New Lab Designed to Make Education Fun And Games

May 16, 2013

The décor in the headquarters of the Games+Learning+Society project bears a much closer resemblance to a Silicon Valley start-up than a university-affiliated laboratory: a Pacman-style arcade terminal, complete with bulbous joystick, gives off an alluring glare in one corner of the large, multi-level space, while in another, an arsenal of Nerf guns hangs from the wall, ready for action. Entire walls have been dedicated to friezes depicting iconic scenes from classic video games like Super Mario Bros. There’s shag carpeting, a Rube Goldberg machine, and a break-room known as the Batcave. Though it emanates a relaxed nonchalance, the design and feel of the lab was carefully considered.

In late 2012, WCER researchers and husband and wife team Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler, the co-directors of the project, decamped from their lab’s office space in the Morgridge Institute for Research and settled into a second-floor loft in an unabashedly purple building one block away, at the corner of University Avenue and Randall Street. The move was made to give their growing program that makes “video games with a purpose” more space, and to allow for conversation and inspiration to flow freely between the project’s game designers and academic researchers, according to Steinkuehler.

“Prior to the move, the project’s staff was always fragmented, working in multiple spaces,” said Steinkuehler, who is also an associate professor of education. “When you’re trying to creating technologies that cross the barriers between entertainment and education, between rigorous research and market-driven product, it becomes tremendously important what the architecture of your space is like. We needed to a space where people could work creatively on both design and on assessment together, as one network of team members.”

Across the country, there are only a handful of projects pursuing similar work, Steinkuehler said, and most are newer to the game than Games+Learning+Society Lab, which was created in 2005. Even fewer are so openly conflating the domains of academics and industry – creating games with measurable impact that are simultaneously commercially viable.

“It’s a bit of the Wild West,” she said. “Many Ivy League and Tier One universities are entering this new frontier but no one has really knows what the model should look like.”

Because there was little precedent to follow, the GLS team felt liberated to be completely original in the design of and organization of their program and workspace. Squire, who worked on the Games-to-Teach Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting as an assistant professor at UW-Madison in 2003, said he drew upon “flex” spaces he had seen used with great success at other fast-growing computer science programs across the country, including at MIT.

“I loved the idea of a do-it yourself building, where you could easily knock down walls, change room sizes, be flexible and alter the space as your team composition and research evolved,” Squire said. “But my first goal was to carve out a space that wasn’t like anything people would typically see in an academic setting, because I think that leads people to be more creative and imaginative.”

Squire said he hopes to turn the lab into a welcome space for aspiring game designers and UW-Madison students to work, mingle, and learn.

“I’d love it to function a bit like an incubator, especially for undergraduate and graduate-level computer science students. They have access to people with lots of experience here,” he said. “It’s a concept that’s had a lot of success out on the (West) coast, but not something you see a lot of elsewhere.”

Intentionally or not, the Silicon Valley vibes of the lab are undeniable. Though the lab emphasizes fun, it also knows how to get its work done. Its primary objective is to create and distribute “games for impact” – games that have a positive educational or societal effect on those who play them.  In the past, the GLS lab designed the Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) engine, which gives smartphone users information about local historical events based on their location as determined by their phone’s GPS. The lab also designed “Virulent,” “Anatomy Browser” and “Progenitor X” – three games designed to introduce medical concepts to teenagers.

Like many of its compatriot start-ups in Silicon Valley, in business terms, the lab has already triumphed, earning licenses for several of its games and spinning off two private companies. Also similarly to some of its Computer Age-brethren in Silicon Valley, the GLS Lab’s founders see it as having a larger, more esoteric mission.
“We are in start-up mode now and we plan to stay in start-up mode,” Steinkuehler said. “We’re looking less for institutional permanence than we are (looking for) academic and creative room to radically innovate. We would love to see Madison transform into a national tech industry destination, producing world-class games and talent.”

Whether it’s their larger sense of purpose, the office environment they’ve created, or the groundbreaking work they’re doing, Steinkuehler and Squire have begun to lure top-tier talent away from other game development companies. 
“Nerf fights may be a bit of a hook, especially for the game programmers and artists,” Steinkuehler joked. “But the real draw for these talented veterans of the industry, who could probably work wherever they chose, is that a lot of them have kids of their own, and they want to be involved in creating innovative and educational games that have the power to improve kids’ lives.”

As much as they’ve been prioritized and catered to, game designers are only one of three elements Steinkuehler said must be combined to get the results the lab is after. Content experts, like the stem cell researchers who were consulted in the creation of “Progenitor X” to ensure the game’s scientific principles were sound, are also necessary, as are the academic researchers like Steinkuehler and Squire who use empirical evidence to shape the game into a product with a proven impact.
“It’s very hard, frankly, to marry all the concepts you need to find success in this field,” Steinkuehler said. “It’s absolutely necessary from the very beginning of the process to get education experts in the same conversation with game designers and content experts.”

The GLS lab’s newest projects have a different focus than its previous work, which mostly concentrated on teaching hard science skills. One new project in collaboration with Richie Davidson and colleagues at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds is a game in which players stuck on a strange planet must read facial expressions of the alien species they encounter in order to gain their trust and assistance in rebuilding their robot characters. The game is intended to teach its players how to discern emotional responses and effective emotional communication,  which is an underappreciated and critical life skill, as research has shown that people who have difficulty reading others’ emotions also have difficulty sharing empathy, Steinkuehler and Squire said.

Another development on that project, a mindfulness app designed for seventh and eighth graders, is intended to instill calmness and peace. As part of the design process, game designers working on the app attended meditation sessions at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.

“As designers, we have to be able to understand what it is about meditation that’s highly conducive to improvements in empathy, calmness, and well-being,” Steinkuehler said. “In some ways, its just like gaming: the only way to get the game is to play it. “

Initial results have proved the effort worthwhile.

“In user testing, we’ve seen good correlation between the length of successful gameplay and increased reports of calmness,” she said. “We have a good feeling that we’ve nailed something important.”

That success is personally satisfying, Steinkuehler said. But not nearly as satisfying as sharing it with her team.

“We have incredible talent working here. They come from so many different backgrounds and each person is working on a different segment or aspect of the larger project. When we bring them together and show them the actual empirical effects of their work,” Steinkuehler beamed, pausing for emphasis, “it actually blows their minds.”

Visit www.gameslearningsociety.org for more infomation.