Case study on the impact of the Making Games project. March 2011

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Case study on the impact of the

Making Games project

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Introduction

User-friendly tools to create websites, edit video, compose music and manipulate digital images have been widely available for more than 10 years. In 2003, however, there was a dearth of suitable software to enable children to design and produce computer games. The researchers involved in the Making Games project identified this need and recognised the educational potential of such a tool. Together with an industry partner, Immersive Education Ltd, they then spent three years (2003-2006) developing the software that would allow young people to make 3D adventure and puzzle games that are as satisfying to play as the ones they buy. This project was made possible by research council and government funding provided through the People at the Centre of Communication and Information Technologies (PACCIT) programme. The fact that the project secured three years’ funding was crucial to its success. As an ESRC evaluation of the project1_{later pointed out,}

this enabled the tool’s developers to reflect on their work with teachers and students and refine their product before it was offered to the market.

The software tool that the project eventually produced, Mission Maker, is now used in hundreds of schools and other educational establishments throughout the UK. It is also being sold to a number of other countries.

What Mission Maker allows

children to do

Mission Maker enables young game-makers to create visually rich worlds for their first-person adventure ‘missions’. They can:

• create and animate 3D characters with superior movement and spoken dialogue

• select elements from an extensive library of objects to create personalised environments for players to explore

• import their own music, graphics and videos

• set rules for the game play – and award points and scores to engage players.

The software is used in schools, colleges and city learning centres. It can be used by primary school pupils yet is also sufficiently adaptable to meet some of the requirements of A-level and undergraduate students on game design and multimedia courses. The Institute of Education also uses it in Masters programmes.

The researchers and their roles

The researchers involved in the Making Games project, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Caroline Pelletier, are affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and the Media at the Institute of Education. The centre is part of the London Knowledge Lab, a unique collaboration between the Institute of Education and Birkbeck. It brings together more than 50 researchers

Making Games project

Who carried out this research and development project?

Professor David Buckingham, Professor Andrew Burn and Dr Caroline Pelletier of the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, conducted the study in partnership with a software publisher, Immersive Education Ltd.

Who provided the funding?

The cost of the project was underwritten by the Economic and Social Research Council (£211,605), the Department of Trade and Industry (£242,293) and Immersive Education Ltd (£389,889).

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from both social sciences and computer science backgrounds.

The project’s researchers had three key roles. They:

• specified the design brief – the development of a software tool to enable children to make their own games

• organised a series of conversations between the software designers and the children participating in the project. This ensured that the children’s ideas fed into each successive design stage • set out to discover how well

the software worked with the children, what improvements could be made, how it could incorporate sound pedagogic principles, and how its design could reflect young people’s involvement in gaming culture. The research team initially considered how the tool could be used to help deliver the Year 8 curricula for English, Media and ICT. They also developed approaches for introducing young people to game design in after-school clubs.

Their research focused on game design as an extension of literacy, specifically ‘media literacy’, which has been

promoted by the government in recent years through the agency of Ofcom, the media regulator. As Skillset, the sector skills council for creative media, has pointed out2_{, the contemporary media}

environment means that traditional notions of literacy are being widened beyond written text, to encompass the many different ways in which people communicate - including visual images, animation, video, audio, graphic

design, and 3D objects. Computer games bring these different modes of communication together in highly sophisticated ways. The researchers also looked at the needs of girls and children with print-literacy problems.

What was original about

this project

The software broke new ground by simplifying the design of complex adventure games in two ways. Firstly, it contained a ‘rule editor’, which allowed children to specify the conditions under which any event in their game would happen as a simple sequence, such as “If the key is clicked, the door opens”.

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There was consequently no need for complex programming. Secondly, the 3D environments, objects and characters were pre-designed, so children also had no need to master 3D design or animation. They merely had to select characters, sets and objects from ‘libraries’. Some simple game-making software was available before 2003 but it did not include the programming element incorporated into Mission Maker.

The Making Games project also provided a new model of industrial design for the games and educational software sector. This was based on a partnership between the researchers and Immersive Education, together with the students and teachers, who were actively involved in every stage of the project. They were, in effect, co-designers of the software. The project evaluation commissioned by the ESRC concluded that this participatory design process had worked well.

Student and teacher

involvement in the project

The research team worked closely with students and teachers from two secondary schools: a mixed comprehensive school in Cambridge and a girls’ comprehensive in Lambeth. The children were about 12 when the project began and 15 when it ended. Researchers and representatives of Immersive Education took three successive prototypes of the software into the schools to collect feedback. Although the R&D team collaborated with more than 100 students and a dozen teachers over the course of the project, they worked particularly intensively with two groups of eight students, one in the co-ed, the other in the girls’ school; as well as two English teachers.

Over the project’s three years, the research partners (researchers, Immersive, students and teachers) developed a common language by

which to describe the software and its uses. This enabled cross-disciplinary as well as cross-generational

understanding of game design which ultimately improved the quality of the software.

They also defined the areas of knowledge that students need to acquire, such as the conceptual understanding of the conventions of game design, the way games target different audiences in specific ways and the commercial and regulatory aspects of game design. This model of game-literacy has been used to create materials to accompany the software. At the end of the project all the students who had worked with Mission Maker in the after-school clubs presented the games they had produced to a panel of education policy-makers, industry representatives, and games designers.

Dissemination

Journals and conference presentations

The insights derived from the project have been extensively disseminated through journal articles and book chapters written by David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Caroline Pelletier. The project has also been featured in keynote addresses at international conferences, media literacy seminars and teachers’ conferences in Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

One of the teachers involved in the project has spoken regularly at conferences and other events, and has co-authored a book on media literacy.

Media publicity

The researchers have also given a number of media interviews. Mission Maker has been the focus of several newspaper articles and has attracted the attention of Teachers’ TV and websites specialising in ICT in education. In one Guardian article3_,

technology reviewer Chris Drage

The research partners developed a common language by which to describe the software and its uses. This enabled disciplinary as well as cross-generational understanding of game design.

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concluded: “Handled correctly by a sensitive, well-organised teacher, Mission Maker can help develop problem-solving, decision-making and strategic thinking. The only limit is the imagination of the game creator.” A second article4_{, in The Times}

Educational Supplement, reported that Mission Maker “extends pupils’ media literacy skills, as well as engaging them in literature”. It explained that pupils in one East Midlands school had created computer games that dramatise key scenes in Romeo and Juliet. Another TES article5_{explained that an English}

teacher had used Mission Maker to turn Robert Browning’s famously

enigmatic poem, “My Last Duchess”, into a computer game to help them decode its meaning.

Other articles have reported favourably on how Mission Maker has helped to motivate young offenders in Sheffield and English-as-a-second-language learners in London6_.

You Tube and social networking sites

Although newspapers and their websites have done much to publicise Mission Maker many teachers have also found out about the games-authoring tool – and discussed its uses – by logging on to social networking sites. Mission Maker video tutorials7

are available via delicious, the social bookmarking web service. Other videos have been posted on the You Tube site to demonstrate educational games that schools have developed using Mission Maker. One has been devised to teach children about health and safety8_.

The project’s impact

Sales figures and foreign purchasers

Mission Maker has proved to be a commercial success. By 2009, sales of the software tool had amounted to £607,500, some £33,500 of which were from international sales, mostly in the US and Australia.

Mission Maker is also being used in

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Singapore and Danish classrooms and is being piloted in Finland.

Immersive Education is also negotiating (December 2010) a translation into Spanish for a pilot project in Argentina.

Influence on policy

Becta, the government agency that was formerly responsible9_{for ensuring}

the effective and innovative use of technology in education, was closely involved with the Making Games project. As the ESRC evaluation of Making Games noted, Becta subsequently revised its policy for ICT in schools, allowing the purchase of higher-specification PCs. This has enabled schools to handle the demands of gaming environments. In a document reviewing game-based learning

published in March 201010_{, Becta points}

out that Mission Maker allows pupils “to learn about the literacy of games design (eg narrative structure, rules systems, designing for audience) whilst developing their problem solving, value judgment, negotiating and decision-making skills”.

The London Knowledge Lab researchers involved in the project have participated in policy-related workshops and conferences, some of which have considered the gender equality issues raised by the growing popularity of computer games. They have also liaised with the National Association for the Teaching of English and the communications regulator, Ofcom.

David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Caroline Pelletier have been asked to take on a number of consultancy and advisory roles since the project ended. For example, Andrew Burn subsequently acted as an adviser to the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (the games industry’s European association), and gave talks at two of their annual conferences11_.

Use in the classroom

Ready-made classroom activities mapped to England’s national curriculum and other relevant

frameworks and exam syllabuses have been produced for schools that are using Mission Maker. They include:

• Media Studies KS3 (4.5Mb) • Focus on Games KS3 (2.7Mb)

Written as part of a collaborative project by middle school

teachers in Bedfordshire, this resource provides suggestions for 10 weeks’ work.

• Teacher Notes (1Mb) for the Gifted and Talented Mission Maker Developing Cognitive Skills course (KS2). This is further supported with the Gifted and Talented Workbook (1Mb) and the Fairy Tale Detective games (18Mb).

Endorsement by examination boards

“Games, Game Engines and Design”, a teaching programme built around Mission Maker, has been endorsed by the OCR exam board for use with students working towards its Certificate/Diploma in iMedia. This resource provides step-by-step ideas to support teaching of the game units in the iMedia course.

Mission Maker has also been included in the Moderators’ Toolkit for the EdXcel Diploma in Digital Applications course as an appropriate tool to use in the game-making modules.

Building capacity – future prospects

Mission Maker’s designers do not see it as a vocational training aid. They regard it as a learning tool – one that helps to prepare young people for a world in which new media will have huge importance. However, it is hoped that Mission Maker and other games-authoring software that is now available to schools could encourage more young people to consider careers in the games industry.

The Computer Games Skills Forum, which is tasked with ensuring that the UK’s games industry has “the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time” believes that

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The Making Games project

projects such as Making Games should be supported wherever possible12_.

The Scottish Government has reached a similar conclusion and its new Curriculum for Excellence encourages pupils to use software to create their own computer games. It hopes that this will not only help children to develop skills for life in the 21st century but will also create “dynamic young programmers” who will ensure the continued success of Scotland’s computer games industry13_.

Singapore has the same aspirations. It has established a National 3D Game Building Competition for schools – using Mission Maker – to raise awareness that computer games can be engaging learning tools. However,

this

annual competition, now in its second year, is also seen as supporting

Singapore’s efforts to establish itself as a regional hub for interactive games development.

It will be years before anyone knows whether this initiative has helped to achieve that aim. However, the very fact that Mission Maker is being used in Singapore, a country that is in the vanguard of ICT-in-education developments, is further evidence that this project has had substantial and very far-reaching impact.

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Pelletier, C. (2008) ‘Producing difference in studying and making computer games: how students construct games as gendered in order to construct themselves as gendered’, in Y. Kafai, C. Heeter, J. Denner and J. Sun (Eds.) Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: new perspectives on gender, games and computing. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 145-160.

Pelletier, C. (2007) ‘Producing gender through digital interactions: the social purposes which young people set out to achieve through

computer game design’, in S. Weber and S. Dixon (eds.) Digital Girls: Growing Up Online. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129-148.

Pelletier, C. (2006) ‘Reconfiguring interactivity, agency and pleasure in the computer games and education debate – using Zizek’s concept of interpassivity to analyse educational play’, E-Learning, Vol. 2(4), pp. 317-326

Pelletier, C. (2005) ‘The uses of literacy in

studying computer games: comparing students’ oral and visual representations of games’, English Teaching: Critique and Practice, Vol 4(1), pp. 40-59.

Whiteman, N. and Pelletier, C. (in press) ‘Affiliation in the enactment of fan identity: a comparison of virtual and face-to-face settings’, in C. Ching and B. Foley (Eds.) Technology and Identity: Constructing the Self in a Digital World. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press.

Notes

1 Impact Evaluation of People at the Centre of Communication and Information Technologies (PACCIT) Programme, ESRC, February 2009

2 Making Games http://www.skillset.org/games/ at_school/article_4404_1.asp

3 “Review”, Guardian, June 19, 2007

4 “Technology - Mission possible”, TES, January 22, 2010

5 “Robert Browning, ‘Playstation’ poet”, TES, September 15, 2006

6 “Learners on a mission at Stephen Lawrence Centre”, Merlin John Online, December 15, 2009

7 http://www.teach-ict.net/software/mission_ maker/mission_maker.htm

8 http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qES6WyizoqM

9 The Coalition Government announced the closure of Becta in May 2010.

10 Game-based learning, March 2010

11 http://www.isfe-eu.org/index.php?PHPSESSID =bnl2ru90o2o330vb5bjt0spmt5&alias=3rd-isfe-conference

12 Making Games, Skillset http://www. skillset.org/games/at_school/article_4404_1. asp13 “Games go on the curriculum”, Scottish Government news release, April 14, 2008

13 “Games go on the curriculum”, Scottish Government news release, April 14, 2008

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Case study on the impact of the Making Games project. March 2011