Games and Education

MODERATOR: Our second panel of the day is on games and education. We're going to be going a little out of order from the sequence in the program due to technical difficulties. But, I think, we'll hopefully get everyone's AV stuff up and operational as this goes along. I'll remind you, for those of you who are arriving late, the way this works is each speaker has been given, all the speakers have been given a set of questions, which are in your program book. And the questions for this panel are on the bottom of page 9. They can address any or all of these questions as they choose in their opening presentation. Each speaker speaks for about 10 minutes. And, then, we will open it up for a broader discussion, including questions from the floor.

MODERATOR: And, we're going to begin with Idit Harel. Harel, named one of Silicon Valley's rally reporters top 100 entrepreneurs for the past three years holds a Doctorate from the MIT Media Lab, two Masters Degrees from Harvard University in Interactive Technology in Education and Human Development, and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Tel Aviv University. She has taught at MIT and Harvard and speaks frequently to business and academic communities throughout the world. Harel is co-editor of Children Designers, winner of the 1991 Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. One of the first graduates of the MIT Media Lab, Harel founded Mama Medica, Incorporated, to create a consumer brand based on break through learning methodology and technologies pioneered at the media lab. I'll turn it over to you.

HAREL: OK. Thank you. Am I on? Yeah? Your first question, Henry, to us was entertainment has become something of a negative term in popular discussions of media contact. Why? Are there meaningful ways of reconciling the goals of education and popular culture? Or, are these necessarily antagonistic or, at least, fundamentally different goals? So, entertainment, the word I know whose willing to shoot it up right now, I'm going. Who wants to do the sound effects for me? Besides being just a very ugly word, we talk about the aesthetics of things. The so-called entertainment products typically wind up being neither educational nor entertaining. And, that's a very bad thing. It's usually the worst of both worlds. I don't know of any edutainment product that I love or am passionate about. And, most of the research that I did, I don't know a lot of kids who are passionate about this so-called entertainment product. So, selling kids on this edutainment thing took the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] trying to convince the child that broccoli tastes good or that maybe we should produce broccoli-flavored ice cream. But, I think, kids know better. So, that's the first thing I'm shooting up this morning. But, I also think that education and entertainment are not mutually exclusive. And, what we'll see today is how at Mama Media some of our most popular features are ones that actually develop some very specific, useful skills. A lot of entertaining, playful, features that we have in our products actually are very important to children's development of love for learning and a lot of very important learning skills. And, actually, as I was thinking about the stock yesterday and the title of our panel is Games in Education, I created four slides, and this is the other one, Games in Learning, Play and Learning, Playful Learning. So, let's go back. And, I invite you to shoot the first three. I'm shooting this one. Shooting this one. It's a little bit better. This is kind of OK. But, this is it. So, playful learning is really what I would like all of us to focus on today, because I think this is what I hope to see happening in the future with this new generation of kids that are born into the Internet age, that are born into a world filled with technology, boys and girls, who are born into a world filled with technology from day 1, who are going to play video games and use VCRs and all different kinds of Play Stations and Sega's Dream Cast. I actually would like to make two more claims, and this will lead us into some of the discussions that were made here this morning. Claim No. 1 for this panel will be, All games are better than school work sheets. Who disagrees? [LAUGHTER] OK. Claim No. 2 today will be, and I'm sure my panelists here will agree with me, especially Bonnie who is really coming from inside from being a teacher, here's claim No. 2. If kids will play some of the best Nintendo 64, Sega, Dream Cast, and Sony Play Station games in school every day for at least an hour or two, they probably will score higher in most or maybe even all standardized tests. And, it's not because people will train them for the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] games, but simply because they will play these games, something good is going to happen to them. And, that spirit of play, and that rich environment that is immersed even in gauging in the way that all of you are talking about, is very important. But, my Claim No. 3 today, which is, I think, really lacking in the discussion so far, is that it's really not just about playing games. It's also about making them, designing them, and thinking about what it means to develop and design your own game, which is really the essence of what I think we need to bring to kids from day one since they're born. And, this is what I would like to introduce into the panel into the discussion today. How many game designers do we have here? Great. How many game players do we have here? We had a business man here before who is running a company but doesn't like to play games. Who is a designer that doesn't play? You're a designer that don't play. Not too many. I'm sure that, even those two people who were brave enough to raise their hands, they probably have at least one or two games that are engaging to them. They're probably very selective, and maybe they have good memories of using games and gaining some insights, because, otherwise, I don't know why they were attracted to this whole idea of designing games. So, playing is very important for the process of design. And, if kids are not born in the '90s, and we know that probably a big percentage of the work force have been involved in designing multimedia information, playful learning environments, and games. For a form of entertainment, I think, all of these kids need to be engaged in learning how to create playful learning, playing in playful learning environments, and just doing it on a regular basis. So, it's going beyond the three Rs into something that I will describe today as the three Xs. It all started at the Media Lab. I was lucky enough to be here when it started, when Nicholas [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and many others put together this incredible, experimental program in thinking about life of being the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and integrating learning and thinking with playing and design. And, cinema was made interactive. And learning was made interactive. But, I think, the thing that united all of us at the Media Lab is that we were focusing on construction versus instruction. We were focusing on using technologies and using media for self expression. And, this is something that, I think, we need to bring to learning environments and think about this when we think about designing games for kids to use for the purpose of playful learning, or involving them in construction of learning environments that involve interactive design. So, I took a lot of these ideas myself in my research here in the '80s and the early '90s and really focused on using versus creating. I focused on the creation, although I really believe that you have to be a heavy user and be passionate about playing in order to want to design one of these things yourself. I don't know a lot of chefs that don't like eating gourmet food. I mean, it's the same idea. People who want to produce films watch a lot of films. People who produce television watch a lot of television, even stuff that they don't really like to produce. They just play it and use it and view it, because they need to get into thinking and inspiration and into the culture. And, the idea of learning by design is very, very, important, because today's generation, these kids who are born in the '90s are very different than us. I mean, when we were kids, baby boomers, we were used to consuming media, one or two television stations, maybe a couple of newspapers, and that was it. Generation X, a lot of people who are sitting in this room, are already used to controlling, we heard yesterday about this special relationship you have with Cable television and magazines and the remote control. And this, our early versions of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and video games through the movies we saw yesterday, were really about giving you a little bit of choice, but as Warren said this morning, not enough. I think this new generation of kids are already born into games and into a world of interactivity that's allowing them a much greater sense of control over the media experiences that they grow up with. And, they really do have, from research that we do at Mama Media, they do have a very different set of attitudes and expectations and behaviors as they interact with media, all media, not just video games that they interact with. We call these kids the karate generation. We think that these kids, who are born in the '90s or these kids who are not even born yet, are nonlinear. They can think linearly, but they feel very comfortable thinking nonlinearly. They are multi-taskers. They are interdisciplinary, technologically fluent. They are accustomed to control the media experience. And, they're looking for what we call hard fun, which is very much [UNINTELLIGIBLE] from the world of video games. Every time you solve the level, you want and you get even a more challenging complexity. And, the challenging level is very different than the school's worksheets, right? So, that's something that is a very important element that we need to integrate into media experiences of children in playful learning environments. The 12 and under generation, which is my expertise, I'm usually focused on that age group in my work. These are great kids who are really passionate about learning. They're learning all the time. They think that learning with technology is cool. And, I think, that's another important element as you design the video games for the future of these kids. If you design learning environments for schools or home or museums or community centers or the Piata, whatever it is, I think you have to take into consideration that they are multi-tasked, that they are technologically fluent, that they want to develop this intimate relationship with creating media, not just using media, and that they're looking for diversity, not for uniformity. And this is all very important. Here is another insight that we have about these kids. They are the new CEOs of the household. So, when you create this consumer product, you have to think of these kids as the chief entertainment officers. They're definitely more technologically fluent than their parents. They make a lot of entertainment decisions in the households today. Our research tells us that they are also the other chief education technology officers in the home and in the classroom too. They are really out there testing things, figuring it out, hooking things, looking at new games and new pieces of software, and making pretty clever decisions about navigation and aesthetics of design and a lot of things. That's part of their language. It's part of their [UNINTELLIGIBLE], which is part of the way that they think. And, they are also chief retailing officers feeling very comfortable navigating in this interactive, immersive, multi-media environments, not just for play. Not just for learning, but, also, for shopping. So, communicating shopping to these kids, even shopping of these games or shopping of any other thing, groceries, is going to happen. That's a big deal of convergence from my perspective. It's going to happen through creating stuff that feels like a video game as you shop. Parents [UNINTELLIGIBLE] rely on kids for technology and entertainment decisions. And, so, we need to take this into consideration, too. There are a lot of creative future opportunities. And, it's very important to talk to kids and to ask them about it as we design this multi-dimensional, highly immersive playful learning environments for the future. What Mama Media is actually presenting to this karate generation when we create mixed media for kids to create their own media, we really have five principles we always want kids to try and experience, again similar to a video game's experience when you don't need manuals. You don't need instruction. You kind of plug it in, and you do it. Good learning environments, even without technology, you just do it. You just know what to do. You know what needs to be figured out, and you mess around with it. And, you're engaged from, actually, maybe one other thing that is important to note, it's not just about what games can bring to education, but there are a lot of great learning environments who can inform game designers about what to do to create good games. And here at MIT, I know of a lot of people who will get engaged and addicted to learning, will close themselves into an office, and will not go out, and will be very passionate and engage with lots of adrenalin and all these emotions and all these things. Even without characters and sophisticated graphics, they are just engaged in topic or studying something in a way that is usually project centered. We need to take some of these elements from people who are engaged in technological or non-technological playful or immersive learning and see what can we learn from that, and bring it into the world of games and designing games. A lot of this is about personalization and make your own. And, they think, in graduate schools, we see much more passion towards learning than in the fourth grade, because in graduate school, we allow people to create their own media, their own expression, pick the topic that they love, and develop a lot of passion about what they're doing, and try to figure a lot of things on the fly, not have a plan necessarily. All these things that are happening in graduate school that relate to learning are really important as we develop learning environments that are involving play for younger children. It's very important for children to have access to their own ideas and to bring themselves into the game, to create their own levels, to create their own graphics, to create their backgrounds, to figure out, I think, what we saw yesterday again in the video, is that some elements of design your own Barbie and send her into something. Obviously, it's very primitive. In technology, we couldn't really do anything interesting with Barbie after we built her up. But, in the future, we'll probably be able to do something more interesting in [UNINTELLIGIBLE] time and design some interesting things for the Barbie or the wrestler to do that would be very exciting for players, not just kids.

MODERATOR: About two more minutes, Idit.

HAREL: Good. Three X's is very important, so kids can grow up today and learn how to read perfectly well. We heard yesterday the story about Hawkins daughter who is six. She doesn't know how to read, but she kind of figured out how to play her Pokemon at night. I observe this a lot with my own children and other children that we study. And, I think, we can definitely imagine a kid who is learning how to read and write perfectly well today will not be a happy citizen 10, 20, years from now, because these kids also need to know the three Xs, which is expression with digital media, exploration in digital spaces with digital tools in real time, and exchanging ideas and projects and stuff in a digital world beyond email. So, I hope that I will be able to surf with you as part of the question/answer period, to take it with some quick grab that I did yesterday just in case the searching will not work. What we have at Mama Media is a space for game design, for participation in building characters and narratives. We have places where kids can come and design their own interface, and that's the beginning of their participation. We work with very retarded and primitive technology called the Internet. We have to run on AOL browsers, Netscape, and Explorer [3.0?] and higher. So, what you'll see on Mama Media.com is just the beginning of that direction that we are very interested in bringing these ideas to the masses and create not an [itchy?] but a mass media type of company that allow kids from all over the world, the haves, the have nots, people from developing countries. We have kids, over 1 million members, and kids from over 36 different countries doing it as we speak. So, it's not just the suburban kids or kids who have the fence at technology. It can be a kid from Thailand or a kid from South American or from Africa that happens to have the community center with one computer that was donated somehow. And, they can already do it. And, hopefully, we will get a lot more devices and wireless and things that are cheaper, or Play Stations, throughout the world with a people who are going to sponsor that. Playful learning and digital [final?] line is really what we're trying to give kids in a surprise that is filled with projects and games and design environments that allow boys and girls to grow up with the very simple tools that are involving them from age 5 in the process of designing their own games and sending these to friends. So, it's Mama Media assets, combined with kid's assets. And, everybody's creating games with our assets or their own assets. And that's, actually, reducing costs of production also quite a great deal. There are [UNINTELLIGIBLE] activities and tools for kids to learn about so many nations and making their own social animation activities and send it to a friend. There are different jig saw puzzles. But, it's always with the purpose of kids sending their own art and creating their own puzzles and publishing, sharing, them. The kids art is blended with Mama Media art. People can create their own interactive narratives with animated characters and different themes. If they're into popular culture and bands, they can create their own bands and backstage basketball games, different kinds of space stories. Even greetings at Mama Media are customized and animated by the children. And, we pick up topics that we think will be a good entry point for them, you know, zoo, and earth, and space, and whatever. And, again, think of 7, and 8, and 9, and 10-year olds getting involved with digital media to create their own. This is a noisy drawing. That's the publishing area. But, we also have something here called [Stemps?] and Stomps inventions, which is really about kids designing their own machines and their own creations and writing stories about it. Some of the results, if you see that when you create something like this, media metrics fun, Mama Media.com, to be the second fastest growing site after Pokemon.com. Now, we don't have television every morning at 7:00. We don't yet have television every morning at 7:00 in the morning. We don't yet have video games and commercials all over and a lot of merchandising and licensing and advertising. But, this is something that we're doing that is always easier. We're appealing to today's kids, and we are very excited. It's much more appealing to kids than seeing the nick dot, the com characters from TV or the Fox Kids.com from TV. They're actually coming and creating their own media on our site. And, they're also customized. Advertising that we do, based on the same principles, which is kids design their own expressive advertising and print them and send them to friends. There are ways to do it in an appropriate way with parental permission and with [UNINTELLIGIBLE] between content and advertising and make kids more media savvy and more knowledgeable about what advertising and sponsorship is all about in this interactive space. And, so, we use the same story engines that we use with kids to create games, we can also use for, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] of Ford cars that kids can actually build their own stamps and their own story and submit it to a contest. So, it's really developing relationship with playful learning through kids websites, through parents and teachers websites. Teachers will publish lesson plans on how to use these activities in classrooms. There are different kinds of programmable activity and stuff that kids will be able to design and buy or sell on the site. Let me stop here. The last thing that I would like to do is just, as we go through this site, we can do [MUSIC]. You're obviously invited to play on Mama Media.com. And, I know we're running, right now we have a game's club. We're running a poll related to kids designing their own games. These are the four main activity centers on Mama Media where you can build your own directories and rom. [MUSIC] You can be involved in projects and games, and design your own, and customize your Mama Media experience. You can, for example, decide to, I'll just show you something very, very simple. You can design, in this little digital [UNINTELLIGIBLE], you can pick up something really special for Valentine's Day, and see it in real time. If you don't like it, maybe do this one. I have to do the poll. One second.

MODERATOR: All right. One second. And, if people want to start lining up for questions while she's finishing up --

HAREL: OK. So, we have the community here is ours. [MUSIC] And, we're going to enter the game squad where kids are encouraged to share their own games. Jessie, Devon, and Zack are the hosts. Welcome to the Games Club. We're the M gang, Devon, Jessie, and Zack. These days everything is getting more and more high tech, even games. So, we're trying to introduce really young kids to this notion of digital games. We are excited to have you post messages about games on the message board, or check out a high-tech game on the web, or create one of [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And, if we go to Zach's polling booth, we can, in real time, actually see what we are featuring this week. OK. If you had a game factory, what kind of high-tech games would you design? Option No. 1: A game that blasts you into outer space to explore galaxies far, far away. Sounds like edutainment to me. OK? Option No. 2: A game that lets you pop up on your friend's computer screens and play against them one on one. Option No. 3: A building game in which you design your own high-tech kid run city. Four: An entertainment site where you play all your favorite games with your friends, and you always win. And, Five: A high-speed action game in which the super hero is made from a 3-D image of you. Most of the time, by the way the polls themselves are being submitted by kids, this one is a good example. So, who wants to, what are you voting for? One. Who votes for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? What? Which one, which option is that? Four. Let's see if you're thinking like an 8 or 9-year old. Well, as of now, we have almost 31% of kids voted for a game that lets you pop up on your friend's computer screens and play against them one on one. And, No. 2 is a building game in which you design your own high-tech kid run city. So, all of us need to really ask kid questions and run polls. And, we have a lot of other game, design related polls from kids that we can explore later.

MODERATOR: OK. We need to move to questions. And, there's a gentlemen up there ready to fire. [MUSIC]

MAN1: I'd like to introduce a sort of a, can we turn that music off please?

MAN2: We can't hear you. [LAUGHTER] We can't hear you.

MAN3: Kids told us the Internet was too quiet.

MAN1: I would like to introduce a sort of a negative note into this conference, because, I think, based on my experience, that almost all educational games suck. And, I've heard Brenda [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and various people come out with brightly, cheerful, speeches about this subject for a long time. And, I'm not sure that the games don't still suck. But, I'm still open minded and hopeful. Now, you said something at the beginning of your talk, your very first sentence, which made me think, Ah. Here's somebody I want to listen to, because you said, any game is better than going and doing sheets. What was it?

MAN2: School work sheets.

MAN1: School work sheets.

MAN2: When was the last time you did one?

MAN1: Right. Right. [LAUGHTER] And, I would totally agree with that. And, I've raised four kids, and I've watched them all go through school. And, we found that buying "educational games" was not nearly as useful in our mind as buying things like Railroad Tycoon and games that didn't --

MAN2: What's your question?

MAN1: The question is, is, so, I'm now working with the life span partnership. And, the question which comes up all the time is, is it better to have a game that really engrosses you, that has no overt educational content as opposed to something that is trying to teach you something, but doesn't engross you. You can guess what my answer would be, but I'd like to know yours.

MAN2: Why don't you say the answer? It looks like you really want to.

MAN1: What?

MAN2: You really want to answer. Why don't you answer?

MAN1: No, because I want to know what you think.

MAN2: I think I said what I think is that I don't know of an educational game in this category of edutainment that I like, do you?

MAN1: [OVERLAPPING VOICES]

MAN2: I don't know of a lot of educational games in the traditional category that I like, do you?

MAN1: There are a lot of food that people don't like, but as a teacher, what you have to do is to find what they like, and it might be a game that sucks, to just get

them into the experience of wanting to learn. One of the things that kids really like is learning about the Maya. Well, before we had games, we had the book, OK? So, you could tell the kids, you know what? They used to cut people's heads off. And, that's exciting for like three minutes, OK? [LAUGHTER] And, then, they go to sleep. A little boy told me, he said, come walk to the bathroom with me. I said, why? He said, aren't you bored too? [LAUGHTER] And, it's about what you're talking about. You can't motivate someone for six hours. So, yes, some of the games do really suck. But, what you do is you find the part of it that works, or the ones that work for particular people, and you wrap them into a learning landscape that includes a lot more than just the games. And, particularly, not the worksheets.

MAN2: The important thing is to include, to that aspect of let's discuss why this game sucks. Or, let's talk about people cutting other people's heads in the real world or in the game world, should also be, let's design one. OK? And, engaging in, you know, creating a shoot the mob game, is a very interesting process. Just to make one.

MAN1: Right. I would agree with you, but --

MAN2: That's the approach I'm saying. So, if you agree with me, then, good.

MODERATOR: OK. I think I saw the next person in line there; and, then, I'll get to you, hopefully. So, yes?

JUSTIN: I'm Justin [Goomey?] from Turbine Entertainment Software, and my question is about the negative side of introducing new technologies into the learning process that, I think, one of the interesting things about looking at any new technology is what are its down sides? Both my parents are teachers, and they really didn't like Sesame Street when it first came out, because it shortened the attention span of students. They would come to the class, and they would notice that over about a five-year period, students were less likely to pay attention to long lessons after Sesame Street had been introduced. I was wondering, what do you see as a potential downfall, or down sides, to introducing games into the educational process.

MAN2: I think I have to make my point again. Sesame Street was brilliant, because 30 years ago, they looked at advertisement and how inner city kids were so engaged in watching advertising. And, they decided back then to use this new medium called television and do 1, 2, 3, and a, b, c., and the three Rs through this medium in a way that will engage parents, because it was clever, and kids. And, it was designed for inner city in a very clever way that was really a good use of that medium. Now, the effects of that, in terms of what it created in terms of, oh. Now, you only have to do a Sesame Street like a, b, c, and 1, 2, 3, that's another question. But, if you take what I've been talking about very seriously, which is a very long-term, complicated, complex engaging process that can take 18 months, 8 months, 8 weeks, of designing a game, that's an incredible use of technology. You cannot do it in any other way. You can save states. You can share with a community what you think. You can go back to stuff you did, all the good stuff we're doing. Why shouldn't we give it to kids? That's one of the most exciting process to do with this new medium is the process of designing things with digital tools and expressing yourself, and creating challenges for other users, and designing games for other friends. And, challenge my parents and my teacher. That's amazing. This is something that Sesame Street couldn't do with TV, because TV was not designed for this.

JUSTIN: I'm not disagreeing that it has its merits. I'm just asking what you think are the potential down sides to this.

MAN1: Can I? I'm a teacher, and what Sesame Street does is to get the kids started. But, in that learning landscape, you might have grandma and me. You might have Dr. Seuss. Fifteen computers with six different stories. And, then, I can take the small kids, and if they have a short attention span, I can work with them. But, I've never even seen the special ed kids not spend, you know the game Grandma and Me, the one where you go through, and then the bus comes there. You have to say to them, you know what? You've been here an hour. It's someone else's turn. Or, you have to say, it's 6:00, and I have to go home. My cat is hungry. Because, the problem is is that what we do is we look at one thing. What happened to adults during that time? What is the attention span of adults? And, are we just using Sesame Street, or is it part of an integrated way in which to teach where you go from the book, to the disc, to writing something, to making your own story. And, that's what everybody's forgetting. We focus only on the technology. The technology is just a tool. And, what we have not done is to reinvent education to use it in the most effective way.

MODERATOR: OK. I'm going to take this last question here. I'm sorry about those of you in line. We've got to keep moving forward.

CHRIS: OK. Hi. I'm Chris Choler. First, an observation really, I think it should go on the official transcript, how funny I find it how much everybody's using the word, suck in this discussion. [LAUGHTER] If you think about it, it's really funny.

MAN2: Why?

CHRIS: Because you can't use that in school.

MAN2: You can.

CHRIS: I mean, it's a conference at MIT. And, everybody's just like well, this game sucks. And, that game sucks. [LAUGHTER] Well, why does it suck? Let us look at the suckiness [LAUGHTER] of this game and determine the educational suck factor [LAUGHTER]. But, that's not what I wanted to say. I liked the website until I saw the Ford advertisement "game" with the iron giant pieces, and the Osh Kosh advertisement disguised as a game. How educational is that? I mean, how do you justify calling that an educational game, where kids. I mean, the only thing I see kids learning from that is, you know, tell your parents to buy Ford cars. I just, I don't understand. If I had children and I saw them using that website and playing a thinly veiled advertisement, passing it off as an educational game, I'd just, I mean, I don't see how that's --

MAN2: OK. There are a few answers. First of all, I did not call it an educational game. I said, it's a playful ad that is another medium over the influenced by games in the way that Henry was talking about, how games can influence films, games can also influence advertising. There is nothing bad about creating advertising that is influenced by a game techniques, if you want to communicate to kids. In our world, on the Internet, as we create environments for kids that are playful, that are really about developing some very important three Xs skills, we don't sell these games. We actually generate revenue by selling advertising and sponsorship that will pay for these games so that everybody in the world can get them for free. So, that's a business model that we currently have. If you want to really create advertising that is engaging to kids, so the sponsor and the advertiser will give us a lot of money, so we can really give more games and more design environments for kids, you have to do it in a language with the aesthetics that kids really connect to and relate to. And, just like you love commercials on TV, and you hate some other commercials on TV, these kids have their own aesthetics about commercials on the Internet. And, you have to be very smart at understanding, as you develop the interactive advertising, personalization of advertising medium, on the net with the game aesthetics as well. I think that was my point there. If you're a parent, down the road, that does not like your kid seeing advertising, we will have an on and off switch, which is the beauty of the Internet. And, you will be able to pay a prescription or premium fee like in Cable, and you'll get a channel without advertising. Or, maybe I'll get AT&T to sponsor the website for the state of New Jersey. There will be a lot of new techniques for allowing people to actually enjoy a lot of these games that a lot of you developed here that never made it on the shelf, because of shelf problems and cultural issues, and whether Toys R Us decided to include it or not. We actually have another way of going about it that, I think, is much more clever, personalized, targeted, customized, with choice, even related to the payment method. You want it for free? You can see some ads. You want to pay? You can see it without ads. In this way, schools and kids in developing countries can actually get to the games in real time from very far away. They don't have to wait for three years after the game went out to play. Monday afternoon, 4 o'clock, I'm launching a game. I'm on Media.com in New York City. Everybody can play it.

CHRIS: It's not so much that there ads, you know, because I understand the commercial nature of the Internet, that you'd need to have ads to generate revenue. It's that the ads, rather than seeming apart from the rest of the content, seemed like a part of the content of the site. And, so, how are kids supposed to distinguish between what is a game to play and what is an ad that's trying to sell you something?

MAN2: How do you distinguish when you watch a television show or read a magazine? In the kids world, there are regulations that may work very closely, are a model site actually, for [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and for other watch dogs in D.C., the Center for Media education. So, in advertising in kids magazines, you have to put a frame say advertisement. And, in television, you have, we'll back after these messages, or in radio for kids, or whatever. On the Internet, if you realize we can surf further this site after this session, you'll see that we are labeling everything that is advertising with pink ears. And, we'll say that it is an ad or a sponsor. When you click on it, there is an inter[UNINTELLIGIBLE] saying you are leaving Mama Media site on advertiser's area. And, we're very thoughtful and careful about separating. What you saw on our power points is me just grabbing some screens to talk abut convergence in another way, or the influence of gang culture, or the way it should be, if you want to really communicate to kids.

MODERATOR: OK. I need to cut this off and move to our next speaker now. Hopefully, this question, if people care about it, you can talk to her about it during the break. Ellen Strain is an Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and Multimedia at Georgia Tech. She teaches with the School of Literature, Communications and Culture graduate program and Information Design and Technology. Her research concerns historical understandings of immersive entertainment technologies ranging from world spheres to video games and virtual reality. She currently has several projects in development, including a book entitled, "Public Places, Private Journeys - Immersive Entertainment Technologies in the Tourist Gaze" and a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] funded multimedia learning tool focused on the analysis of DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation". She recently finished a CD Rom-based interactive narrative on the unsolved murder of Hollywood director, William Desmond Taylor, in 1922.

STRAIN: I've got some images that go along with this course. I have changed my talk since I came up with the images, so they'll be slightly out of sink. So, just enjoy the ironic juxtapositions [LAUGHTER]. Let me get them going. I'm obviously not a member of the clickerody, because I can't talk and click at the same time. OK. We've heard a lot about the evolution of computers. I've got a couple of analogies that concretize this development. The most significant change, of course, has been in the rate of information flow. So, if we were to compare the Intel 4004 chip of 1971 to a Pentium 3 chip and assume the same rate of development in the automotive industry since 1971, then, today, our cars would travel fast enough to make it across the country in 10 seconds. That's without traffic, of course. [LAUGHTER] Or, if we look at the change from a particularly sleek model of a Univac in 1968, this would be with a CPU with the speed of 1.3 megahertz and a whooping 1/2 meg of ram. So, compare that to, let's say, an [UNINTELLIGIBLE] book. Let's make it tangerine. And, then, apply the same rate of change, in terms of size and cost, to an affordable Manhattan apartment. [LAUGHTER] In the past 30 years, that apartment would have dropped to a price of $6 in rent a year. [LAUGHTER] The down side, of course, is that the same apartment, if it had changed as much in size as computers, it would fit inside my pocket. [LAUGHTER] This is to say that we, as educators, would be idiotic to turn our backs on the pedagogical potential of computer tools and computer games. Now, unlike the educational CD Rom market, computer games have proven themselves as a viable industry. Most of you out there know that. And, this is despite the high production costs, despite the warped speed forces of technological obsolescence. Now, as Henry remarked earlier, a sign of video games coming of age has been the intense public and political scrutiny on games and, particularly, violence in games. Now, I want you guys to imagine for a moment that these same complaints, these same public protests, were applied not to computer games, but to homework, to education, schooling, OK? We might happen upon a group of concerned parents having a conversation somewhat like this: I barely see my little Johnny. He's always up in his room completely absorbed in his homework. Oh. I know. My kids escape into European history books like it was another world. Sometimes I think the only muscles they exercise are those they use to turn the page. You think that's bad? The twins, when they're not fooling around with those damn math equations, they're on the Internet participating in, would you believe, an algebra users group sharing tips and techniques in what they called cheats. Now, I don't mean to sound paranoid, but if I didn't know any better, I'd say that all this education, well, it's affecting our kids' world views. If only, right? This fantasy vision begs the question, the same one asked by, is it possible to apply the same power, the same appeal to educational ends? Are the kinds of pleasures offered by computer games incompatible with educational goals. Now, what I've been hearing about how educational games suck, it would seem to say no. This is not possible. And, many of my university colleagues would agree, from a different perspective, saying that if it doesn't hurt, it couldn't be educational. Right? If the medicine doesn't taste bad, it couldn't possibly be effective. Now I, too, am trying to find strategies that make learning fun, learning playful. We've agreed that the semantics of edutainment doesn't quite work. It's a little bit like docudrama, right, an untenable duo. The two don't belong together. And, if it is indeed the violence, the escapism, the supposedly skewed morality systems and anti-social impulses of that 5% of video games that make them fun, then, maybe we are talking about an incompatibility. But, I'm sure I'm not the only idealist in the room that believes that games offer many other types of pleasures. Let me run through a quick list here: agency, immersion, challenge, reward, immediacy, a dialect of repetition and variety, physical and mental engagement, and multi-sensory stimulation. All of these things could be applied to games with educational ends. In fact, in one study, seventh and eighth graders were asked to name their favorite computer and video games. And, a number of titles that appeared on that list were educational. OK. Only 2% of them were educational. But, for the optimists, that does point to some kind of untapped potential, or it points to something very odd about 2% of our seventh graders, but [LAUGHTER].

[END OF SIDE A]

[BEGINNING OF SIDE B]

STRAIN: -- metaphor of educators and industry members, game developers, meeting half way to produce successful educational games. I'd have to say that members of the game industry are much closer to that halfway point than members of higher education, and this is for one simple reason. What I call the breakfast cereal approach has in many cases won out over the idea that educational content always waters down entertainment value, and vice versa. Right, this kind of purism. Sort of realism has won out. A popular breakfast cereal can have both sugar and fiber, cartoon characters on the box and calcium. We can design educational games that Mikey and his education-minded mother like. Whenever those of us committed to education haven't had the benefit of a captive audience, we've had to in a way candy-coat these little pearls of knowledge we're attempting to deliver. And these strategies are the same better used in games. We've got narrative. Think about fables that deliver a moral. Immersion; we've got field trips, we've got natural history museums that have always created life groups and habitat groups to communicate information about anthropology, about biology. Interactivity; we've got laboratory experiments, workshops. Role playing; I don't know if any of you in your classes have done things like reenactments of the Lincoln-Douglass debates, the drafting of the constitution. And lastly, encouraging motivation through evaluation and rewards systems. OK, gold stars, report cards, say no more. Now many of these techniques are not just the sugar that makes the medicine go down, but they encourage problem solving techniques, an active learning process that lead to what I think of as deep structures of knowledge, as opposed to the somewhat elusive results of wrote memorization. OK, now there are some educational games that I think don't suck, that show some promise. And all of these share the kind of constructivist approach that has been mentioned. I'm not going to name any brands here. Quickly running through them: an aerodynamics game that allows user to tweak an aircraft's wing and rudder design, and then show simulations that allow users to examine the effects of air pressure; drag, life, thrust; a simulation game in which users learn the short and long-term effects of tourism and industrialization on a contained island environment; a virtual environment for construction using motors, pulleys and pin joints that produces a result in animation based on physical laws of equilibrium, momentum, etc. OK, and none of this is surprising to any of us in the room. This is what games do well. They simulate complex environments full of interdependencies, contingencies, being brought into play. And it is just this simulation of real world environment that has been an only arduously attained goal of science and education, and excuse me, science and engineering, education at all levels. And this is one of the reasons for the greater success of science and engineering applications, as compared to at least upper level humanities. So I'm going to be addressing humanities to some extent, having come from that tradition.

MAN: You've got about two minutes.

STRAIN: OK. Physical laws, unlike human behavior, can be collapsed, can be boiled down to algorithms that get tied to visualization so that we can simulate 3D molecular structures, wave interference, etc.. Social interfaces, however, and these are perhaps more crucial to humanities education, lag behind. I think this is evidenced by the failure of Bob, or at least my incessant desire to turn Microsoft Office's paper clip spot into scrap metal. And I don't think I'm alone on this. [LAUGHTER]. OK. Additionally, if the humanities does choose to enter the digital age, it's charged with the creation of interactive tools that assist in learning situations that aren't necessarily modeled on real world simulations. They don't necessarily map on. In other words, modeling interactivity for a chemistry lab, you have this real world equivalent to use as a guide. But, if you have a very different set of goals, for instance, I come from film studies, analyzing a film in an interdisciplinary way is sometimes about making visible that which is invisible. My project on D.W. Griffith has been mentioned. My attempt in this project is to see race relations in a historical perspective, to reveal the mechanics of melodrama employed for, literally, propagandistic purposes, as well as the development of a cinematic language. OK, there's no Sim Cinema engine that I can map these goals on. There's no real world correlative. So this involves some kind of innovation in terms of interface design. But further complicating the situation is what I call the language locked condition of most humanities scholars, which has led to a conceptualization of interactivity as text-based information relay in complete ignorance of all that the popularity of games could teach us. Even film scholars who specialize in the image, craft their careers on the edict that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Right, so you analyze seven films, get two books out of it, and get tenure. Hopefully. [LAUGHTER]. OK. On that note, let me wrap up with a couple of predictions for the future. First, without the deep coffers of the department of defense or McDonnell-Douglass, as in the case of many of the educational software that you see employed in colleges, things like aerospace applications. Without those resources, you know, the NEH has been good to some of us, but again, not the deep coffers of some of these other sources. Developers of humanist games with educational goals, even those of us working in the ivory tower will not be able to avoid dealing with commercial viability. This is not news to any of you industry folks. And lastly, innovation in terms of what I'm calling non-naturalistic interfaces appropriate to the more abstract learning goals of upper level humanities. I think we'll only come about through a synthesis of three areas. One is interface design, another is domain expertise, whether that be film studies, American history, and pedagogical knowledge. Now while academics like myself have two of those three, the interface design has been a very difficult barrier for us, and I think in order to move to the next generation of educational games that don't suck, that can be used in college classes, people like myself are going to have to look more closely at not only at the models, but hopefully at the collaborative opportunities offered by the computer game industry.

MAN: OK. Do we have some questions from the audience? [APPLAUSE]. All right.

MAN: Yeah, I'm one of the 2%, and I think this panel is very inspiring and a breath of fresh air. My question is to Henry Jenkins. Why did you pick men to talk about games, and women about education? [LAUGHTER]

MAN: Uh --

BRACEY: Because women are the people who are educators. The rest of them escape to be principals or something. [LAUGHTER]

JENKINS: I think I'll stand behind Bonnie's statement there, yes. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]. OK. Yes, next question.

LEBLANC: Hi, I'm Mark LeBlanc from looking glass studios. I have a general question. I hear your stories from a friend who's a grade school teacher of first graders who hurt themselves by jumping from heights that they know Mario can survive. And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts, any of you about what the responsibilities and the opportunities of the game industry at large are to education.

BRACEY: There's a scar right here from playing Wonder Woman, you know, the comic book. [LAUGHTER]. I jumped off a church roof. It depends on what generation you're in, what it is that makes you think you can do those things.

STRAIN: Exactly. It's the same criticisms over and over just applied to new media. Anybody who is a media scholar, or probably, you know, hobbyist media scholars like yourselves, being involved in the game industry, cannot avoid hearing that intense ring of familiarity in all of the arguments that are made about video games.

LEBLANC: Well, to put my question in a more positive way, is there an opportunity to educate in games at large, rather, you know --

STRAIN: Well, let me mention --

LEBLANC: -- as opposed to making educational games specifically.

STRAIN: Yeah. Sesame Street was mentioned previously, and I don't know if some of you are familiar with the results of Sesame Street. The idea was that underprivileged kids come into first grade or kindergarten behind the other students who have stay at home moms who are teaching them how to read. So this television show was designed as a kind of head start program to bring people up to speed. What they found out was Sesame Street actually increased the knowledge gap, because the kids who had stay at home moms or nannies and, you know, someone there to reinforce the educational value of the show, they were that much more ahead. So it increased the knowledge gap. And I think that points to something that's very significant in computer games as well, which also has the potential of increasing this knowledge gaps, since not everybody has access to the internet, to computers. But the most important learning effects are those that are achieved through not only a medium such as television or computers, but the collaboration between that medium and some figure; whether it be a parent or a teacher. So there's this fear that comes out of, this assumed logic of substitution. I hear it from my colleagues. We don't need teachers anymore because we've got these interactive learning tools, or we don't need parents anymore, babysitters, we just put our kids in front of the tv or the computer. So I think the most viable learning opportunities that can come out of computer technologies is again chaperoned experience with the computer so that parents can point out what's an ad, what's an unjumpable height, how this is fantasy, what are the educational values that can be reinforced.

BRACEY: Let me take a shot at that. Teachers don't know everything, OK? I've been teaching for about 20 years. I have been to National Geographic, Discovery, all of the different, I've even taken astrophysics, but I don't know everything. And one of the things that the technology allows us to do is to contact experts, to start kids with software that allows them to go through levels of learning that we can be a guide for, because we can read it and learn it with them. It allows us to diversify the classrooms. So if I happen to be a really bad teacher, or maybe I don't know, like when the kids came here with the stuff about dinosaurs, I didn't know anything about dinosaurs. But you know what? The technology allowed me to collect stuff, to learn with them and to make it creative. So the technology in the games allow kids to further their learning. They don't have to walk to the bathroom because they're bored. They don't have to send signals and little sneaker net kinds of things, or volunteer for everything to get the heck out of the classroom. They want to be there. The technology transforms what we do in the classroom, if it's done right.

HAREL: I have to add something to this, Henry, if you don't mind. I think I have to bring this back into the conversation. As Sesame Street was developed 30 years ago, here at MIT, there was a very powerful group that developed the logo programming knowledge. And the idea of logo initially was that it will be a tool for kids and adults, anybody who's interested in learning some powerful ideas about mathematics and geometry to get engaged in a whole new way in that process, and to connect to that knowledge in a whole new way. And what we've discovered during the years that in addition to, in conjunction with explorer, are systemalogically deep ideas that relate to geometry and mathematics, that kids and adults that were doing logo programming were also engaged in creating media on computer screens, and as computers got better, and logo programmers created better logo environments, or more elaborate logo environments, not necessarily always better for certain things. We realized that the process of programming and creating these artifacts is a very important aspect. It's kind of slightly different than what we're talking about here, because it's really about connecting fantasy and reality. If you enter the role of the designer and the maker, OK? So it's not just about sitting with the kid and say, Mario is jumping from a high building, you shouldn't do that, little kid, OK? It's not just about sitting in front of the tv and say, yes, this is a Big Bird, but it's not really real. There is a person inside. No. That's not the educational value. The educational value, I believe, will come from a kid designing a Sesame Street show, trying to create Big Birds and Elmos and characters, and things in costumes, and things in no costumes, and graphics and numbers jumping on the screen. The real learning value is coming from trying to create a game that is creating fun for another kid or trying to teach something. The simulation games that you are talking about, many of them are not giving the choice for the user to create their own simulations. And I think they're lacking a great deal of learning that can really be powerful and insightful, because the games between fantasy and reality, make-believe, pretend; we heard yesterday the idea of, the difference between violent play versus violent behavior. It's all connected, and I think it's not just about telling kids, you know, this is on the screen, but in the real world it's about trying to make a screen so you will understand from the inside, deeply, what's going into making that so you're connecting to this in a way that is so powerful. In addition to trying to find the coordinate systems and how to make the graphics zoom, and what does it mean to get the wrong answer, or to bump your head into a wall, and what makes it harder or easier to explain something. And all of that. That's a great deal of learning.

BRACEY: I agree with you, Idit, but the problem is the word edutainment and education have different weights. If you're an educator, you have test scores, you have national state, local school grade level, and then that homework stuff that that guy talks about. Then you have a custodian who sweeps away all those nice little pieces that you bought of the $500 set. Then you have some parent who says I don't want my child doing technology. Real learning is reading a book. So what you've got is a lot of variables that create the impossibility of doing what you did. I learned to do logo in a grocery school, a yes bookstore in Georgetown. And when I took it to school, my principals, I said, Look, I got it. Someone gave it to me. And she says, use it on the computer. I said, it doesn't have enough memory. She says, you're trying, I mean, there are all of these stupid things that happen to people trying to do the things that you're talking about, and there isn't anyone to help us. People make fun. They say, teachers are so stupid, they can't use the software. There is no support. So you have to use what you have. And what you're doing is great, but some of the people who have the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to be in a real classroom where the custodian takes your stuff away, where the mother, where all the kids get up and walk out and leave all those little pieces over the desks, and you're going like, hello, who's going to pick these up? And they go, Gotta go, Miss Bracey. Those are some of the problems. It's the management stuff.

HAREL: Are these the constrains that good game designers need to figure out --

BRACEY: No, no, no. What we need to do is to transform education. I know that what you do works, because I use it. But I do it between 4:30 and 7:00. I'm not against anything, I'm just saying let's take a realistic look at it. Talk about what works, but then let's figure out a way to do something with this. And maybe one of the ways is what they did with Logo. They made a CAD program, so I don't have to pick up all the little pieces. And then after school they know they've got kind of hands-on about what to do, that's all.

JENKINS: OK. I think I'm going to need to, I apologize, people waiting in line. I want to get everyone to lunch in a timely fashion, so I would like to turn to Bonnie now if things are ready.

BRACEY: That's OK. I can do it without.

JENKINS: OK. Let me do the introduction, then.

BRACEY: OK. I can do without it.

JENKINS: OK. Bonnie Bracey is universally recognized for helping teachers successfully integrate technology into their learning environments. In additional, Bracey was the only teacher selected by President Clinton to serve on the national information infrastructure advisory committee. Bracey was a Christa McAuliffe educator through The National Foundation of Education, National Education Association, and was a member of the Challenger Center Faculty. Bracey has served on the advisory boards of the George Lucas Education Foundation, Lightspan Partnership, Apple, Technos, and The Learning Company. She's also written numerous articles for national publications, and has been the featured guest on education technology conferences across the nation. Let me turn it over to Bonnie.

BRACEY: OK. I'm getting miked here. And, you know, this is appropriate, because most teachers don't have anything. You probably saw in the New York Times that all classrooms are wired. I just came back from Mississippi. The tech people have, technology, and that's what's wrong with my computer. I let a nice person fix it for me, and I forgot to check after [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. So what we need to do about [UNINTELLIGIBLE] is first of all what it is. What --

MAN: No mic.

BRACEY: You can't hear anything?

HAREL: You need to turn it on.

JENKINS: It needs to be turned on.

MAN: It is on.

HAREL: Now activate it.

MAN: Oh, need to activate it. Sorry. OK.

BRACEY: First of all, what is education? We have so many people who have so many ideas about what education is. I worked on a panel with CEOs for the President from 1993 to 1995. We're still fussing about what education is. And if you ask what is edutainment, it's anything you don't have to measure by standards. We are [LAUGHTER] we are not against standards, because, you know, I went to one of those little schools called St. Joseph's Mission for Catholics and Indians, and the books were 20 years old, and I learned anyway, but why should you have to? Technology and education changes things a lot. So what does it change? OK, the first thing it changes is who was the person who's in charge of teaching and learning? A teacher says to you, hey, I like books. What's going to happen with the book. It could fall on the floor, a page could fall out, maybe it's glued together. You're looking in a kids book. Who cares? But with technology and with games, a whole lot of different kind of things happen. One of my favorite subjects is space education, and it's not because of George Lucas. I met the idea of using George Lucas after I became a Christa McAuliffe educator. I didn't make it. I wasn't the person who became Christa McAuliffe. Not only that, I didn't even know I could be Christa McAuliffe. When Christa McAuliffe died, I had made a whole spaceship inside my classroom. Thank god for the developers that make games so I don't have to do that anymore. You create environments that I can use to teach people, and I don't have to spend my whole summer building a space station. [LAUGHTER]. In addition to that, there are people who create all kinds of things, like the rainforest network. I've been to rainforest, but I've never been to the places where you can see all of those things. There are children who give you two days in a classroom. And what they're doing is they're looking at you to see if you're smart or not. And during that first two days, they're sizing you up. And as they watch and they listen, they decide whether they're going to learn from you this year or not. And it's a really short time. So one of the things that you can do with a game, if you want to do something really good with education, they should teach the gifted and talented. Help me to learn what that child likes. Where's something in a game that allows me to understand a child, what it is they do, what it is they like, what it is they'd like to do, so it can do that and have a little profile. But the kid can have an experience, a sharing, and it can be in the form of an autobiography, it could be in the form of some story about themselves. I learned that a child in one of my classes didn't talk out loud, because the first day she went to school on the bus, and the bus driver yelled at her and said, you know what will happen to you, little girl, if you talk loud like that? The teacher will put you in the bathroom or something. So after school she would talk, but during school she didn't. Where is the software that personalizes the learner so I know where they are, what it is they're capable of, and what they're interested in. And I can print it out and learn, you know, I know they'll know other things, and they'll learn other things. So let's do Star Wars. I am not, I fly a small plane, I used to have a Corvette. Probably sometimes it was about the same thing, if I was going too fast. But you have a whole group of little kids who want to learn about space. So suppose you're not a teacher who knows space. Where can you go? You can go to Windows of the Universe, the University of Michigan. You can use a software program that someone has. It can be stupid and dumb, and your [UNINTELLIGIBLE] can be different, but it makes them feel empowered. And then you can go to Hubble and look at the pictures, and you can talk to Bob Gabries as NASA. Where is a game that allows a child to use a learning environment. After they play the game, can they go find out about certain things? Well, check this. In Mississippi, where they don't have a lot of technology, they have some really great ideas. I have a friend who has created a game that allows children to learn about the physics of racing cars. Now you and I know that in education we don't talk about why racing got invented in the south, because you know, like they were carrying some contraband across the hills, they were creating like, you know, moonshine runs, and they would get caught. But Richard Petty and Paul Newman and the Hoss team helped kids to learn about physics, because what they did was analyze, had them analyze how do you drive a car? What is the race speed? What are these different kind of things? And a little girl says we don't really like race cars, but you can say the race car guys are pretty interesting, handsome, whatever. There are many ways to look at this. So one thing that we have to do in education is to think about what makes children learn. And the way that you learn, what they learn is by learning who they are. So you don't start the first day with worksheets. You don't start the second day with, OK, now we have to do a test. You do something that is a cooperative kind of thing that allows kids to come together. They're still playing with my computer, so don't worry about it. I'm all right. What are the educational benefits of game making? Well, in this particular game, children learn about the physics of the speed, but they also learn that you could kill yourself just because you do something in the race by hydroplaning, about spoilers, all kinds of. When they're looking at television, they actually understand the racing that they're looking at. How many of you know about hydroplaning? How many of you know? Some of you do, because some of you wrote the games. Now the cool part is [LAUGHTER], the cool part is the guys who use this, use your game to get the kids to learn about physics. That's awesome. Do you know that they're not very many kids in the United States that like science? I'm a science teacher. This is how most people teach science: turn to page 42, and they read it. Now, guess what? People think that that's teaching science. I had like a closet with like bones. There was a rumor. My brother went to Georgetown, so there was a rumor that we had a skeleton. I only had half a skeleton, OK? [LAUGHTER]. I used to do this thing where we'd have chickens, and let's see, we had frogs, and we had butterflies. I actually did that. But you know what? On the internet now there are sites where we can look into an insect zoo and see some of that. And so maybe what you do is to get the children interested in the idea of learning. And what the games do is they give you a reward. Those workshops, those worksheets, people hate them. First of all, they come in in the morning and give you 80 papers. Do you know people who can correct 80 people in 20 minutes? I don't. Do you know what can do that? Technology can. The Empires game. You're trying to teach civilization, OK? The book is OK, but the book is kind of like sanitized. All the good stuff they took out. Well, you can't send them to see any of the books that have the really good stuff in them, even if you're talking about the age of civilization, and some of the stuff that tells you, you know, the stuff you can't talk about in school. But if you do the game, and you don't have to do it during school. You can kind of just say, did you know there's a game that has some of this stuff in it? So you do the game, and I do the things like make the almond bread dough dragons, or create the food that went with it, and they get to sit in the chair with straw under them, and a dog. And you know, you have to create some environments in the classroom. So what I do with your games is I create, first of all, a hook to find out what they like. I use it, if I walked to a school right now and said, hey, look what I got today. Those people after school want to try this? Do you think kids would be interested? Do you think they would be curious? And if I had 23 games, do you think there would be 23? There would be 46 kids there. They would wait in turn, and I wouldn't just have one, see, because that's what you do. You give me the possibility of creating all kinds, I can use your game, and your game, and your game. Now I worked with Dave Byas [SP?] of the Software Publishing Association, and they laughed at me the first time I went into a meeting. I said, why can't we make a kit that has six games about software, and they said, we don't do that. I do. I used the software. I go to NASA, too, and then say, where's the real stuff? See, you provide motivation for learning. I'm not going to tell you, well, I will tell you, warlords, I hope the person who wrote it isn't here, but anyway, the kids, I open the computer to show a kid [UNINTELLIGIBLE], he said, you don't have any games. And I said, I'm a teacher. What's wrong with that? He says, well, what kind of a teacher are you if you can't take a risk or have some fun. So I got this warlords game. First I got the first one. It took me a whole year to get to the level where the develop; if you're in here, don't tell me. But I saw these kids. They were like playing this game, and they were emersed in this. And I said, OK, Shakespeare, Warlords, castles, cathedrals. And you [UNINTELLIGIBLE] why can't anybody do that with software? Why can't we have like lots of stuff? You could get the girls to do stuff, and let's talk about girls. Learning for girls is a social kind of thing, and this is how I got started. I was a [UNINTELLIGIBLE], they pay $45 to go to King's Dominion, and I couldn't find these boys. I was terrified. They gave me the zoo, the boys nobody wanted, and I couldn't find them anywhere. And they were knelt in reverence over this game. And I stood there, and they didn't see me, and they didn't care that they didn't see me. And after all this and everything. And then I said, I'm going to stand here and see how long they will stand there and do that. It was 35 minutes before someone said, Oh, Miss Bracey, come and look at this. This is so cool. So the other thing is that we need to allow teachers to learn to explore, evaluate, be entertained and understand the technology. Educational technology sucks because we don't give any feedback to the people who create it. And I created one that sort of didn't do very well. It wasn't my problem, but I'll tell you what we were working on. We were working on freedom trail, and there was an African who said, put the dialect in. And I said, you know what? We don't kind of like to use dialect. You know, that whole long discussion about ebonics. And they put it in. And I said, you know, I really don't, but they said, but he's a Ph.D., you don't know. You're just a teacher. I said, OK. [LAUGHTER]. This is what games can do. Problem solving. You know those problems you used to hate? Man, those kids. You can't, you say it's 7:00. But I just have one more problem to solve. You do that, because you allow them to feel empowered. I don't care what kind of, it could be a game that you have that sucks. It's the idea that they can go to a different level. I can't get instant feedback. You can do that with games. This is what you do. Idit has some really great ideas, and she's right. If we can allow them to learn in informal ways, they'll learn informal ways and they won't even know they're learning. Now the problem is, and you can't see this little man. That's the person who's investigating. When I was doing the wonderful stuff for the things that I did with the turtle and making things. A person came in who taught me physics, and she said, I'll come back when you're teaching. Well, that went on my evaluation. She said I wasn't teaching. My kids have made all kinds of robotics, they've made little things that showed the physics of the amusement park, all of the things that she's talking about. But my principal said, well, what are you teaching? So one of the other things that you have to do as a parent is to help teach the administrators to understand that learning doesn't just take place on book, and that particular web site is the place we can talk about engaged learning. If you need something better than that, because if you're not a doctor, you're going to have a doctor. See, I took seven different kinds of work because I wanted to be able to teach every year, pick something different, so I could come back and talk about oceanography or space, or astrophysics, or something like that. There should be some kind of degree that is accumulative, that allows you to put all of those things together, that doesn't have to be a specialized kind of thing, but it will allow you to use technology. That shouldn't be so hard to do. But this is from the national academy of science. I didn't write this. Do you see kids in a bar or anyplace where there's one of those machines? They don't fight. They want a quarter. They want to do it better. And they help each other, and they don't even know each other. It's amazing what they can do.

MAN: About two more minutes.

BRACEY: OK. This one's OK. And that's where this one comes from. And so what I'm going to do is to flip through very quickly. My brother is a physician. There's a site he showed me called invisible human body. You can do cool stuff, but there's also a GTV thing, and there are games. You combine, and you put the things together. I love this. You start with make your own robot. Read some of the stories, show some movies, all of these things hooked together. And the Mars Rover. My kids were doing this kind of stuff before the first thing happened, not this last one that didn't work. [LAUGHTER]. I already told you about this one. Geography? Geography sounds boring, doesn't it? But when you get them started doing all of these things, and you just, don't just do one game, but you bring all the things together. They don't know where Indianapolis is. They don't even know, when Mother Teresa died, I said it's in India, they're going like, what, because they didn't know where it was. So what you have to do is to learn to put the things together. And this was the one about the, we started with bananas, some sticks that we use to make a car run. Everybody was on the playground. I got in a lot of trouble. The problem is, [LAUGHTER], if you reinvent schools, you get in trouble. I'm not in school anymore. Everybody wanted their kids to be in my class. They kind of ostracized me, so I kind of had to leave. And I'm not sad now, but I was really depressed when it happened. Lucas, George Lucas has been the person who has been a mentor for me. And I'm not doing this because he told me. He doesn't know I'm doing this. He was the person who helped me understand what it was that I was doing that worked, and why it worked. And he has now a new venture, and I have the games, but I don't have time to show them to you. And I started with those kind of things, because National Geographic funded us teachers to play. I spent all summer learning how to use software. Most teachers don't' get that chance. So this is just a little bit on that racing thing, go real fast. This is a bunch of kids in Mississippi that don't have very much. Paul Newman helps, and teachers can go learn at Daytona a week. That's incredible. But there's also a little program at Metcat, where you build a race car, you build a balloon, you build all kinds of things, and then you try them out. So some of it is techno constructivism. How can you learn it if you don't even know what the software is? How can you do anything with it if you've never explored, evaluated, examined, been a part of trying to figure out what it is. And Tom Snyder here is [UNINTELLIGIBLE] we don't even need but one computer. He's right here in this area. He's amazing. He doesn't make you pay on time, either, so you can kind of like play with his stuff. [LAUGHTER]. That probably sounds funny, but you know what? I bought every piece of software I ever worked with at first. How many teachers have to get what the committee picks. You think software sucks, you should see what the committee picks. We bought 14 computers, and the guy said now, let's use shareware. I said, well, what the heck do we need the computers for? I don't need shareware. So let me quick through real fast. Amazon trails is the software that I use with books, GTV, art materials. I forgot music. Cars topography went down in the cave. Videos from Discover and National Geographic, and the Jason project. That is so awesome. But why can't it be on a disk? Why don't we have to have little pieces of paper? Can't we like put it on a CD-Rom? National zoo. After I finished that, the kids went, they could identify everything. The person who was the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] said, I don't think your kids need me. And they didn't. And then their internet resources. So the information superhighway, I represent the George Lucas Educational Foundation sometimes as a fellow. Take this information and take it to your school. First let's find out what this tech, how can you do these things? What is it that the technology can do that will help schools and education? And then, as Idit said, I spent two years in the summer building a game with kids about a house. You fall down on the floor, three years. But it was fun, and they learned. And I was on a tour, and this kid kept bringing me coffee. I'm trying to figure out, why is this kid bringing me coffee? He was one of those kids. He made six times more money than I did, but powerful models, lightspan. I don't know if you've seen their stuff. National Geographic, Pyrien [SP?] Spring, Learning Company. And of course, Discovery has, I have everything they have. There's a guy named Dave Byer on the SIIA. He's right now talking, trying to form opinions about what software can do to help kids. You are [NOISE OBSCURES] people. I'm not. I'm just a teacher. If I talk to him, he'll talk to me, but you're the people that can say to him where's the fun that allows collaborative project building? Use some of the things you already have so we can do, uh-oh, it should be software. Sorry. And then the last thing is there is research. Everybody says there's new research. Three things; there is not a totally wired school system, I mean, the whole system. Sometimes that's a wire for reporting attendance. How do we know it works? We have a lot of documentation. If you believe all that stuff that Tom Oppenheimer says, it's like me dropping into your lab one day, one hour, and then describing it. Some of it's true, some of it's not. he says he was so bored, he should come to a D.C. school like the one I worked in where we had to battle the rats, the roaches. I could hardly see the Capitol through the front, and there were 11 books. See, he doesn't know from every experience. There is a digital divide, and it's not just in this room. Incarceration is as costly as going to one of your schools. I asked my mom could I come to MIT or Harvard? She says, say Virginia State very quickly, and then say MIT or Harvard. There are children who have the ability to do some of the things that you do, but they're not going to get technology because people keep saying, oh, it doesn't work. The game sucks. The teachers don't know how to use it. Help us. And the last way to do it is to help fill out that Erate form. You don't have to do it. In your neighborhood you may not need it, but there are some neighborhoods where the teachers are so tired at 4:00 when they finish, filling out the Erate form is like pulling their nails off. So you can't see this one. I worked with a group in Europe that is doing a world summit. Some of you were talking about world summit kinds of things. It would be really interesting for you to come to our conference. We have creators, filmmakers, media specialists from all over the world, and I have some brochures of this, and this was the last one. OK. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

MAN: We're very short on time. I'll take one question. It looks like someone's by the mic right now. So apologies to everyone else. Fire away, and let's get a short question and answer.

PARK: My name is Daniel Park. I'm a computer science and arts semiotics student at Brown. I'm glad I waited until after three of you got to speak. I have some really good experiences, memories using some educational programs. I will name one name: Rocky's boots, stuff that's just, that I didn't really appreciate it, I just felt the excitement and the fascination when I used it. But I realize now I'm not, I hadn't seen the stuff since I played it until I got to college. And there was this tremendous gap in between when I saw this program and got to play with, and learn all of these, the different aspects of computer architecture and logic that really wasn't, there wasn't an opportunity for that to be picked up in school. I mean, the software program wasn't used in school. I used it at home. But even when programs are used in school, how do you support students who are excited beyond what the software has to offer?

BRACEY: There are programs that Discovery Channel does. There's a whole web site. It's amazing. I'm not advertising, because I don't work for them, but Discovery.com, and they help you go through what's already there. National Geographic does that, NASA. NASA has enough, I mean, you could just get lost in those web sites. And one of the things that they do is to train teachers. But teachers don't know a lot that they can be trained. But there are those opportunities. Idit?

PARK: Yeah, that was my next question, is how do you get this or that, it's in many, many schools, and so that teachers have the opportunity to use these, and to, if nothing else, point people interested.

BRACEY: Well, first we have to convince people that a teacher standing on her feet all day long is not learning at 4:00 in a half-hour session two times a year about technology. The second thing is when Sputnik went up, people did all kinds of things. I mean, there was money, there was this, if we have so much money, where is the money to go to train so that I can go to her lab, so that I can talk to, where is the bridging from K-14? How do we just get to talk to each other at conferences? That, to me, is a problem.

HAREL: Well, I think, Bonnie, you're talking about a lot of really painful constraints that the teachers, anybody's who's working in school environments is confronting, to just end this with a little, and I know you share that view with me.

BRACEY: Yes.

HAREL: The little optimistic note is that we do have a lot of lower cost Play Stations, different kinds of devices in homes now. 70% of American families with kids under seven now have a PC. It will get more intuitive, and there will be lots of gadgets connected to it. And I think there will be, the reason why I left the media lab, although we did a lot of exciting work with inner city kids and in developing countries to start a company in the real world, because I really see the potential of these kids in the homes, and reaching them right now with high quality games that have some elements that involve them in engaging and fun playing as well as making. I think there's kids who are growing up with all of this stuff around them. Even in the inner city and community centers, or in your beautiful after school programs, I think it will probably help us now change the schools, because it's not going to be just about the decision-makers, and the principles, and it's not going to be just about teachers not having, or yes, having time. I think all of these kids are going to come to school and say, we have to do something different. And I think ten years from now, there will be a revolution that kids will create. Rocky's Boots was a very nice product. The lacking features of Rocky's Boots is that you couldn't get inside it and understand how it was made. When you came to the university, suddenly you made connections to the logic, to the constraints, to the if-then, to everything that happened there. But imagine that you were a kindergartner, or a first-grader, or a fifth-grader, or a high school kid. In addition to doing Rocky's Boots, also getting some insights about how to make one, and all these incredible Discovery and National Geographic and NASA sites that we can all delve into and explore and forget ourselves are really fantastic, but I think, it's not that I'm saying no to this, I'm just saying we have to remember that in addition to this, we have to tell kids something that will involve in media studies. Kids need to be --

BRACEY: Well, in addition to that --

HAREL: Henry's program should be a required curriculum.

BRACEY: Absolutely. Absolutely. But in addition to that, there are step-off programs, like the Challenger Center program where you actually do some of those things. We really do have step-off programs, but unless you people who are parents don't do something to help transform education so that teachers get a chance to do it. They say, let the nine-year-old kids, let the nine-year-old kids teach it. Excuse me. What does a nine-year-old kid know about all of the things that are involved in it? They can cut it on and off and show you how to put the disk in. We need to know the pedagogy, and we do need to know what you're talking about.

MAN: OK, well, on this note of high excitement, [LAUGHTER], let me say two things. One is that the issue of media and education continues to be a central focus of the comparative media studies program, and of the communication forum, which is a host of this. We have other events coming in the future. Check the media and transition web site, both for coverage of things we've done on this in the past, and things we'll be doing in the future. Secondly, there is lunch waiting for you outside. We have roughly 45 minutes for you to eat it, chat and get back inside. So I've got to be a tough taskmaster and let you go.

HAREL: Thank you.

BRACEY: Thank you.