Handhelds, Avatars, and Virtual Aliens

How learning in the classroom is changing and why Professor Chris Dede and his team are on a non-crusade to figure out how all of the pieces fit together.

by Lory Hough

The middle schoolers walk down the sidewalk outside their school in Boston, passing brick apartment buildings and parking lots surrounded by wrought iron fences. The sound of other students can be heard farther away, along with car horns and the general flow of traffic. But these students, five in all, seem unaware of the noise. Their heads are down, their stylus pens busy clicking away on the handheld devices they are carrying. Suddenly, en masse, they stop. A video has just popped up on their computer screens.

“If the aliens wanted to do something to us, they would have done it by now,” the man in the video says. “Besides, uranium isn’t deadly to humans, as long as we’re careful with it.” The students have their next clue. It’s time to figure out, once and for all, why aliens have landed in their schoolyard. And figuring it out is more than just a matter of saving their fellow students from potential annihilation. Their grades could depend on it.

Not Just Fun and Games

Love them or hate them, interactive games — in this case, one called Alien Contact! — have moved out of the living room and into the classroom. What Chris Dede wants to know is: What potential does this have for learning in the classroom? Surprisingly, although Dede’s official title is “professor in learning technologies” and he and his team created Alien Contact! as well as another program, River City, he isn’t determined to find a positive answer to that question.

“I’m agnostic on this,” Dede says. He believes schools should use interactive technology to teach, but he isn’t saying they should necessarily use programs like Alien Contact! or River City. “My goal isn’t to promote technology. It’s to show the strengths and weaknesses of the technology. It’s a value to the field to show this. I’m not on a crusade.”

Crusade or no crusade, when Dede first started developing the ideas for these programs, he knew he was onto something. Commercial video games like Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, and even the slow-moving Pac-Man are incredibly enticing, especially to young Americans who have grown up in a world saturated with technology and have never known a time when computers didn’t exist.

One of Dede’s doctoral students, Ed Dieterle, Ed.D.’07, a project implementation specialist with River City, recently surveyed 800 middle school students — the target group for Dede’s programs — to find out about their media use. He found that 59 percent own a mobile phone, 74 percent own an MP3 player, and 69 percent own a handheld game player. Another study by Yahoo! and Carat Interactive shows that young people (ages 13 to 24) spend eight hours a day on an interactive device such as a cell phone.

Video games in particular, says Dede, are “incredibly engaging.” However — and this is a big however — “the content is garbage, generally, or even pathological,” Dede said at a technology conference in Florida last spring. “We have this wonderful engine for learning that’s hooked to a bad set of knowledge.”

How then to harness this wonderful engine that has proven to be captivating while also making it useful for deep learning, especially in a testing and accountability environment where there’s little room for creativity?

Dede’s way since his days teaching at George Mason University in the 1990s has been to tap into emerging technologies — multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) software and augmented reality — to create his programs, make them appealing to multitasking middle schoolers, base them on national and state standards, give them free to schools to test, then use various forms of educational assessments and evaluation to measure student learning and engagement.

The most-tested of Dede’s programs is River City. Not technically a video game, the program is a computer simulation that looks and feels like a video game, but has a serious goal: help students learn about science the way that a scientist would by testing and gathering data. Doctoral student Jody Clarke, Ed.M.’01, program director for the River City project, says that mirroring the video game format was intentional.

“We took an interface that kids are familiar with and designed it around rich content and complexity. Game designers have given a lot of thought to motivation of play,” she says. “If a game is not good, then people won’t play it. We tried to take some of those aspects: curiosity, exploration, discovery, problem-seeking, complex problem-solving, narrative, and challenge.”

Technically, River City is a MUVE, which allows many users to access a virtual world at the same time — in this case, a fictitious 19th century town where some of the residents are getting sick.

“Students’ mission is very much like the movie Back to the Future,” Dede says. “They can use their 21st century knowledge [in this case] to help people fight infectious diseases about 130 years ago."

Students select three-dimensional virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, who navigate through the city gathering data by interacting with digital artifacts such as microscopes and pictures. As scientists, they chat online with their real teammates about their findings, as well as with the virtual residents of River City. After students collect data, each team forms a hypothesis that is finally shared with the mayor of River City, and later with their classmates.

Alien Contact! is slightly different. Instead of being used on a desktop computer, the augmented reality game is mobile. Students walk around their playground or sports field with individual handheld computers and companion global positioning system (GPS) units. When they come to certain markers programmed into the handhelds, new clues pop up as text, video clips, or audio clips. Similar to River City, students take on various roles, interview virtual characters, collect digital data, and solve math and literacy problems as they work toward solving the main problem — why are aliens in the schoolyard? They form a hypothesis, which they orally present to the class as well as turn into a written essay.

What Does This Mean for Learning?

Although Dede and his teams, which include many Ed School students, are still in various stages of testing and using these programs (River City has been in more than 70 schools nationwide; Alien Contact!, in a much earlier stage, is being tested in three Massachusetts schools), they have some sense of what works and what it means for learning.

For starters, students are, as they predicted, excited to use the programs.

“We’ve crossed that threshold of wondering if the students will be engaged,” says Matt Dunleavy, a postdoctoral fellow who served as project director for Alien Contact! “Engagement has been high with not only the narrative part of the program — figuring out why the aliens have landed — but with the actual equipment.”

Aram Manoukian, a middle school teacher outside Boston who used Alien Contact! with his seventh-graders, said some students were initially skeptical; most had never used Bluetooth GPS systems and wondered if it would be complicated.

“Once they actually got to touch a handheld, play with it for a few minutes, and get themselves oriented, they were great. There was an obvious satisfaction when they watched the indicator on their screen move and track their location,” he says. “They enjoyed getting to the next checkpoint, gathering the evidence, and finding out what came next. They really did have a blast, and the problems were quite challenging, so they learned at the same time. This is absolutely a great way to get away from the norm and bring a little extra excitement to learning.”

Manoukian remembers an afternoon when the students were in the schoolyard using the program and were so engaged that they tuned out the hovering adults.

“Our district superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, Matt [Dunleavy] and his crew, me, and my tutor, Kelliane Boucher, were all out in the field observing the students,” Manoukian says. “Not one student even noticed that, seemingly, all eyes in the district were on them. All the shot-callers were closely watching, but the students were so tuned in that they hardly noticed. It was something to see.”

Students also say they like the way the programs relate, or could relate, to their lives, unlike commercial video games.

“The knowledge and skills participants gain from most video games — for example, how to kill an ogre or how to find gold in a dwarf’s cave — provide no aid in coping with real-life challenges,” says Dede. His programs are set in virtual worlds, but based on real-world content, such as how polluted water affects health.

“My main problem with math is the whole disconnection with real life. How is this going to help us with understanding the real world?” says one student, whose class used Alien Contact! “This program made the connection: Solve these problems for a reason, not just solve these problems to get a grade.”

Virtual, Not Solo

One of the most interesting, and perhaps surprising, aspects of emerging technology is that kids actually spend lots of time collaborating and sharing information with one another — something that flies in the face of the stereotype of computing being antisocial and isolating. With both programs, students work in small teams and are continuously in touch with one another. With Alien Contact!, for example, each team member plays a different role: chemist, linguist, computer expert, and FBI agent. Each role sees different information on their handheld and gets different clues. The key is that in order to come to any conclusion, the four team members have to work together and combine information.

“Kids today like to learn collaboratively through shared experiences,” says Dede. “I don’t think that’s very different than kids of my generation. When you’re that age, you like hanging out with your friends and you like learning by doing. What’s different today is that can now happen vicariously, not all in the real world. That didn’t happen when I was growing up. We might all watch Davy Crockett on TV and then go out into the backyard and pretend.”

Boucher says Alien Contact! was particularly helpful with a group of students who were each used to being in charge.

“There was one group of four extremely bright boys who were all little leaders. They were used to doing everything on their own and not really trusting their partners,” she says. “On the first day, all of them were walking in different directions staring at their own GPS, not listening at all to each other. At the end of the day, very frustrated, they realized that they could not complete the checkpoint without each other. The next day Alex, usually the quietest of the four, took charge. He kept herding them all in very nicely, and they completed the tasks before anyone else. This was significant, not because of the technology, but because it allowed these boys to trust in a group project.”

“[Our city] is a melting pot, with students of all sorts, making this the perfect place to explore how the project would work in a diverse setting,” says Manoukian. “This class in particular was probably the most diverse class I’ve had; there were about an even amount of boys and girls, and there were students of all levels of ability and personality. This class was a mix of ESL, special education, and mainstream students. The students had their teams picked for them, and ‘getting along’ was something that we were a little concerned about. After a day of getting acquainted and settling into their roles, most of the groups became welloiled machines.”

Which could help explain why, at least from the initial data and from teachers’ observations, using these programs helps level the playing field for many students.

“Our research documents fascinating case studies about underperforming students who have given up on learning science but come alive and succeed at learning through the interactive medium of River City,” Clarke says. She later wrote a case study about a student who was flunking seventh grade and who was seen as a troublemaker.

“I observed three different incidents where he was accused of doing something wrong (most likely because he had in the past) even though he had not,” she wrote. “I was doing observations when his class started River City. I forgot he was in the class because he was so quiet. He jumped right in and became a leader for his team. Not only did he see gains in his post-test score, but he used terminology that scientists used and claimed that he felt like a scientist without being prompted.”

Dede says higher-order thinking skills like sophisticated inquiry are more difficult to teach using conventional methods. “Many students have already given up on themselves and given up on school,” he says. “There’s a huge gap between what’s taught by lectures, textbook readings, and labs, and what’s needed to understand the complex phenomena we need in the real world.”

Kate Messner, a seventh-grade teacher in Plattsburg, N.Y., who has used River City for several years, says Dede and his team took into account all kinds of learning styles when they created the program.

“Struggling readers have built-in support with a program like River City because teams can be set up to include learners at different readiness levels,” she says. “Because the program is so visual, it taps into the learning style of visual learners as well — those students who may have trouble learning from reading a traditional text.”

Dede points out, however, that some learners actually need more than these programs alone can provide alone.

“No single pedagogical approach is right for all kids,” he says. “We find that students enjoy River City, but some need direct instructional support that we have embedded in our learning-by-doing environment in order to master the material. We also are careful to ‘fade’ River City as a learning environment, encouraging teachers to bridge to field trips, because our goal is not to draw students into the virtual world, but instead to empower their studying of similar issues in the real world.”

Challenges Met, Challenges Ahead

What may help some students learn is what these programs don’t offer: winning or losing teams and one “right” answer.

“That was very intentional,” says marine biologist Doug Krause, Ed.M.’07. Krause recently created the curriculum for Gray Anatomy, a simulation in its very early stages of development, while he was a student in Dede’s class. “There are three main, well-supported explanations,” he says of the whale dilemma — why are whales beaching themselves — that form the basis of the program. “If students pick up on certain information, that will lead them to a valid answer. What I really wanted was for the students to come away with a deeper understanding of science and that it isn’t about the right answer. Kids often believe that science is a collection of facts when it’s not. It’s about the process.”

“We specifically did not want to have extrinsic rewards,” says Clarke of River City. “Everything students do is connected to the content.”

And the content is connected to national standards, something that was critical to Dede and his teams when the programs were being created. River City, for example, allows students to gather data, hypothesize, use tools to test, analyze, and make conclusions — all meeting science standards that say that students should develop understandings about scientific inquiry. Alien Contact! and Gray Anatomy cover math and literacy (and Gray Anatomy also covers marine environmental issues).

Doctoral student Rebecca Mitchell, a curriculum developer for Alien Contact!, told the school’s news office in May that while the program may be fun to use, it’s also based on real learning.

“I wanted to make sure the curriculum was created carefully,” she says. “Too often I have encountered curriculum that was showy or exciting, but with little quality in terms of math instruction.”

In terms of concrete data about the long-term impact of these programs, it may be too soon yet to tell, at least for augmented reality. Now in its sixth year of use, River City as a MUVE has much data that show how student users are doing, but Gray Anatomy is still being created and Alien Contact! has only been tested in three schools.

Until more time passes, Dede and his team continue trying to keep up with technology that is constantly changing. Handheld computers, for instance, are now being created with GPS embedded, making the separate GPS units used for Alien Contact! obsolete.

“A big challenge that we’ve encountered is that the technology is still immature. It’s definitely still emerging,” Dede says. “It’s taking a lot of logistical support and that’s not practical. If a superintendent came to us saying he or she wanted a huge number of augmented reality units to use in his or her school, I’d say it is too soon, but in two or three years we’ll be able to put this on cell phones and smart phones. Then the technology won’t be emerging anymore. We can leverage that infrastructure. Augmented reality is going through a period of immaturity and is not very practical, but we can see on the horizon those problems disappearing. If I didn’t see that, I’d probably be backing away from this.”

To get a tour of River City, go to http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/view/rc_videos.html.

To learn about Alien Contact! and Gray Anatomy, go to http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=harp.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Respond to this story with an e-mail to the editor.

Photo of Chris Dede by Martha Stewart