings. An operational error by a new employee can be expensive, but a strategic error by executives can be fatal. There’s very few opportunities to practice and train in strategic thinking and planning, except by games. A thoughtful and meaningful simulation or strategic game can provide key training for a more insightful, adaptive, broad-minded, and successful executive and management team.

Compliance & Awareness

Lastly, games can be a great way to test awareness and practice compliance with policy and standards. As we mentioned above they are a great way to introduce new protocols and processes in operational training, but this can be extended to a refresher or testing system as well. While no employee likes to be tested, a properly made game can ensure the process is fun, and can take more of an upkeep/reminder approach rather than the harsher traditional school style testing. Games are about making learning fun, good corporate games should be no different. We’re looking for results, not opportunities for sadism. Fun, engaging, non-punitive approaches to instilling proper procedure will always out perform surveillance & punishment-based systems in the long run and don’t result in confrontations and turn over. People want to be good at and proud of their jobs, unless they’re forced into negative behaviour by existential needs, they’ll migrate towards higher ideals and motivations. If we can build systems that respect and promote personal growth, we can build a culture of growth and success, personally and organizationally.

The Bottom Line

Games are a growing interest to the world’s leading companies. They’re adopting them for myriad purposes and they’re seeing results. It’s been a long and bumpy road to adoption but we’re well past due when any management team should be thinking about them. Companies like Massive Corporation are here to build custom game software to help your team be the best it can be. There are so many potentials it can be hard to know where to start. Thankfully we offer free consultations, so if you’re interested in how games can be used to enhance your organization, just drop us a line (email “info” at this domain). As both game developers and educational experts we’re ready and able to make things happen for you. We can analyze your needs then design and build systems to enhance any aspect of your operations.

The post How to Succeed in Training and Assessment with Video Games first appeared on Massive Corporation.

Education is a big part of what we do at Massive Corporation. I’ve been lucky enough to follow my dreams and become a professional video game developer. Growing up I knew that was what I wanted to be, but no one could teach me the skills I needed. I had to teach myself, and it took a long time and a lot of frustration to get here. Now that I have, I want to make sure its easier for the next generation. Making sure coding education is available and accessible to kids means a lot to me, knowing it could unlock their dreams and potential, whether in game development or some other use.

The Coding in Education Challenge

I’ve been teaching coding and game development now for about ten years. Through in-classroom workshops, guest lectures, internships, and mentorships for grade 1 through master’s level programs I’ve helped people discover not just the skill, but the amazing applications of it. Seeing the amazing difference it can make in both kid’s lives and classrooms has been an amazing and inspiring journey. It pushed me to develop more tools to support this transformation in education. Earlier this year I published The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch book series through Routledge. I followed that up by launching The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch online course – a 40 hour comprehensive video training course for teacher’s to master coding for education. As much as I enjoy teaching students, I know training the trainer is the best way to multiply my effect.

When teaching teachers to code the biggest issue isn’t the technical difficulty, it’s the time & effort and for a big reason. Coding is a brand new subject for teachers, there’s no history and depth of practice, there’s no familiarity to it, so it’s certainly difficult to learn. However, it’s the fact that they have to learn it and incorporate it without anything else being taken off their plates that’s the biggest issue. There aren’t any new days of the week, there aren’t any more hours in a day, and we aren’t having them stop teaching history or math or phys. ed. to give them the time and energy to take this on. The situation is pretty much damns them to fail.

Our Approach

My approach is to try make coding a tool for teaching, not a subject itself. In the real world we don’t code for coding’s sake, we code for a purpose. We can take that same approach in classroom – use code to achieve something. With good cross curricular approaches we can be checking off the curricular needs of the class, while teaching code, saving precious time. That was the focus for my workshops with LEARN Quebec, but it’s a common focus for my educational work. I give some great examples of Scratch projects that bridge curricular connections in my free Scratch Crash Course to make sure teachers can see the potential for education quickly.

While most of my experience has been in Canadian schools and universities, I’d like to start doing more outside Canada. Scratch provides educators a wonderful world-wide, multilingual and accessible platform to explore coding. I’ve started applying to present at big conventions in the US and barring any hiccups, I’ll hopefully start sharing my expertise more with the US (and other countries). Over the years I’ve both developed a lot of material for both teacher training and for in-classroom workshops, I just need the opportunities to get it out their into the world.

We’re Here to Help!

Massive Corporation offers in-classroom coding workshops, teacher training sessions, custom coding education development, educational products and even long-term coding education partnerships. We’ve made coding education curriculum that covers every subject and every grade. We’re here to make a difference and help solve the struggles that teachers and school divisions are facing incorporating coding into classrooms. We want to help. Who do you think we should work with? Help us connect by writing us, or them, or both – and get us working together to make life simpler for teachers, and life better for students.

If you’re a teacher, and you’re looking for professional development, talk to your school division about working with us. We can offer a wide-range of workshops. We have our The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch book series as a training guide and desk reference. Our The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch online course offers outstanding professional development you can follow at your own pace. Best of all you can partner with us to deliver in-classroom workshops regularly through the year to cover every subject over a range of grades to supercharge coding in your school district.

So help put us to work and connect us with however you think can use the support and expertise. Massive Corporation is here to help!

The post Winning at Coding Education, Teacher Training and Scratch first appeared on Massive Corporation.

Civics in Crisis

We developed this fully free accessible online game because its what our nation needs. Earlier in 2024 Civix, a non-profit focused on civics education in Canada, released a report “Civics on the Sidelines”. The report was built upon the findings of survey and focus-group research conducted by Abacus Data that showed only 39% of Canadians aged 18-29 recalled learning about how our civic institutions work in Canada. This lack of knowledge was also shown to correlate with a substantive 10% drop in voting.

Canadian democracy is facing a crisis of engagement alongside the misinformation and disinformation crises. We believe they are directly related. When Canadians don’t understand how government and society works, they are both more likely to be misdirected, less likely to engage, and less able or likely to defend it. Establishing a better understanding and appreciation of the interconnected and thoughtful professional, scientific and legal basis of our free society is vital to ensuring its defence and endurance.

Our Approach

We designed Jurisdictions: Canada to not only teach the basic facts required by the curriculum – the levels of government and their basic duties, but expanded that to explain the world students see around them. By providing the settings students are familiar with we can show a multitude of ways our society works together to create and maintain the necessities of our lives. We show them how the levels of government build, maintain, regulate, support or limit aspects of life as they are experienced. We give students the opportunity to look at the modern world and get the answers about how government functions to guide and provide for society. This works not only to give them a more in-depth understanding of the modern world, but provides them critical knowledge to help recognize political misinformation – like misdirection about responsibilities or the devaluing of government and law. We don’t just teach the facts, we work toward building an understanding of the value and purpose of government and the Canadian system of constitutional law.

In the Classroom

Jurisdictions: Canada provides a fun and insightful way to teach about the divisions of power and levels of government in Canada. Rather than just teaching memorization of lists that the curriculum is based around, here students get to explore their world to understand it through government’s roles. It not only enhances engagement, but improves understanding by contextualizing the broad duties of government with real world examples for students.

We didn’t just build a standalone game. We know for it to succeed we need to help teachers use it. We’ve built multiple lesson plans for teachers to use with the game across a range of grades from 4 through 9 (ages 9 to 15). We have options for physical aids in the form of flash cards, standalone activities, and even real-world connections with researching, mail-in campaigns and media fact checking. Jurisdictions: Canada is built to not just teach the curriculum, but to work to change student’s perspectives of the world. To help them see the value of cooperation and the complexity of the world and how we’ve tried to build a stable and thriving society in Canada through government, law and service.

Please try it out, you might be surprised what you learn! And, of course, share the game with any Canadian teachers you know!

The post Jurisdictions: Canada Civics Game Launches! first appeared on Massive Corporation.

The Research

For most of their history video games were relegated to the sidelines of scientific study. Only in the relatively recent past have they become the focus of any significant study. This is likely because of four reasons; the newness of the technology, the rise in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and it’s boon to the field of cognitive science, the increasing number of scientists who engage with video games, and the undeniable economic and social impact of gaming this century.

We are now seeing more study focused on the impact of technology on development and social interaction primarily focused on mobile phones, social media and video games. We also see a few important push factors for better research into our technology use and its impact on youth – rising rates of obesity, autism, and suicide have all prompted a deeper look at what modern childhood is and what causes might be behind these trends. Unfortunately for the fearmongers, video games might not be causing any of those problems, and might actually be a mitigating factor! We need more research and less hyperbole.

Thankfully we do have a growing number of researchers who are pursuing these issues. So far the results aren’t what the naysayers predicted. Prominent researchers like Dr. Rachel Kowert and Dr. James Paul Gee have not only helped build a body of evidence, but have helped put forward the good news into the public conscious. Games are not causing the downfall of civilization, but in reality they can and are actually promoting learning, better mental health, and increased mental performance. We now have multiple scientific studies, and meta-analysis (the evaluation of multiple scientific studies to better derive a consensus), that show video games can have cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social benefits for players.

Drive & Motivation

A common benefit cited for using video games in education is engagement. Video games are probably the most engaging media we can use in any field, and education is no different. Often when compared to traditional formal learning, video games offer students an exciting stimulating immersive opportunity for agency and autonomy. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that kids want to play video games. But this draw could just be the same as their desire to eat candy, mere fulfillment of base urges. What benefits is it really offering? One potential area is drive and motivation. Students want to play video games, if we provide educational games, they have some inherent drive or motivation to at least try them. But games are built to provide goals, choices and stories, a part of good game design is to help continually encourage the player to continue and succeed. Used correctly we can see games help students keep the drive to finish and by keeping them engaged encourage and increase participation and completion rates.

Tenacity & Resilience

Stick-to-it-ness is a valuable skill in a learner, and here video games can really excel. Part of the challenge of building a video game is to balance the difficulty. Games need to provide some level of challenge to the player, but also need to be winnable. Games are built around the concepts of challenge and overcoming challenge, often including loss or setback as part of the process. We’ve all seen character plummet to their doom or get eaten by monsters only to see the player get another life and try again. Resilience is built into the norms of gaming.

Good game design builds to encourage a growth mindset. Playing a game is a skill (or set of skills), either physical, mental or even social. Skills take time to develop, and the process inherently involves messing up. Games are built around these realities, with opportunities to fail, learn and grow. Combined with systems for drive and motivation they teach tenacity to reach goals and overcome setbacks.

Strategy & Planning

“Games are a series of interesting choices” is a quote attributed to game developer superstar Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization series. A good game provides the player with options. Combined over a series of choices and interactions players are faced with an emergent system to navigate and plan around. This necessitates at least some level of strategizing and planning. Some games take this further than others, with Strategy and Simulation gaming constituting a large portion of the industry. Games are a great way for us to explore ideas, concepts and consequences. Computers are perfect for simulation, being able to not just calculate complex relations and consequences, but also easily and quickly setup or clear out scenarios. By using games we can give students the ability to simulate situations or concepts and to explore them with agency and autonomy. They can try different strategies, analyze results and plan around different theories of solutions and options.

Problem Solving & Cognition

Strategizing and planning can’t happen in a vacuum. Players need to be able to perceive and interpret the game world correctly to make plans. This can be a major challenge with developing minds, games need to be age appropriate, but they can help to expand and train cognitive skills. Games require players to understand the game world and the problems and opportunities it provides. A good game is designed to help players understand these systems, sometimes through manipulation, others guessing, and others creation or exploration. They are a rich environment for perception, interpretation and hypothesis. Puzzle games are the most obvious examples of getting players to understand manipulating the game environment to progress, but all games are problem solving playgrounds in some form or another. Done right students can learn the joys of puzzling their brains, building theories and working out solutions.

Creativity & Imagination

One of the great joys I get in working with kids and video games is when they can discover their own voice through creative tools. Games aren’t just a medium of consumption, they can be creative tools for players to use to bring their imaginations to life. This is a wonderful and underappreciated nature of games – the ability to both spark imagination and empower creativity. Now not all games have a particular creative aspect, but all empower the imagination. When playing any game a players brain automatically is generating future possibilities. This skill can be prompted, enhanced and rewarded by clever educators and mentors. Games with direct creative opportunity provide these options directly, and educators should make good use of them. The exercise doesn’t just provide for the maturation of a students autonomy and personality, but it also encourages deeper understanding and engagement with the system and topics. Turning from observer to consumer to creator is a powerful transformation and shows students a path to personal fulfillment and self-empowerment.

Social Learning & Empathy

While video games are often seen as a solitary exercise they rarely are. While many games are multiplayer providing an obvious social angle, even solitary games are often a social engagement. As the dominant media of our time, students have gaming as both a hobby and as a generational experience. They talk about games constantly even when they can’t play them together. They’ll watch each other play, they’ll discuss their theories, ideas, strategies and experiences. They are a shared experience even when experienced, initially, alone.

We can see this as we bring video games into the classroom. Students will share with each other their thoughts and experiences about games. They’ll teach each other strategies, commiserate over setbacks and celebrate each others victories. Social bonding and social learning are inherent to the use of games. When actively engaged in through social learning best practices, video games offer wonderful opportunities for teachers to get students bonding and empathizing with each other.

Taking this further some games, even single player ones, can offer social and empathic content and game play. Role-playing games allow students to experience a game world through the shoes of a character that allow them to see things from their perspective. They engage in narratives, often reading dialogue and choosing responses to it. These can offer opportunities for reading comprehension, empathy and other social skills that students can explore with a digital partner, meaning mistakes and assumptions can be learned without the hurt feelings of a real-life partner.

More Reading

To learn more about the benefits of video gaming check out these articles:

The American Psychological Association (the APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 146,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students as its members) hosts a 13-page pdf paper “The Benefits of Playing Video Games” published in American Psychologist (the magazine of the APA) in 2013 by Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels of Radboud University Nijmegen. It provides a broad view of possible benefits of gaming across the cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social domains.

The Entertainment Software Association (the ESA serves as the voice and advocate for the video game industry in the United States and provides information and communications support that helps members promote the industry, their products, and games’ positive impact on society) in partnership with the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (the HEVGA is the leading academic association advocating for the critical role video game programs play in higher education, industry, and government) have a 32 page pdf “Benefits of Video Games in K-12 Education” hosted on the ESA’s website.

The National Library of Medicine hosts a paper “Does Video Gaming Have Impacts on the Brain: Evidence from a Systematic Review” originally published in Brain Sciences in October 2019 by Denilson Brilliant T., Rui Nouchi, and Ryuta Kawashima. The paper is a systematic review of 9 papers focused on cognition and neuroplasticity (roughly the brain’s ability to adapt) benefits from video gaming.

The post Are Games Good For Learning? first appeared on Massive Corporation.