Every Game Teaches Your Child Something | Dr. Erik Harpstead

Patricia Cangas [00:00:00] Welcome to Pixel Parenting, the podcast that helps families raise kids in a world full of screens using science and curiosity. Here, we share science-backed strategies and real conversations to help you build healthier digital habits with practical tools for everyday parenting in this digital age. Let's get into it. Your child wants a new game and the App Store says it's educational? That label means less than you think, because most stores check games for age-appropriate content, not for learning. Today we get into what a real learning game looks like, how to identify one in minutes and a free library of games that actually teach. Because every game teaches your child something. The question is whether it's something you care about. Today with me is Dr. Erik Harpstead, Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute. Dr. Harpstead studies the data behind child games to see if anyone is actually learning anything. He teaches game designers how to build games that really teach and he's part of the team behind the vault, a free online library of learning games built by education researchers. Let's get into it. Thank you Dr. Harpstead for being here. It is a pleasure to have an expert in educational games. Erik Harpstead [00:01:08] Happy to be here. Patricia Cangas [00:01:08] So tell me about your work. What do you study and what do you study specifically on educational games? Erik Harpstead [00:01:18] Yeah, so my background is in human-computer interaction broadly, but specifically within that understanding game-based learning and how people learn from play and learn within play and the lens that I tend to use in that space is one of data and analytics. So how could we using log data from players interacting with game environments understand that there is evidence that they are learning something or maybe they're not not learning something so and and my interest has generally been in the space of helping designers of educational games understand essentially the things they're making and is it actually doing what they want it to and can we highlight places where it's not so that they know how to update or change or improve things. Patricia Cangas [00:02:03] Can you give me an example of what you look into? Erik Harpstead [00:02:06] Yeah, so one of the techniques that I've worked on and published on is actually kind of importing a technique from the field of educational data mining, which is more broadly like how do we understand learner data in all kinds of technologies where we look at what we call learning curve analysis. So there are ways of taking player data and essentially annotating within a game or within a other kind of a structural environment. What kinds of skills, what kinds of knowledge do we think pieces of the game leverage? And then looking at a trace of a player going through that environment and seeing it's like, well, if these are the knowledge involved and this is how they're improving or not within the game, then they're probably learning this set of skills, for example. And you can plot that over time. So essentially over your opportunities to practice something, are they reducing an error or improving in success, it's kind of the same thing. And you can actually empirically plot the curve of learning against a particular set of skills. But then there's some interesting nuances in how the statistical models work, where if you notice a distinction between what the curve should look like and what players actually seem to be doing, that helps you highlight places where, oh, maybe the skills that we're understanding about our game are not correct or they're different and that students may be learning something else. So you have a really concrete example of that in the particular game that I'm thinking about here is there's this balance beam game for roughly third-ish grade and we had a few different essential what would happen is bugs would fall on one side of a balance beam and in a certain number and certain positions and then you had to grow flowers on the other side and the goal was to get the beam to balance and we had a whole different range of challenged levels there were like maybe the design was bugs found up like on position two and then you had to grow a flower in position two you can mirror what was on the other side or maybe you had to do some of the algebra essentially of do I count things up and figure out positions and then that tells me what to do on the side where I have to come up with something that looks different from the other side. And we found that when we plotted those out, things like mirroring are much easier, that's what makes sense. You know, kids could just look at something, copy it, and whereas if they have to do some of the more algebra, it gets a little harder. But then we discovered in some of our levels, there happened to be a cases where kids could just kind of mindlessly place their flowers on any open position and it happened to work. They didn't have to do any math, they didn't have to do any counting. And when you plot that on these learning curves, you see these really weird waves in the curve, which is this evidence of like, oh, we thought they were learning is clearly not what they're learning. They're getting better and worse kind of unexpectedly. And if you sort of go and re-annotate the data against this model that assumes that, oh, there's the shortcut strategy, then you start to see it's like, oh, actually they are learning something here, but then also some of these other harder skills, they're not learning anything. And so maybe we need to add more practice. And so that's kind of one of my favorite techniques because it leads directly to sort of design insight. It's like, do we need to add more practice? Do we need to take some practice? maybe we're over practicing something, like maybe kids are getting really good and we're asking them to do like 20 more levels of a thing they've already mastered. And it can really help with understanding what needs to be changed in an experience. Patricia Cangas [00:04:54] Interesting. And the games you analyze, are those all educational games, all types of games or? Erik Harpstead [00:05:01] Yes, I've typically been in the space of educational games. So when I started my PhD, it was around the space of educational technologies. Not necessarily gonna start out being games, but my advisor happened to be starting a game project right when I was starting my PhD. And I was like, oh man, can I work on games? And so I've largely been in the space of educational games, usually in the STEM part of that space in particular, not necessarily for like a particular interest, but this, because the projects happen to be working on. I have been sort of since starting my own research career, been exploring also the entertainment space as well. And I also find that interesting, so not necessarily educational, but so much of my sort of academic background and training is in understanding and thinking about learning and learning processes that I tend to be pretty rooted in the education space. Patricia Cangas [00:05:44] OK, and I wonder, the games that are educational, so you have a process to analyze if educational games actually teach. Most parents I talk to assume that a game that is labeled educational is actually teaching something to their kids and that their kids will learn with it. How true is that? And are those educational games analyzed with a system like yours? Erik Harpstead [00:06:06] Yeah, so that's an interesting way to be kind of an academic about it. There's a very particular way of interpreting that question. And it's actually kind of interesting that I started with that learning curve example, too, is I think all games teach something, but it's whether or not you actually care about the thing being learned. And so like, to some extent, all games have to teach themselves, right? You wouldn't be able to play a game if you didn't learn it, but that's usually not what a parent actually wants, or that's not the part they care about. And you'll see lots of stuff getting tagged education and particularly like the big app stores or something like that. There isn't a lot of vetting or requirement to add that educational tag to your product. And there are some people in the educational technology space who are like really mad about that and others just kind of wish there was kind of better standards for how you would decide if something was educational or not. And so the process that I kind of go through in thinking about how whether or not a game is educational. So I teach educational game design as well as develop educational games and analyses. And one of One of the things I have my students do is, one of their assignments is to go out and find existing educational games, broadly construed, and analyze them against this framework that we use in our class. And in that framework, they are asked to identify what are the apparent learning objectives of this game. So not, what does the marketing material say, but play the game, what does it look like you need to learn to succeed. And then also along with that, it's like, is there prior knowledge it's assuming you have? And where might you be able to transfer that knowledge to something else? So that's the first piece. And then the second piece is kind of draw out, what do you think the game loop is? of what kind of actions does the player have to do regularly, what does their goal seem to be, what kind of abilities do they have available, what kind of decisions are they making in this loop. And then the third piece is from the learning sciences we have all these different principles and understandings of things that lead to good learning. And there are many, many lists of these things if you go and look in the literature and see it's like which principles do you see are coming up, but one of the core things that I want students to think about there is one of the core theories we use is called the Knowledge Learning Instruction Framework or the CLEE framework. I don't expect parents to go read it, it's like a 50-page journal article. But in it is this hypothesis that there are sort of three learning processes or learning mechanisms. And so, essentially, the learning is not a monolithic thing, there's different kinds of learning, and they're triggered by different kinds of experiences or different kinds of instruction, and they're also best used for different kinds of targeting knowledge. And so, the main thing I want students to be identifying then is which mechanism do they think they're seeing in this game. And when you have all three of those things laid out, you can start to see, it's like, do they actually reinforce each other? Do they align? And so like what is the kind of learning we think kids seem to be doing in this experience? What is the kind of knowledge that the game seems to want the player to learn? So is it maybe it's learning basic arithmetic skills or maybe it's learning how to set up a good scientific experiment or has got hypothesis or whatever. And then if you look at the gameplay, is that what they're actually doing? Or are they doing some other random thing? It's like sometimes you'll see games where it's like do some math problems, okay, now then, now go play Pac-Man for a bit, and then it's sort of set up in a cadence like that, and it's like, well, the core experience isn't really the thing they're trying to learn. Or maybe it is, maybe the thing they're actually doing is legitimately like scientific inquiry, and they're setting up experiments and gathering evidence, and it's like, oh, that's what we want them to be learning. And then that third piece is, is which learning process does it seem to be evoking? And then those three processes are, are sort of memory-influency building, which is, you can kind of think about simply as sort of flashcard-y sort of experiences. Really useful for things that we need to be fast and immediate at, like there's value in that kind of learning, but it's only useful for so much, or necessary for so much, like facts and things. Is it like learning rules and processes? So how do I do as particular kind of skill or how do I do it differently? Or is it like sense-making of like a complicated system? Like, do I need to be understanding some kind of complicated thing? And so you can say, which of those three is happening? What kind of loop is happening for the player and what kinds of things we want them to be learning and do those three line up with each other. That's why I have my students go out and do that kind of analysis. And one of the big things that I have, I've built up this big list for my class that I have in a spreadsheet. And one of the requirements I have for all my students is they must, for one of their posts, they do like four or five of these in a semester. They must find one new game that's not currently on that list. And so there's like some 400, 500 games on there right now. And crucially for that one, again, I don't know if I necessarily share that directly with parents because maybe a third of the games on that list are not good. But that's kind of the point when you're learning to design an educational game, you need to have that experience of both. You need both positive examples and negative examples and the ability to kind of talk about why the positive ones work and why the negatives don't. And so some of those are terrible. Some of them are great. Some of my favorite educational games are wrong. And some of my favorite educational games that I've played actually have come from students finding games I'd never heard of before, which is kind of neat. Patricia Cangas [00:10:38] When you say that a game is bad, is it because it's not fun or because it doesn't teach or both? Erik Harpstead [00:10:42] So usually what we're talking about in the context of this class, and I guess usually where my head is normally at, is the latter, so that it doesn't necessarily teach. There are educational games that aren't fun, but maybe are pretty good learning experiences. And then in my experience, it tends to be, like you usually find your way in the space of educational games either because you're interested in game design and you wanna do something like productive or positive with your work or you're coming from a pedagogical background and you're interested in games because they seem like they might be more engaging. And typically if you come from one of those two, the first things you start making are either, like if you're a game designer, you make fun experiences that don't teach or if you're a pedagogy person, you make instructional stuff that's not fun. And then eventually you kind of spend enough time in the space. You talk to other people and you start to get better at doing both at once. But usually my own mind is that, yeah, is it, does it seem to be learning or not? And that's partly because I'm one of the people that kind of guests came more from the pedagogy side of the thing. Patricia Cangas [00:11:37] Interesting. You mentioned that the games labeled as educational in the app stores don't follow a rigorous process or even they don't have to meet any standard to be on those app stores. You just submit an app labeled as educational. And if the app has appropriate age content, it goes through no educational goals or learning objectives or anything needed or approved. Correct. Erik Harpstead [00:12:02] Typically. Yeah. I mean, I don't know every app stores standards, but generally that would be my expectation. I imagine they probably are checked for age appropriateness, which is a relatively low bar or approachable bar, but not necessarily that they have a rigorous learning goal involved or any evidence that learning goal is regularly achieved for some body of players. That's not to say there aren't games like that, so there are games that do get tested and evaluated and there's evidence for certain things, but it's generally not a requirement for showing up on an app store. Patricia Cangas [00:12:32] Yeah, and I know some of the games that are actually tested and they're backed by research, but those get lost in the ocean of the other ones. Erik Harpstead [00:12:41] Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, and finding them. Patricia Cangas [00:12:43] So if a parent has 15 minutes to size up a game that their kids want to play, what should they look at? using your framework, writing a simplified version of it. Erik Harpstead [00:12:53] Yeah, so one of the things that I do recommend, and I can appreciate this is sometimes harder than others, but really getting to see a little bit of the actual play of the game. If that's a video, great. Ideally, it's actually interacting with the experience, because that's another thing that often happens in app stores is the way that a lot of, particularly the mobile games get marketed, doesn't necessarily always showing a true version of what the actual play experience is like. And also in certain contexts that might mean in order to get that experience you have already bopped it. So that is kind of a moot point at that point. But interacting with the experience a little bit and seeing what the gameplay actually is like. Because a thing we talk about in educational game design is this idea of integration. So it's like what's the relationship between the gameplay experience and the target knowledge, which is kind of what I was in that three-piece framework that I was talking about. And generally we know from research, maybe reasonably intuitive, that if you want your game to teach something or you want you want your learner to learn something from your gameplay experience, it should make them do that thing. So whatever is the core of the loop of the experience is should be close to the thing that they should be learning or coming away with. And if it's not, like if they're spending a lot of time doing a bunch of other random unrelated things, or they don't really touch sort of the content or the target knowledge or something with some frequency, then maybe it's not going to be the most educational experience. Now, that also again doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing, like, I can appreciate there is a degree of, if there's just some amount of learning and then otherwise it's like safe engagement for a kid. As a parent myself, I would probably be okay with certain kinds of experiences like that. And then it comes down to kind of understanding how they might be spending like a lot of time in an experience like this and whether or not you think it's like worth it for the kinds of experiences they would have or the kinds of things they might be seeing. But really for me, it would be like, what seems to be happening, what seems to be the actual core engagement of this experience? And that can be a little hard to get to just looking at marketing materials or videos. Patricia Cangas [00:14:45] So what I hear is there are core engagements like destructions from the learning objective. If you want them to work on math mental agility, then they need to be doing math and not something else. Erik Harpstead [00:14:59] Yeah. Patricia Cangas [00:15:00] Also the guessing part, your example on the first, the first example you gave, if a game allows for guessing and guessing works, then there's no learning, right? Erik Harpstead [00:15:09] Yeah, or at least it's less likely. Patricia Cangas [00:15:11] It's less likely. Yeah. Erik Harpstead [00:15:12] So like, if you do know and you can, like, in those levels, you could have gotten them right because you understood the principles. It just happened to be you could mindlessly also solve them. And from the perspective we had, it was impossible to tell which one of the two was happening in a student. So. Patricia Cangas [00:15:25] Yeah. So parents need to be involved and actually play the games a little bit, not a long time, just a little bit before deciding either educational or not or educational enough, right? Erik Harpstead [00:15:37] Yeah. Yeah. Patricia Cangas [00:15:37] Can you briefly state the three items of your framework? Erik Harpstead [00:15:42] Yeah, so the way I typically refer them is what are the learning goals or learning objectives? What is the core gameplay loop? And the thing that I suggest for my students in identifying the core gameplay loop, I have them actually articulate a deeper version of game design, but it's one of two things. And dialing in this takes a little bit of practice, but it's either what is the smallest unit of action that the player will find interesting, Or that draws your attention or what is the thing that the player spends the most time thinking about? So when you're watching a gameplay like what is the thing they did you attend to the most? Yeah, I realize I totally walked past quickly summarizing the three things but so the three are Yeah is um, what does it look like the game wants the player to learn in terms of their actions? What is the core loop of action that the player spends the most time doing or paying attention to? And then the third piece is within that loop and towards that goal, does it seem to be that it wants them to do more of a sort of memory fluency practice, which you can think about as flashcards? Is it more, does it want them to learn a rule or a process, which we call induction or refinement? Or does it look like it wants them to kind of make sense of a complex system? And if those are the three things, those should relate to what you want them to be learning. And that would also help you think about is the loop actually helping them go through that process. Patricia Cangas [00:16:58] Got it. That's perfect for the audience. And we have the long version of it in the past explanation, but without the three items in our mind, it's harder to follow that. But it's very insightful, and it is also, from a parent's perspective, I'm trying to think about games that I play and thinking about the smallest action or thing that I do when I play them. I'm finding it hard to think. I mean, now I'm talking to you, I'm not focusing on my attention in that, but I find it that it could be hard to identify the smaller gameplay action piece. Any tips to identifying that for the parents? Erik Harpstead [00:17:36] Yeah, yeah. So core gameplay loops are, I think, game designers talk about a lot. And they're usually the most interesting thing for game designers, because they're the thing that the player is going to spend the most cognitive time and attention on. And in my class, I bring in a couple of different examples to talk about them. In my actual lecture on game design, I use Monopoly as an example. But it's actually not the best for talking about this particular piece of the process understanding loops because its loop is a little weird because in Monopoly you actually don't have a lot of agency but the one that I do like to talk about is Minecraft and so partly because everybody's heard of it and because it's got some interesting dynamics to it because because another way that I another thing that I had to get a little deeper in how I talk about gameplay loops is there's the core gameplay loop which is the thing the player is spending the most attention and time on but then within that are micro loops they have different kinds of interaction and also outside that are macro loops and so if you think about Minecraft if you think about the very smallest unit of action you can possibly do, it's like hit a block or pick an item up or something. But like when you're doing those actions, you're probably not actually really attending to them very much. You're probably not thinking about them. Like they're part of like what you're doing in going maybe diving into a particular cave or maybe you're kind of looking for a particular resource or something. And in that process you're doing a bunch of little micro interactions. But you're not really planning or processing those. I mean you are, but you're not really doing it consciously. So those are micro loops to the core loop. And then at the same time, one thing that makes Minecraft really interesting is it actually has different macro loops for different people. So there are some people who want to go and get to the end, like Minecraft has an end where it'll roll credits and everything, you go fight a dragon in another dimension. Some people want to play Minecraft because they just want to build some really cool big castle or a whole big town or city or whatever. And so they're driven by different kinds of long-term goals. Some people want to go like, I've played Minecraft sometimes where I just go and I want to just like map out, like you can make maps in the game. I just want to like be the cartographer of the world. And so those are kind of different high level and those are usually going going to be things that you're doing on a like a session to session time skill. And so then the core loop is like, what are you doing in between? And again, that might vary a little bit depending on how you play, but in a given session of a game, what is a kid kind of focusing on? Is it that it's like, okay, I'm going to be building my big castle. That means I need to go and get more of a particular kind of tree for the columns, whatever. So this session, I'm going to be like, okay, how do I go to there? How do I identify the trees I want? How do I cut them down? Oh, maybe my axe broke. Okay, now I got to go rebuild like and so it's like the what is my goal right now? And what am I working towards that goal? And the process what am I learning right? Like that's where the learning happens. And then in tying it to the learning is the learning will happen in that loop. It might not happen in that long-term one. It might not happen in those micro ones, but it's the thing that's kind of driving your your sort of active planning. Patricia Cangas [00:20:09] Fascinating. Erik Harpstead [00:20:10] Yeah, so if you're aiming for a learning game that's kind of the unit you want to be trying to think about. Minecraft is probably on the order of things that parents might be looking at. probably a more complicated experience, so it's a little hard. But it clearly has those micro interactions and it clearly has those big macro ones and that the core lives somewhere in between. Patricia Cangas [00:20:26] So I guess the fun, you can put it in the macro and maybe in the micro and then the in between can be the boring quotes part, but like you have a goal, you have micro taxes in between, can be the boring quotes part, but like you have a goal, you have micro taxes in between, you learn. Erik Harpstead [00:20:40] Yeah, kind of. It's actually interesting. Patricia Cangas [00:20:40] Too simplistic. Erik Harpstead [00:20:40] Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah. Well, what's interesting is, this actually reminds me a lot of Jesse Schell, who's a game designer, and he wrote, They Are a Game Design, really great book. And in there, he talks about this idea of an interest curve. And if you've ever taken a literature class or something, you know, kind of like there's the intro, the rising action, the climax, the dating model, like you've probably seen that drawn out. That's like a classic interest curve, but you can draw lots of other ones. And things like roller coasters have a similar, if you'd like take the velocity of a roller coaster over time, usually has similar kind of shape to it. And he talks about it like you want it you can draw these curbs out and thinking about what you want your experience to be like. You can also try to measure them with players and have them actually try to articulate. It's a little hard to get that kind of subjective experience on the kind of timescale you need, but you can do it. But then he also kind of talks about in the way the games are often designed is you can kind of view that curve as that interest curve is kind of tessellating. So the macro version of Minecraft going building a big castle or whatever has an interest curve to it. An individual session has has a sort of a rhyming interest curve to it. And then also the feeling of like going and breaking an individual brick is supposed to kind of have a similar interest. And so you can kind of keep those ideas, as a game designer you can think about having roughly that same shape at every one of those timescales. It's just, there's one that the player is probably going to be spending the most conscious direct effort planning and thinking on and that's usually where we want to think about situating learning. So they're all kind of fun. They're just fun in different ways. Patricia Cangas [00:22:03] Fun in different ways. Got it. So let's get a little bit more like practical. Is there a place, least, You mentioned you have a spreadsheet with educational games that you like, is there a website anywhere parents can find true educational games in the sense that they teach? Erik Harpstead [00:22:22] Yeah, so there's a couple. I probably wouldn't go and point people at my list like I mentioned. So another project that I'm a part of, is part of this open game data community, which started out as this collective of people to try and solve a problem of when we do research in games, kind of every game is kind of its own micro universe. And so every analysis process of understanding, experience in a game is kind of always been bespoke, which makes it really hard to kind of do generalizable science. And so we started out with, what if we always agreed on how we record our games, and then we could share our data and we could generalize science. That'd be great. Turns out the problem is way more complicated than that. And so the thing we were discovering is your typical academically developed educational game, historically, would get a grant. Maybe you get a year to build it. Maybe you get a year or two to do some couple studies on it, and then it would disappear off the face of the earth. Maybe it would live on your lab's website. Maybe it would be on your grad students, like a GitHub profile and not updated for five, six years. And so we got together and created what we call the Vault. And so if you go to vaultlearninggames.org, it's trying to be a place where these great educational games that have been studied, usually studied, whether or not they've been validated as learning, they've at least been studied, usually they have been validated and being beneficial in some way, but to have them have a place to live so that people can actually play them. Patricia Cangas [00:23:30] That's a great idea. Erik Harpstead [00:23:30] That's kind of become one of my core answers to this question of what lists exists and where can people go. And it's mostly in the STEM space, mostly in the sciences space. But there's also some interesting civics games. So there is a group called iCivics. We sort of re-host a bunch of those, but that one's a good one for about various civics topics. And I used to send people lots of different websites, but now I'm just gonna send to the vault because it works pretty well for a lot of these things. Is directed more at a teacher kind of context, but parents can use it too. You can play all the games that like there's no particular thing. But the idea, the original set of criteria for us to include something in the vault was it can be played in a browser, is tied to some kind of curricular content. Again, could be very different units of analysis there. It could be like a very specific skill. It could be like a whole curriculum, but it's tied to something. And can be played in about the time you would have in a classroom, about 45 minutes, and is free. So those are sort of our four big requirements. And they're all for desktop, I understand, or? They are all built for being played in a browser on like a laptop or desktop or something. Or, well, iPads. I believe many of them would be iPad compatible. I don't think we've looked at that as a strict criteria. And also many of them do have other, like we have the link to the browser playable version, but many of them also do exist in other places. Almost all the entries on the vault should list the developer and like where you can find other stuff about the game. And we're mostly trying to be a place where they can at least be linked in a central location. And so many of them do have other versions that exist in things like tablets or mobile or something like that. Patricia Cangas [00:25:00] the app stores, like you would find them in another version, like in game, but just another platform. Yeah. I love, and I like a lot how it's structured. So I highly recommend parents to go and check any top three games that you would recommend for parents that are fun and educational. Top three. Erik Harpstead [00:25:19] I had an answer for one, but can I come up with three? Patricia Cangas [00:25:22] Well, you can also, yeah, if you have to be great, you can also give you one. Erik Harpstead [00:25:26] Well, it's interesting having looked and played around this list a lot. I mean, one of the big ones, which is a little bit, so this is largely put together originally by Field Day Lab, which is a group at University of Wisconsin-Madison who is also one of my favorite educational game developers currently working. We've become close collaborators on this open game data project and so, but I really like their game Wake, Tales from the Aqualab, which is up on here. It's actually an interesting one for a K-12 context, because it's actually really long. It's like, there's like, there's like a potential 10 hours of gameplay in there, I think, which is hard to do when you only have about 45 minutes in a classroom. Um, and so it actually might be a better game for kids to play at home. And so that's an interesting one where you're going and finding like kind of the core there is to try and understand ecological relationships and like food webs and things. And you actually go to sort of particular aquatic sites. You observe animals, and then you go and you put them in a science. You put them in like an experiment tank and you could all observe what they do with each other and turn that into pieces of evidence that you turn into arguments. And you go to a bunch of different. Patricia Cangas [00:26:24] What was your name again? Erik Harpstead [00:26:25] Uh, Wake. Patricia Cangas [00:26:26] Wake. Okay. I will ask you for the link and I can put it in the show notes. I'll put all the links that you mentioned in the show notes. Erik Harpstead [00:26:32] And so that one, because one thing that I really, that I really admire about field days process in particular is, so wake's a great science game, but it's also got our, like a really rich narrative structure around it. And there's like a whole thing about relating to your, I don't remember if it's this one or if there's, they have another one that is also aquatic that I always confused with it, but there's one where you have like these dreams about your dead grandfather or whatever. And you're kind of trying to understand what happened to him. There's this whole slight personal narrative drama to it on top of doing underwater archaeology and some way you have a similar thing where you're like relating to your family and stuff like that. And so, so it's both a great game and a great educational game. So I do like that a lot. Patricia Cangas [00:27:09] Yeah. Does the vault target a specific age range or no? Erik Harpstead [00:27:13] So the vault is targeted towards K-12 and there's actually a great dropdown if you go to the site. I think it's reasonably dialed in on the ranges. So it essentially has like K3, 3, 5, 5, 8, 9, 12, as kind of ranges that exist on the site. And I think it's a reasonably well calibrated. There might be a couple that are maybe on the borders, depending on what you want to be doing. And I think the bulk of it is going to be more in the middle of the high school. That's going to, I think, I think it swings a little to the high end of this range, just in terms of what tends to be there currently. Patricia Cangas [00:27:43] I'm so happy that there is a place to find educational games, you know, back by research. It is amazing. Erik Harpstead [00:27:49] And we're also, we're always looking to add more. So this was kind of an initial list created from a couple other services that were sort of sun setting. We sort of started from them and kind of brought them all together. And some of these you might debate how gamey they are or not. We've tried to be a little bit open-minded about what exactly counts, but like some of these are kind of more just pure pure physics simulators, which are kind of fun to toy with. They don't really have so much of like a goal like a game might, but it's kind of like things you can play around. And then a couple on here that I do enjoy, probably for an older audience than for kids, but they're these explorable explanations from Nicky Case. So the wisdom of madness of the crowds or the evolution of trust. They're pretty text heavy. They kind of feel a little like you're clicking through a slide deck, but they're more interactive than that makes it sound. But also like the evolution of trust one is like understanding the prisoner's dilemma. When you play it once, it makes you very cynical, but if you play it repeatedly, it creates really interesting social dynamics and stuff like that. And it's a really nice way of interactively going through these explanations of complex sort of usually philosophical or social topics. So I've always really enjoyed those ones. For certain ages, they might be like, why am I doing so much reading? But I think they're pretty interesting. Patricia Cangas [00:28:56] Yeah, yeah. So what's the one thing that you would love parents listening today to walk away with? Erik Harpstead [00:29:02] That's an interesting one. I think, I guess maybe I have a couple different ways I could answer this. Listen, I'll give you the sort of what I think of is kind of like the more like pithy response that I give to parents when they ask me. Like if I don't have time to get into all the learning and everything, what is my one suggestion for like, what's the game that I should give to my kid? or what's a good game for my kid. And my canned answer is any game you play with them is good. And then when you're doing the kind of, you get a lot of benefit out of like, well, implicitly, if you're playing with them and you see something that you don't think they should be engaging with yet, you can cut it off because you're there and you're following and you're thinking. But I think maybe the better takeaway or the maybe more relevant one to the rest of what I've already been talking about is kind of taking a look at kind of the sort of educational or learning experiences you want your kid to potentially be playing with and kind of really thinking as like, What are they really asking my kid to learn or what are they really dealing with and does it seem like it supports it? But does it seem like it supports the kind of learning that it claims to and I think you can make some judgments like that Relatively cleanly and again, it's enough not necessarily is it all education or not? Like but is there some amount of benefit here and the rest of it seems like it's safe engagement I think those are probably particularly if you're thinking about a younger side of kids That's definitely the kind of thing you want to be thinking about Patricia Cangas [00:30:13] Yeah, I love both answers actually the one you want to play with your kid Like if you like playing a game that it's not necessarily educational its entertainment But it's it's appropriate and you're playing with them That's fine because as you said you're there and the jump is something that they shouldn't you're there and the second one Yes, I agree. It doesn't need to be educational just the way to think about it I love that perspective eyes What are they gonna learn because as you say all games teach something whether you like what they teach or not, right? Like you said, so I love that way to approach it and I think it's very practical and it leaves a lot of room for parents to decide what games to play and it takes away the pressure of oh my god, they're playing video games and it's not educational, right? It's great if it's educational, but games need to be fun too, right? Erik Harpstead [00:30:59] Yeah, there's room for that kind of amusement and enjoyment in such as well. Patricia Cangas [00:31:03] Well, thank you so much for this amazing information. I really did change how I'm going to think about games from now on. The whole loop experience, I'm going to be aware of that. You're raising the awareness. Thank you so much. Patricia Cangas [00:31:19] That was Dr. Erik Harpstead. Three things to keep. First, all games teach something. The question is whether they teach what you care about. App stores check games for age, not for learning. So treat the educational tag more as marketing. Second, watch the game before you decide. Sit with your child for a few minutes and ask yourself one question. What are they actually doing most of the time? If the learning is in the play, not added on top, then that's a good sign. Third, you don't have to hunt for the good ones. There is a free library of learning games made and vetted by education researchers. Go check the vault at vaultlearninggames.org. They run in a browser, they're free, and you can filter by age. Erik's pick are Wake and Tales from the Aqualab. If this episode helped, share with one parent who needs it, thanks for listening.