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Harnessing the educational power of gaming
As a gamer and a teacher, I have always had an emphatic belief in the power of gaming as a vehicle for learning and building connections. Through a rather indirect path that sometimes frustrated my parents, this belief steered me on a journey of pedagogical experimentation that resulted in me completing a PhD on using cooperative video games to support social skills development. Ultimately, this led to the creation of the intervention that is the focus of this book: Level Up Collaboration.
As a teacher-researcher, I developed an intense interest in reconciling the practice of using games as teaching tools with the extensive research into cognitive psychology that clearly shows us the conditions in which children learn best. This interest has served me well in my current role as researcher and teacher trainer and motivated me to write this book for my fellow interventionists (whether teachers, teacher assistants or allied health professionals), as well as game designers.
But the story of Level Up Collaboration really begins long before I started teaching. My understanding of gaming as an inherently social activity stems from my own childhood, and my experiences trying to make sense of the social world through cooperative gaming. Woven into this introductory chapter are also my experiences of working with students with neurological differences in mainstream and specialist settings, and how I came to recognise the potential of video games as particularly powerful tools for inclusive education. Through sharing my own story, I hope to convince interventionists that games can have a place within their setting when positioned in a way that builds from the evidence and harnesses the strengths and interests of the children in their care. And for game designers reading this book, I hope to share the significant impact design components can have on developing the social skills of children.
When I first considered writing this book, the thought was slightly overwhelming. Nevertheless, I felt that it had to be written. I am certainly not the first person to use video games as tools for teaching, and I am not the first person to use video games to support children and young adults with social-emotional challenges. But relatively speaking, digital gamesâbased learning is still in its infancy as a pedagogical approach. And, quite simply, a limited amount of evidence-based practical information is available to interventionists wanting to use video games with children and young adults with social differences. Hopefully, you will find that this book not only provides the requisite practical advice and structure that you need to implement a successful intervention in your setting, but also equips with you with an understanding of the underpinning research evidence.
Developing a keen interest in gaming from a young age
Gaming has always been part of my life and it most likely always will be. My interest in video games was the primary vehicle through which I bonded with my younger brother Josh. While we were never allowed to have the âholy grailâ of gaming â a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) â we did have a then state-of-the-art 286 IBM compatible personal computer, complete with a 256 colour monitor, a keyboard and even a mouse (with a track ball in the bottom that we had to clean every three or four days). Josh and I spent hours upon hours playing whatever games we could get our hands on through our friends, through extended family or through the local market.
Shareware titles were all the rage, with this model of distribution providing extended demos of games that could be shared legally via the lunchtime exchange of floppy disks. If you are of a certain generation and had or continue to have an interest in gaming, you will surely remember Commander Keen. Created by Texan game developer ID Software, this two-dimensional platform game was the closest (legally available) thing to Super Mario Bros. on a computer. In this game, players moved largely from left to right of the screen, navigating their way past terrifying aliens, collecting tokens to increase their score (represented in this game as candy bars) and trying to find the key cards to open the exit for the level. Although this was officially a single-player game, we transformed it into a cooperative multiplayer experience. Josh, myself and other friends who lived in our neighbourhood would take turns controlling the protagonist, Keen, with the non-players offering advice and providing feedback on the playerâs performance. We also developed systems for ensuring fairness, such as changing players at every level or life lost, with caveats for new players or when attempting more challenging levels. That said, it was not always a harmonious affair. When we encountered sections that were particularly challenging, the collective group would often discuss nominating a more skilled player to skip ahead and to navigate the group past this particular point. As expected, this could be controversial, especially for the player forgoing their turn. But this led to the development of systems for dispute resolution, including a last resort appeal to the higher court of my parents.
These discussions and debates centred around the game, often referred to in game studies as the âmeta gameâ, formed as much of my experiences of Commander Keen as actually playing the game. Through engaging in interactions around this and other games, we utilised a raft of technical vocabulary, we called on our knowledge of what other conversationists likely knew and did not know to explain our theories, and, without realising it, we were using rich persuasive language to implore our friends to believe our version of events in describing epic sessions of play. These are communication skills that I still call on today, and I have these discussions partly to thank for providing a space for practising and refining them at a young age. Josh and I eventually got our own gaming devices, and I feel like something was lost in this transition. I still believe that the best multiplayer gaming experiences are those shared in both the virtual and physical environments, and, for the purposes of teaching, this means everyone sharing one screen and one experience.
Learning to connect and teach through gaming
In my first months of teaching, I was apprehensive about leaning too heavily into gaming. However, I soon found it to be asset in connecting with many of my students. In my second year I had a large cohort of students on individual learning plans for academic, social-emotional and behavioural reasons. After initially figuring each other out, these students were some of my favourite people to teach. I loved their off-kilter senses of humour, their different ways of seeing our world and their genuine love for their special areas of interest. Within the staff room these students became known as my âcelebritiesâ, as every teacher in the school had heard of them even if they had never met them in person. It is with this group of children that I first experimented with using multiplayer gaming as a tool for teaching collaborative social skills.
The advent of the Friday lunchtime gaming club started as a reward for demonstrating positive behaviour at lunchtimes during the week, but it soon became apparent that this club could become something more than casual play (which is important in and of itself). When I began to run these Friday lunchtime sessions, I started to notice that some of the players were acting in ways that were more conducive to collaborative play than I would have expected. As gaming served as an area of strength for these students, they had a lexicon for sharing information with their fellow players. More than this, I observed some individuals demonstrating behaviours in this context that they would not display when playing cricket in physical education or outside at lunchtimes. In one memorable instance, an experienced player waived his turn playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii because he wanted a less skilled player to have another turn at practising using the Ice Flower power up. He declared that he would provide coaching to help this player improve. For him, it appeared to be a calculated long-term investment in the collective skill base of the team. As a teacher and gamer, this display of strategic generosity sparked my curiosity.
It was these early experiences of running the games club that led me to the pursuit of further study and eventually the completion of my PhD. By this time, I had worked in South Korea teaching in a high school for gifted students, been a leading teacher in the United Kingdom and returned home to Australia to teach students with complex needs in what we term a Special Development School. With the enthusiastic support of my principal, this specialised setting provided fertile ground for developing a more structured approach to digital gamesâbased intervention. It was the culmination of my experiences working within these schools and researching my own social skills groups as well as those run by other teachers that served as the foundation for the intervention that you are about to explore in this book.
Who can the Level Up Collaboration intervention help?
As an intervention program, Level Up Collaboration can help children and young adults with a range of functional needs. Some examples of populations that I have supported through this program include:
- children who find it difficult to make friends;
- individuals who need assistance with knowing how to provide constructive feedback in a way that minimises hurting the feelings of others;
- students who communicate using augmented and alternative communication (AAC) and require a social context to practice using it;
- young adults who lack the confidence to take on leadership positions within group tasks.
You might notice that I have avoided using diagnostic language. Since I began teaching, much has changed in how we discuss disability and education. Some intervention participants have had formal diagnostic labels, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Other children have come to join my interventions having been described lovingly by their teachers as âjust a bit differentâ. What all these children have had in common is that they required support to establish sustainable friendships and to develop the collaborative social skills required for effectively working within a group. My job was never to diagnose or to seek funding support, but rather to focus on the individual areas of strength and need for each of these children. This approach reflects a broader shift experienced by many Australian teachers and, as I understand it, by other systems around the world. Medical labels of disability can be particularly problematic when used to categorise individuals who share a common âlabelâ but have very different functional needs (Berman & Graham, 2018; Rohmer & Louvet, 2018).
It is through the lens of âfunctional needsâ that I will frame most of the discussions of difference in this book. When thinking about functional needs, I ask âWhat are the specific challenges an individual experiences, and how can we support them?â By considering individual areas of strength and challenge, we can sidestep the stereotypes that often accompany labels of disability. While a label can be one way of beginning to understand what a child or young adult requires, we need to get to know them in all their complexities before we can truly recognise and prioritise our efforts.
Considering the language of neurodiversity
As evident from the discussion above, labels have been of little concern to me. Since I began teaching in 2008 I have had the good fortune of becoming close friends with many people in the Australian autistic community. Some of these people have been, and continue to be, colleagues at the University of Melbourne. Others have been people who have heard me speak on the radio or on television...
