THE BOOKS

John L. Rudolph, Section Editor

How Computer Games Help Children Learn, by David Williamson Shaffer. PalgraveMacmillan, New York, NY, USA, 2006. xii + 242 pp. ISBN 978-1-4039-7505-8.

Newspaper articles, policy reports, and research reviews about the educational promiseof digital games and virtual worlds have recently moved into the center of public attention.This excitement must remind some of the early discussions about computers in schools thatwere announced with equal fanfare just a few decades ago. The promise of computers inschools has since received a great deal of critical scrutiny, and, although debates over theireffectiveness has receded into the background, a number of scholars have recently initiateda long-overdue conversation about digital games and their pedagogical value, starting withGee’s book What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). Ageneration of kids has grown up playing digital games and continues to do so in theiradulthood. Thus the idea of computer games for learning, or “serious games” as they arealso called, seems within reach and reason.

The publication of Shaffer’s book moves straight to the heart of the matter. At itscore is an argument for a particular genre of digital educational experiences he calls“epistemic games”—a concept for which Collins and Ferguson (1993) deserve the credit.Epistemic games, he explains, are based on epistemic frames, around which the work ofcreative professionals is organized. An epistemic frame, he defines as a “collection of skills,knowledge, identities, values and epistemology that professionals use to think in innovativeways.” Also included in the idea are “real-world skills, high standards, and professionalvalues, and a particular way of thinking about problems and justifying solutions” (p. 12).Many will recognize connections to cognitive apprenticeship and legitimate peripheralparticipation in this definition. Shaffer builds on these ideas but situates them in a contextof role playing in imagined worlds where students make judgments and develop solutionsaccording to the rules of the “game” in question. He claims that, for instance, in the contextof a debate over the interpretation of historical events, “the rules of the imaginary worldof the game do a better job in representing what it means to think like a historian than thetraditional text-lecture-and-recitation of many history classes” (p. 29). Shaffer argues thatif we want to design computer games that simulate aspects of what professionals do in theirwork, we need to create epistemic games that can help learners understand and apply thepractices of the domain.

In his book, Shaffer provides five different examples (six, if you include the debatinggame) of epistemic games and reports findings from observations and interviews with smallgroups of participants. Throughout the book, he weaves in concepts from contemporaryeducational psychology, research on learning in academic disciplines, and design andprofessional practice. While many of his observations and findings remain descriptive,they provide the reader with a sense that learning with epistemic games is complex andmultifacetted and could have important implications for classrooms. (All the interventions

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except one take place on weekends, or in after school and summer camp programs with asmall, yet ethnically diverse number of voluntary student participants.)

For instance, in the Digital Zoo game, players use the SodaConstructor, a spring-massbased modeling system, to design and simulate moving creatures much like an animationdesigner, robotic scientist, or a biomechanical engineer would. Using the SodaConstructor“players join design teams, to work on a series of engineering design projects, . . . leadingto the construction of virtual objects and creatures.. . . The teams develop innovative solu-tions by repeating basic steps of engineering: designing, building, and testing alternativesolutions to problems” (p. 44). The recorded conversations of student teams, their notebookand Sodaconstructor designs, and exit interviews indicate that their designs became morecomplex after playing the game, that they learned from their design mistakes, and masteredkey technical concepts and terms in the process.

Another game was the Pandora Project, which emphasized values in professional prac-tices by illustrating “how learning to think like a professional means learning to valuethings professionals think about as important, interesting and meaningful” (p. 105). Thisepistemic game offered a scenario where a hypothetical biomedical breakthrough opens upthe possibility for xenotransplantation, the transfer of organs between different species. Asthey consider the risks involved, such as the spread of animal viruses to humans, playerstake on the role of negotiators using the mutual gains approach and identify trade-offsand best alternatives as they develop consensus on the most sensible health policy. Re-sults from students’ participation in the project indicate that they began to respect multipleperspectives and were able to transfer this understanding to related situations.

Other epistemic games Shaffer describes include science.net, in which players “becomejournalists reporting on the scientific and technological breakthroughs for an online news-magazine” (p. 135). To help younger students, a computer-based system called “ByLine”provides prompts that guide students to communicate the findings to a larger audienceaccording to the genres and practices prevalent in the journalistic profession. In Escher’sWorld, students adopt the role of computer-aided designers using transformational ge-ometry, tessellations, and fractals to create designs. This game introduces students to “amicroworld of points, lines and angles and polygons and the mathematical functions thatcan relate them to each other” (p. 84). Finally, Urban Science positions students as urbanplanners in charge of developing a pedestrian mall in their city, helping them consider thevarious social impacts of such work.

One of Shaffer’s goals with the proposal of epistemic games is to move beyond thetraditional academic disciplines found in schools to professions such as urban planning,medicine, and journalism. The virtual worlds of video and computer games, he argues,“make it possible for players to learn by doing things that matter in the world on amassive scale” (p. 191) and can recreate the practices inherent in the epistemic framesof these various professions. Thus, epistemic frames for professional practice, in thisconceptualization, offer applications and illustrations of discipline in action. The focal pointof Shaffer’s argument is the idea of epistemic practice—the idea that if we put learnersinto the shoes of professional scientists, engineers, and journalists, they can adopt theirmindsets. This idea is not, of course, without its critics. Researchers Brown and Campione(1994) have argued that “even without an appreciation for daily life in grade school, thearmchair philosopher must see the impracticality of suggesting that children be enculturedinto the society of historians, biologists, mathematicians, and literary critics. This may bethe desired state of first-rate graduate school education, but it is surely not a reasonableexpectation for grade school” (p. 190).

While epistemic games may emulate certain activities and artifacts of professionalpractice, such as the design critiques and presentations, they omit others that are key to

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professional learning and experience, such as the role of economic pressures, marketing,cross-functional teams, and age differences. Choices of some of these features are obviouslybased on pedagogical needs and demands. Shaffer himself admits that the goal of epistemicgames is not to train future urban planners but rather to provide a more authentic contextfor students’ inquiries. This desire for authenticity is not new (project-based learning isa notable example with a long history). But it seems to be at odds with the game side ofhis proposal. Game researchers often invoke Huizuinga’s (1938/1955) magic circle thatdescribes play as a free and meaningful activity, bound by a self-contained system of rules,and carried out segregated (spatially and temporally) from the requirements of practical life.The professionalization seems to pull the epistemic games into two opposing directions:inside the circle for assumed role-play but outside the circle for assumed authenticity.

Furthermore, the notion of epistemic games seems to take certain liberties with the veryidea of “game.” While Shaffer‘s epistemic games are described as imagined worlds withrules in which players assume particular roles, their close ties to authentic professionalpractice put them much more squarely into the field of simulations rather than games.Throughout the book, in fact, terms such microworlds, simulations, and modeling tools areused after the example has been introduced as an epistemic game to describe the activitiesperformed by students. The curricular software designed by Shaffer and his students followsa longstanding trend in educational technology to customize professional visualization andlibrary tools for learners. This might help explain why the epistemic games described byShaffer bear little resemblance to commercially available video or online games. Shaffer’sgames are much more like educational software tools that have already established theircurricular relevance.

This focus on professional practice points toward an even larger issue, that of epistemol-ogy itself. The nature of knowledge is at the very core of the scientific enterprise. Yet it isalso, perhaps, one of its most debated issues. Feminist researchers have argued for a longtime that what is accepted as scientific inquiry is actually part of a political discourse withinthe scientific community. This book treats epistemology as a monolith. A crucial questionthat needs to be asked of Shaffer’s vision is whose professional practice or epistemologyhas been adopted in the service of education? Returning to the examples presented in thebook, it appears that little discussion of this sort has informed the design and analysis of hisepistemic frames. Perhaps this is something to be addressed in future research—the bookbrings little to bear on this key issue.

With epistemic games, Shaffer has introduced a new perspective that will move beyondthe drill-and-practice computer games often used in schools as motivational tools to rewardstudents for completed assignments. Although his book presents an argument that shouldbe of interest to science education, it also invites a number of questions that pertain to thecore of the nature and practice of science. Some might argue that this proposal is too farremoved from the realities of K-12 education. But if we want to entertain the possibilitiesof digital games for learning, then the idea of epistemic games can help us broaden ourdiscussion.

REFERENCES

Brown, A., & Campione, J. (1994). Guided discovery in a community of learners. In K. McGilly (Ed.), Classroomlessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice (pp. 229 – 272). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Collins, A., & Ferguson, W. (1993). Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and strategies to guideinquiry. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 25 – 42.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy? New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Original

work published 1938)

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YASMIN B. KAFAIGraduate School of Education & Information StudiesUniversity of California, Los AngelesLos Angeles, CA 90095-1521USA

DOI 10.1002/sce.20261Published online 10 January 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

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