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Life
After Twitch:
An Interview with Margo Nanny
Who is
Margo Nanny? Margo Nanny is the Senior Designer/Producer at Interactive
Learning. Margo started as a middle school Math games teacher. In 1987
she turned Disney's Donald in Mathmagic Land into an early HyperCard/videodisk
prototype. She became a founding member of Apple's Multimedia Lab where
she designed activities for the Visual Almanac. She co-authored, CountDown
and Planetary Taxi (Voyager Co), and co-designed SimTown for Maxis. Her
most recent product is a kid's code cracking product called Top Secret
Decoder (HMI). This January she helped gather 45 education software industry
luminaries to spend a day discussing the future of the educational software
industry.
Is it possible to provide children with needed skills and talents simply
by making use of the processes inherent in new media?
This is accomplished by working with ideas in complex environments like
simulations or construction kits and by developing a sense of representational
systems as seen in music programs or kids programming environments like
Cocoa. My last product was called Top Secret Decoder by
Houghton Mifflin Interactive. On one hand it was a kids' product to create
and crack codes, but on the other hand it was a great environment to give
kids an experience in playing around with representational systems. One
code had an animal for each letter. One code would print out gibberish
and when you folded the paper in half and held it up to the light you
could read it perfectly. These are just tiny examples. The possibilities
have barely even been thought about.
Basically humans are stuck in many frames of reference related to time
and space. So...technology can allow us to get a unique point of view.
It can also allow us to speed up and slow down time which lets us see
things we can't see from our normal human perspective. (we're also stuck
in a framework where time just moves at it's own pace).
So the point of view we take can be orchestrated to create a superior
environment for learning?
The technology enables us to get unique points of view. A favorite example
is one from the Apple Multimedia Lab 10 years ago. We created footage
of kids on one of those playground merry- go-rounds. Four kids sat on
the merry-go-round and we spun it. One of the kids on the merry-go-round
rolled a ball to the person straight across from her. The ball however
seemed to make a 90 degree turn and roll exactly to the person on her
left. It seemed soooooo weird to the people on the merry-go-round. However
we also shot the footage from directly above the merry-go-round and then
used the computer to mark the placement of the ball as it moved. With
the technology we were able to see that the ball actually moved more or
less in a straight line, it's just that as the merry-go-round moved the
person to the left ended up being in the straight-across position by the
time the ball got there. It's an interesting example of how we can't always
see what's happening because of our point of view. The people on the merry-go-round
couldn't believe the ball moved in a straight line until they used the
computer to trace the path. This example always interests me because here
we are living on a spinning earth and there are probably plenty of things
happening that we don't realize just because we're stuck in this point
of view.
And by permitting the student to participate in this type of activity,
it enables learning to take place at a faster pace?
The process of participation definitely accelerates the learning activity,
but the question is always, what kind of participation? With the estimation
game (CountDown) as well as with the solar system game (Planetary
Taxi) the most profound interaction was not between the computer and
kid but between kids and kids. The kids would sit there and discuss their
guess and share their strategies. This interaction turned the game into
a human experience with a concept in which the child would have to articulate
her ideas to a friend. That's where all the mental structure around the
concept is put in place in the child's brain, even if the child doesn't
know much about the concept. Through this interactive experience of discussing
it with a friend and then applying conjectures in an interactive software
environment the child becomes totally ready to learn about the concept
in a more formal learning environment in which a teacher brings final
substance to the idea and helps it all make sense. That's the great feeling
we all get when we participate in a well done lesson where we really get
it, and realize that we've learned something new and interesting and valuable.
The child's interaction with the technology is also important and again
we have to look at what is involved in it. The main question which Seymour
Papert put so aptly in his book "The connected Family" is, "Is the child
programming the computer or is the computer programming the child?
It would
appear that both need to take place. In order to take advantage of the
processes and the content, a certain amount of learning must occur at
the onset. The distinction becomes hard to recognize. In gaming, the rules
of the game are used to introduce the player to the manner in which to
proceed. Is there an equivalent factor in education?
The field of education has uncovered basic principles that help to explore
the idea of active cooperation. If we really want computers to help children
enter the 21st century we need to use them for higher level thinking activities
in which the child is creating, designing, building and representing ideas,
not simply becoming a correct answer machine herself. Activities such
as simulations, creativity programs, construction kits, or kids programming
languages end up being highly compelling because the child creates a framework
in her mind which holds all the constraints of the program and then she
works within that framework to create something of interest. This is the
greatest kind of interaction because it uses multiple intelligences rather
than simply reinforcing a specific kind of thinking.
It's hard to know which comes first - the concept needed to teach or
the example that clearly demonstrates a principle. It is amazing how like
puzzles/games these elements are...but I suppose that has to do with the
medium and its ability to support interactivity.
Either the concept or the example can come first. For instance, with Planetary
Taxi a teacher wanted us to think about the concept of a scale model
of the solar system so we just played around with ideas until someone
got a truly original one. With the marbles the activity was first and
we started thinking about how to apply the technology to the age old activity
of estimating beans in a jar. Unfortunately most design tasks today go
something like this: A publisher wants a product to compete with the Jump
Start Series because it's a big seller to anxious parents who want
to be sure Johnny knows his basic skills. So the designer is asked to
come up with 15 language arts games that reinforce the skills listed in
the California State Framework for Language Arts for 3rd 4th and 5th grade.
This sort of design work doesn't leave time for very original thinking.
Curious about how all this work came about. Just how is your
work accomplished? Are you given a problem to solve? Do you meet with
the producer and then do the research? Do you have dialogs with the end
user - Or do you write via assignment for a particular age group? Or is
the eventual use a blank while you are working? Do you work in isolation?
Or is it a team effort where you bounce ideas off each other?" Her answer
shed some light on producing concepts for educational purposes that holds
true for all creative development.
Generally someone has a concept for a product. Sometimes it's the publisher.
Sometime we get a good concept and pitch it to a publisher. Right now
that's difficult since as one publisher said "All we're interested in
now is 'meat and potatoes' which is essentially reading and math with
a licensed character". However once there's a concept then a team is brought
together and we start hashing it out. From here on it's always a team
effort though it does take one lead designer to hold the vision together.
My own method is to start by having creative conversations with people
I know who have thought much about similar things. For Planetary Taxi
we hung out with people at the exploratorium. For our last product
Top Secret Decoder we spent quite a bit of time with Scott Kim,
a visual wizard and puzzlemaster (in the gaming community) who had created
amazing fonts which were so puzzle like that they could be turned into
unique visual codes. Generally we collect many ideas and then start honing
them down until we have a coherent product. Usually the end result is
about 40% of what we'd hoped for when we started. When it comes down to
time and budget there are many compromises.
The way in which the material is used influences its effectiveness.
Here is where interactivity and the resulting participation becomes significant.
Participation accelerates the learning activity - (as demonstrated in
the estimation unit.) This proven technique, which is such a major part
of new media instruction, can be made use of for the teacher's, as well
as, the student's advantage. Does this princpal hold true regardless of
the learning objective?
School most strongly reinforces only two kinds of intelligences "Linguistic"
and Logical/mathematical" The others that are often left behind are Spatial,
Bodily kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and the newly
defined Naturalist intelligence. (These kinds of intelligences were defined
by Howard Gardner a professor of Education at Harvard who developed the
theory of Multiple Intelligences).
I can see where spotlighting intelligences usually overlooked would
improve the quality of education. It isn't as clear exactly how that's
done.
Basically back at the multimedia lab we were making a thing called The
Visual Almanac which was our sample of 2000 images and sounds with
about 20 interactive pieces showing what could be done. We brainstormed
hundreds of ideas and shot some images and then each just picked one as
a challenge and developed an idea around it. The best ideas were not new.
The marble idea came from years of having asked kids to guess how many
marbles there were in a jar and realizing that the technology could help
create an experience in which the kids could focus on the estimating rather
than on the counting the marbles. It takes a long time for a 1st grader
to count 250 marbles. Much better to have the computer do that if the
goal is to move the first grader onto the estimation concept. After playing
with the image of the marble jar on the videodisc for a year we (Bob Mohl,
a wild and crazy MIT Media Lab guy) were asked to make it into a CD game.
This was when we got the idea to expand the math and use images of objects
stacked or piled in different ways so that kids would notice some piles
were sort of countable because they had patterns (like a rectangular pyramid)
and other piles were just piles and you really had to guess.
So, some
of the ideas evolve from the nature of the work, itself.
Other ideas came out of conversation with teachers. The high school physics
teacher told us he spends a week creating a scale model of the solar system
out on the football field. He has the kids do all the calculations and
then if the sun is the size of a grapefruit they discover that Pluto is
the size of a grain of salt and is a football field away. We thought maybe
the technology could help speed up this concept of the relative size of
planets and the scale of the solar system. So we thought we'd make the
sun about 8 feet (a weather balloon) and then calculated that the solar
system would be 6 miles long. So we got a piece of footage from the California
Hwy dept of a VERY straight desert road and we laid out the planets along
the road so as you drive past the first planets would go by quickly and
the other would take a long time (many seconds) to get to. The image is
so striking that you never really forget it once you've seen it. And getting
to manipulate it yourself helps imprint it. Thus kids in a very short
time have a strong impression that those inner planets are really close
and the outer planets are really far away. This is something they never
really get from making those planet mobiles in 4th grade. They do get
it in the Football field model but it takes so long to get there that
it doesn't seem that dramatic.
This is a very striking example. One thing the technology can do is speed
up the time it takes us to "get" an idea which makes it's impact more
profound somehow.
And putting the process in the technological arena helps to do this?
Hopefully we can create environments in which kids can play around with
concepts. The environment may not actually teach the concept, but by playing
around the kid gets an intuitive sense of the idea such that when a teacher
brings it up the child has already "got it". One of our first examples
of interacting with images was a simple little game with a jar of marbles.
We shot a picture of a jar of 250 marbles. Then we took one marble out
and shot another picture of 249 marbles. Removing one at a time we took
pictures all the way down until the jar was empty. We put the pictures
on a videodisk and made a little estimating game. Guess how many marbles
and the image would count down your guess and you'd probably find many
marbles still in the jar so you could make another guess. A first grade
teacher told us that she used this in her class as an activity station
and later in the year when she got to her estimating unit she gathered
the kids around and started talking about the concept of estimating. Finally
one kid said "Oh! It's like those marbles." And suddenly like lightening
the whole class "got it" because they'd been playing with the images of
marbles all year. The teacher was amazed because rather than spending
a week on estimating she only spent two days and felt the kids understood
it better than in previous years.
A light goes on for the kids because of the special configurations
possible by using a computer.. That's the same thing that happens in a
good game, Isn't it?
People often polarize our industry into two distinct camps. At one end,
gamers use cutting-edge technology to build killer entertainment. At the
other end, educators apply tried-and-true (read: out-of-date) technology
to build brains.
And you're saying that we can use the resources of the industry: software,
hardware and the creative elements, to lead both gaming and education?
The educational software industry over the past 10 years has yielded a
few little "golden nugget" engines that have allowed users to make profound
conceptual leaps through software experiences. A probability machine that
dynamically flips 10,000 coins per minute and enables us to watch the
dynamic graph change and grow can alter our thinking on the topic forever.
Software pieces which enable us to manipulate time and space can allow
us to grasp things in new ways. There are plenty of profound examples
which use technology to help the brain make interesting conceptual leaps,
yet these products have never come to the forefront. Meanwhile the latest
clone of Command and Conquer or JumpStart 4th grade are heralded
by the industry as leading us all down the road to success.
Involving students in the process of learning is unquestionably beneficial.
Educational psychologists declare that we learn by seeing, by seeing and
hearing, but best of all, by participation. Computer technology permits
interactivity of a very high order.
Through interaction with interesting activities the user can construct
ideas. Generally the reason a great lesson from a great teacher is so
compelling is because our experience makes us ready for it. We've already
constructed a framework in which to place the information. Interactivity
has a tremendous potential to help kids construct such frameworks. Consider
what children go through becoming adept at SimCitychat. Consider all the
concepts such as management of resources, population's happiness, government,
balance of taxes. But simulation doesn't "teach" those ideas, they just
create rich environments in which kids encounter them. But an instructor
who later teaches those ideas to an audience of SimCitychat players would
probably have a somewhat captivated audience.
There is no question that using the computer in service of education
has a great many features that cannot be obtained in any other way.
Both the gaming industry and the educational software industry are acting
in a short sighted fashion by driving their product design entirely from
the latest software fad and short term bottom line. The goal of this round
table is to look at what both industries have learned in the past 10 years
and talk about ways to develop software that has the best of both worlds
in it. Currently the educational software industry tries hard to make
interesting games which can satisfy both the consumer and the education
market but the environments are flat, the technology old and the outcome
rather dull.
Meanwhile high tech consumer game developers continue to crank out shoot-em-up
games with beautiful technology, fantastic environments, engaging interaction
but zero level content. It is hoped that the CGDC conference can become
a place where these issues can be discussed with hopes that over time
some of the game developers will think about creating games with real
content which can actually benefit the conceptual thinking of users.
The round table to be presented at the CGDC "Getting an Educational Bang
From your Killer Game" is specifically for those who might want to take
on the challenge of combining great gaming and conceptual content for
products of the future.
The gamers have technology, excitement, and pacing, often in fantastic
3D environments. The educators have the keys to creating conceptual experiences
which build minds and make complex ideas come alive. The goal is to consider
the possibility of a cross-breeding, the merger of game technology with
educational content, one to grab kids attention and one to give them something
they can take away. Consider the possibilities that could evolve if a
portion of the high-tech game developer community started using their
skills to develop software that provided quality educational experiences
as well as quality game play.
The big message is this: The gamers have fantastic technology and the
educators have fantastic content. The world simply can't afford for these
two groups to go their separate ways any longer with the gamers out there
using their incredible technology to build the next "killer" game while
the educators end up with only those products that can be programmed in
Director. There must be a way to start turning the heads of the gamers
and finding ways to interest them in taking their wonderful game engines
and somehow applying them to fantastic content. I don't know all the answers
for how to do this, but I certainly believe with all the brains in the
gaming industry that it shouldn't be too hard to work together to figure
it out.
Gloria Stern is a game design consultant and the director of The
Virtual Classroom, a distance learning program for creating new media.
She is the founder of The Mouse Trap and Two By Two. Her web activities
include reviews, live chats, a Q & A column and Gamasutra interviews.
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