There are thousands (maybe even millions) of examples of the Decorative Media Principle out there in the Internets. The Decorative Media Principle involves creating a visually pleasing background and other decorations for a worksheet, website, etc. that is usually thematically connected with the instruction. The principle, although unproven is that the decoration helps to increase interest and may also increase the conceptual coherence of the learning object.
I came across this one today (this one isn’t even thematically connected):
It looks fine. With the exception of the fact that it isn’t obvious how I find out who these people are and what they’re about (I suppose they assume we will just know), as a web page, it works OK.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, now that you asked……
- It’s NOT a game. Unless we start calling all multiple choice questions games. Sure, this one wraps the questions and answers with visually pleasing backgrounds and graphics. It even gives you sound effects when you click on something, but to call it a ‘shooting gallery’ is really stretching it. I didn’t get to shoot anything. I got to click on buttons. Somebody should tell these people that shooting games involve aiming and firing something (guns and bullets, or slingshots and hamsters, or some such). Shooting games also involve a chance (that really should be greater than zero) that you might MISS. It’s hard to miss clicking a button.
- I assume that this is supposed to be EDUCATIONAL. If I get a question wrong, TELL ME WHAT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. I don’t actually learn anything for the answers I get right. If I get on wrong, and you don’t tell me what is was supposed to be, I learn almost nothing. And really, this is not fun enough that I would play it just to get a high score.
- Newsflash: Edutainment is DEAD. Wrapping boring content inside a game failed as a strategy in the 1980’s and it continues to fail now.
And to think, I could have told my first-year computer science students that they weren’t writing a final exam at all – they were playing a game. Who knew that all I needed to do was hide the scantron sheet under some pictures and make noises when they fill in a bubble. I coulda done that!
Decorative Media does NOT make anything a game.
Mark my words:
We have a limited amount of time to demonstrate that games are effective as instructional technology. LOTS of people in industry get it. The military gets it. Healthcare gets it. Social change organizations get it too. Why can’t formal education figure it out?
If we screw this up like we did in the 1980’s, we will NOT get a third chance. Formal educational institutions will reject games as a viable instructional technology and the growing chasm between 21-st century learning and early 20th-century schools will widen.
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Not all edutainment failed. I think that the Math Blaster series (at least the early ones) were very successful at teaching math while being fun. Most of the other edutainment I bought for my son was indeed wasted money.
It did (and does) sell well. By that measure, I guess it is indeed successful. It is however not a good game. For me, and for most professional game designers, Mathblaster is one of the ones that *really* failed. It’s often used as the quintessential bad educational game. I did an assessment of it here: http://minkhollow.ca/becker/doku.php?id=pf:game-reviews:mathblaster
There are a few games from the 80’s that were good: Carmen Sandiego is one, as is Oregon Trail, although later editions of Oregon Trail weren’t as good as earlier ones even though the graphics were better. The third edition is the best.
Teachers LOVE Mathblaster, and kids HATE it, although they’d never tell their teacher that because it still beats doing paper worksheets for most kids. Mathblaster is made with cheap graphics even though the production company is far from poor; it lacks sufficient feedback to let players know where they are and how they are doing, it is mind-numbingly predictable and the learning goals are tacked on as a front end rather than being part of how the game is scored. It is entirely possible to get through the game using random choices alone while learning nothing about math. As an Ed game, it fails to deliver on its promises, and as an entertainment, it kind of sucks. All three of my kids hated it.