A third space—a practice space—is needed that combines the authenticity of the practicum classroom with the control and scaffolding of the GSE seminar room (or through books).
—MIT Teaching Systems Lab
Authenticity: LURN is heavily based on the real-world experiences of dozens of teachers, and has been curated and tested by teachers to ensure its relevance to players.
Control: Thanks to games existing in a semiotic domain—a self-contained world with no real-world consequences—variables that would otherwise be unpredictable, such as time, can be adjusted to allow players to give significant thought to the issues presented.
Scaffolding: Players may adjust the difficulty of the game by starting with more or fewer initial points, or replacing situations with more challenging ones. This allows pre-service teachers to tailor the game to the challenges they can expect in their placement schools.
…And, of course, when done correctly, games offer a more engaging learning experience.
Classroom management is a complex topic, where sometimes you have to weigh individual students’ needs, and other times where you have to resist and make objective decisions. Through the course of this game, players are faced with students and situations, and challenged to work with their peers to determine the best strategy for maintaining a positive rapport with your students.
The key to developing an educational game that balances education and fun is by ensuring that the learning objectives of the game, its design, and established learning principles all complement one another. To do this, we evaluated it using the EDGE framework developed by CMU researchers.
The primary purpose of LURN is to elicit discussions among peers and mentors to prime learners for the factors they’ll have to consider when making in-the-moment decisions, and so our mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics center around giving metaphors in gameplay to the pressures a teacher will face, and our learning principles focus on self-guidance and discussion.
The most interesting dynamic that results is with the student building step, which prompts learners to consider the whole person, but steer away from superficial features in forming opinions of students.
This game fosters learning by providing feedback, utilizing relatable situations, and encouraging peer dialogue to encourage students to ask deep questions.
By playing this game, players will come away with better reactions to student incidents in a shorter time, and giving due consideration for both short- and long-viewed responses and the effects they elicit. Stated formally:
Short Term Responses: Teachers will be able to scale their reactions to student behaviors appropriately in a given context, taking into account the visibility, directness, and degree of sternness in their response (e.g. volume, language, body language).
Long Term Responses: Given a student incident, teachers will be able to identify and apply effective strategies for re-establishing broken routines/expectations, including considering the frequency with which a pre-standing issue is addressed.
Since we wanted to understand teachers’ experiences more fully we reached out to expert teachers and novice teachers alike through a survey. We gathered 17 unique responses. From what the novices said, our insight was that in general, novices have very short-sighted responses to classroom incidents. They focused more on dealing with an issue in the moment, rather than dealing with the root of the issue. They would do things like yell at the students to make them stop talking or send students to the office for minor incidents.
From this, we understood the breadth of scenarios teachers encounter in the classroom and the factors that influence them. There isn’t an established framework for classroom management, so we experimented to create our own classification systems. This was important to try to formalize so that it could be easily incorporated into a system for game mechanics.
We developed light concepts for three different gameplays, and dozens of possible game mechanics that could accompany them.
Since classroom management is very broad, we considered several topics: creating rules in the classroom and dealing with specific issues (which is what we chose).
The presence of feedback in the game was heavily considered throughout the prototyping process. We decided to start without any feedback from the game because we thought that the players would learn from developing their own rationales. In the first round of playtesting, we discovered that the players didn’t like this.
Competitive vs. collaborative gameplay was considered. We thought a competitive game would be more engaging, but collaborative could lead to better learning. In the end, the game was designed so that players could choose to play either competitively or collaboratively, but due to time constraints we only playtested the collaborative version.
We conducted five playtesting sessions with different audiences. Early on, we tested the game with non-teachers to ensure that the rules and mechanics were clear, and later we focused on teachers-in-training, who could speak more to the effectiveness and realisticness of the student personae and incidents.
One of the playtesters who was an administrator remarked that the student-trait cards didn’t fit together. When this happened, another player made up a student who made the four traits fit together. We saw this as a good outcome because it might teach administrators that students are more diverse than she previously thought.
Early playtesters, despite not having been teachers, were very cognizant of answers that would embarrass students.
The primary basis of our content sourcing consists of anecdotes from current or retired teachers who have provided responses to our game. In the initial research phase, we asked teachers what classroom management tactics they have changed since being beginners, and we based our situations around those.
Current teachers who have played our game have told us that it would be of particular use to newly admitted education students. However, because of the timing of our testing, none were available. Nonetheless, the pre-service teachers we tested with generated useful discussion when playing.
As we refined the design of the game, we went back-and-forth about how best to depict students. Ultimately, we decided on a non-human aesthetic, in part in order to establish a stronger fantasy element to the game, but more so to discourage stereotyping. Students are depicted in a lightly diverse manner.
Out of consideration our audience, we chose a color palette that would resonate with adults in a workshop setting.