Welcome to “StoryTeach,” the tentative nickname we’ve given to this component of Gram’s House. Our project officially launched in September 2014, when we received our funding from the National Science Foundation. We hope to use this blog as a means of reporting on our activities, sharing our design work and research findings, and reflecting on what we are learning about the role of story in educational games, designing games to introduce computer science concepts, how girls respond to such games, and other topics that we find relevant to our project goals. I’d like to kick off the blog by describing our initial rationale for investigating the role of story in games, drawn from our NSF proposal.
Our interest in the use of story was inspired in part by popular books that introduce CS concepts in the context of narratives designed to appeal to girls, such as Lauren Ipsum (Bueno, 2011) and Computational Fairy Tales (Kubica, 2012). While we are skeptical of broad generalizations about girls’ or boys’ preferences for particular game features, we believe that stories have affordances for engagement and learning that might help to overcome, for example, stereotypes or misconceptions about domains such as computer science. However, understanding the potential value of story for learning, in computer science or any other field, is not a simple task.
First of all, we had to define what we meant by “story.” We have adopted Bal’s (1997) definition of story as “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (p. 1). We define a fictional setting, or story context, as the elements of a story world that provide a concrete scenario and vocabulary for the concepts to be learned and applied. But what do these terms mean in relation to games?
Bateman’s (2006) discussion of explicit and implicit storytelling in games is helpful in clarifying this distinction. An explicit story in a game is spelled out for the player, as in a book or movie. For example, the popular Legend of Zelda series features recurring protagonists, detailed backstories, a fantasy land, and a mixture of action, adventure, and puzzle solving directed towards overt goals such as saving a princess, reconstructing a powerful artifact, or defeating evil demons. An implicit story consists of the elements of the game world, such as the environment, available tools and objects, that set the stage and give meaning to a game but do not specify a sequence of actions or plot. These elements can be fashioned into a story through the player’s imagination. An example of a game with an implicit story, or fictional setting, is the wildly popular Angry Birds series, in which players launch birds with a slingshot at pigs arranged on various structures. While the scenarios get increasingly difficult as the player progresses, there is no real plot or character development. A game without story or fictional setting is the puzzle game Tetris.
Research about learning and games suggests that story could have a strong impact on learning. Consider Gee’s principles of learning found in effective video games (Gee, 2007). Stories may help learners adopt an identity and feel part of a field’s academic activities; a story setting may not allow players to invest as fully in such an identity. A story’s structured progression of events can be used to ensure problems are well-ordered. A story setting might be able to give context to information needed on demand, but a story could help control the flow of information so it is not only just in time, but also more deeply meaningful. Essentially, while the context of a story setting may help situate educational content, a story can do so in a more structured and meaningful way.
One literature review on educational games indicates that narrative context provides motivation for learners to continue playing (Dondlinger, 2007). It is not clear whether a fully realized plot is important; understanding the type of story or context most useful in educational games is our research goal.
Our proposal was inspired by our team member Gail Carmichael ’s previous investigation into the use of story to teach middle school girls computer science concepts through interactive activities. The findings of this small-scale study suggested that learning outcomes were enhanced when students were taught with some type of fictional context or story. However, story did not appear to have any advantage over context, and may even be a distractor to mastering educational content.
In this first stage of our project, our team has focused on three main activities: (a) analyzing the role of story in existing STEM-related games, (b) holding focus groups and game play sessions with small groups of middle-school age girls, and (c) developing design documents for games aimed at fostering girls’ understanding of several key computer science concepts. In subsequent blog posts, various members of the team will discuss what we’ve been learning from these activities and how we are moving forward with the game design process.
References
Bal, M. (1997). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative (2nd ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dondlinger, M.J. (2007). Educational video game design: A review of the literature. Journal of Applied Educational Technology, 4(1), 21-31.
Gee, J.P. (2007). What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave.