Teachers, do you hear that? It’s the sound of summer. But before you get there, there is this little thing called testing that comes up in the spring. Did you know in spring testing is more common than flowers? A key to successful testing is preparing students so content is fresh and top of mind.

Nearly every school in the country is testing this week, tested in the last week couple weeks or is testing in the next couple weeks. For example, in Baltimore students are taking the PARCC exams for the next three weeks while in Virginia they will be tested on the SOL.

All of this makes testing at this time of year extremely challenging for teachers. Teachers have to find a way to keep students motivated and engaged in class so they do their best on exams.

The key to student success on exams depends a lot on how confident they feel in the material they are being tested on. That means practice. Students need to prepare for test taking in a way that’s fun and engaging so they aren’t wracked with nerves when they are taking the real test.

How can you achieve this worthy goal? By playing games of course!

It might sound crazy, but games are exactly the right tool to pull out of the tool belt right now. Think about it. Students are a little stir crazy. They can hear summer coming and spring break is either just around the corner or just gone by. Students really need some engagement, and science games offer just that.

In our pilot of short curricula games last year, our research statistically proved that when students learn with games they have higher levels of simple fact recall and are thus able to give more sophisticated answers to complex questions on tests.

But don’t take our word for it. We have a lot of teacher Ambassadors who have already thought of some great ways to use games to prep for their exams. Here are some of their suggestions:

Renee Ekhoff, Nebraska

Recently, we were studying adaptations and natural selection. We used the life science games — Walter’s Travels and Survival of the Fittest — to identify adaptations, both behavioral and physical. The students applied their practice to their review for the quiz and for the adaptation poster. It was awesome to see students using adaptations they had learned through the games on their projects! — Renee Ekhoff, Nebraska

Ann Pottebaum, Iowa

I have previewed the games and selected ones that best fit our learning objectives. I have projected the games up, and we have worked through them together to introduce the site/types of games available to study for exams.

The students thought they were great. What an interactive way to study and review as we finished our units on atoms, molecules, compounds and bonding! — Anne Pottebaum, Iowa

Caitlin Unterman, Virginia

We used the natural resources games to help review renewable vs nonrenewable sources. We also used the oceanography (weather and the ocean) to review ocean currents. — Caitlin Unterman, Virginia

Elizabeth Lewellen, California

LOL has been an invaluable tool for helping my students prepare for the state test. Students have been giving me personal requests for the topics they feel they need to review the most.

Every student is different. With LOL I just launch a playlist for the different topics requested, and in this way I’m differentiating the review practice for each student. It’s awesome. Its empowering for me and the students feel very catered to when they feel their personal needs for instructional focus are being met. — Elizabeth Lewellen, California

Mariana Garcia-Serrato, California

For test prep in 8th grade, I displayed the complete list of LOL learning objectives. Students were invited to peruse them and decide which ones each of them wanted to review.

Then I created different playlists for groups and individuals based on their perceived needs, with a couple of special invites for concepts that were covered in previous years. Having that list of discrete learning objectives proved an easy way for them to decide what to study! — Mariana Garcia-Serrato, California

If you want to play the games for yourself, sign up today on the Legends of Learning platform. To become an ambassador, visit our site and fill out this simple form (https://www.legendsoflearning.com/join-us/).

Good luck with testing and the rest of your school year!

$9 Million Raise to Support Team Growth, Market Expansion

The following is a press release issued this morning about Legends of Learning’s seed round of fundraising.

Legends of Learning closed its seed round of fundraising with a total raise of $9 million. The fundraising round follows the successful launch of our initial game-based learning platform that has been met with praise from educators and recognition by influential media organizations. The company was featured in a recent USA Today article that explained how its platform can overcome a barrier to “getting high-quality learning games into K–12 classrooms.”

Legends of Learning, which is co-headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Md., will leverage the funds to execute its long-term strategic plan in the education sector. The investments will allow the company to meet demand by hiring additional team members and expanding its platform to new school grades and subjects.

The company was founded by Vadim Polikov, a research scientist who previously started Astrum Solar, a top 10 U.S. solar installer, and American Journal Experts, a large academic editing company serving the international scientific research community.

Joining Polikov as co-founders are Larry Cynkin, chief technology officer, who was formerly with Comcast and Honesty Online; Aryah Fradkin, manager, Teacher Outreach, who is a former Baltimore City, Md., teacher; Joshua Goldberg, chief strategy officer, and an Astrum Solar co-founder; Geoff Livingston, chief marketing officer, who is an award winning digital marketing entrepreneur; and Sandy Roskes, chief operating officer, and a former Astrum senior executive.

“This team brings vision and experience to the table. The successful closing of this seed round will let us accelerate our focus on helping more teachers reach students with research-driven, curriculum-based education games,” says Polikov.

Legends of Learning launched at the end of March with a first-to-market approach of 900 curriculum-based education games for middle school earth and space science, life sciences and physical science curricula. The games, created by over 300 game studios, are based on rigorous academic research conducted in partnership with Vanderbilt University.

Unique aspects of the Legends of Learning game-based learning platform include:

• Short games (5–25 minutes) that align to middle school science curriculum standards to ensure content engages and helps students succeed in their studies;
• An intuitive platform similar to Netflix and Amazon that makes games easy and natural to use in classrooms; and
• A dashboard that allows teachers to observe student comprehension in real time, create game playlists for classes and individual students, and assess content mastery.

The company will demonstrate its technology platform and games publicly at the International Society for Technology in Education Conference & Expo June 25–28 in San Antonio, Texas.

Caitlin Unterman (see her DonorsChoose Page here) is and 8th Grade Earth Science and Science Exploration at Forest Middle School in the Bedford County School District. She also partners with NASA to deliver a class in her school.

Caitlin is also one of the first teachers demoing the Legends of Learning platform. She shares her insights with Aryah and new co-host Sean Reidy about game based learning, NASA, the Legends of Learning platform, and much more.

Two of our strongest ambassadors in the community are Rebecca and Scott Beiter. This husband and wife tandem teach at two different school districts in upstate New York.

They share their insights on game based learning and what it is like to help Legends of Learning build its games and platforms from ground zero to market launch. In addition, Rebecca and Scott share the story of how they both got into teaching science, and the teacher conference life. Enjoy this super fun podcast!

The following is an excerpt from our new white paper Introduction to Game Based Learning. Download it today!

Few blended learning studies exist to date, but those that do highlight some best practices. Legends of Learning’s own GBL study, “Substantial Integration of Typical Educational Games into Extended Curriculum,” identifies several elements essential to overcoming challenges found in blended learning environments. They include the following three:

1. Student choice from a set of teacher-curated games
2. Competency-based game mechanics
3. Strong teacher instruction

A Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation RAND study, Interim Research on Personalized Learning, notes an additional four attributes common to successful blended learning environments. Jamee Kim and Wongyu Lee name two more characteristics in their study conducted at Korea University. The six cumulative characteristics are:

1. Learner profiles
2. Personal learning paths
3. Peer interaction
4. Competency-based progression
5. Flexible learning environments
6. High levels of teacher support for the digital material

The qualities further detail the three identified by Legends of Learning and Vanderbilt University in their collaborative study. The six also recall James Paul Gee’s 16 tenets, suggesting they build upon the best practices of the past while encountering the present and looking forward to the future.

Turning Curriculum into Interactive Game Content

However, true success with GBL cannot be limited to engagement alone. Games must help educators deliver lessons for them to have long-term value and impact. That means they must connect to the curriculum in some way, as well as support other learning goals related to the subject matter, lesson plan, or grade level.

Robert J. Marzano, who conducted a five-year study of game based learning, makes the argument in his findings. He says, “If games do not focus on important academic content, they will have little or no effect on student achievement and waste valuable classroom time.”

European researchers Venera-Mihaela Cojocariua and Ioana Boghiana also believe that games need to have a clear and understood role in the classroom. They state, “In order to exploit the advantages of using game-based learning in class, there is a clear need for standardization and regulation on the use of games in teaching-learning-evaluating.”

Legends of Learning and Vanderbilt University similarly tie GBL success to the rigors of learning. Their study shows that GBL efforts integrated with the classroom curriculum cause quantitative and qualitative improvements in content mastery as well as engagement.

Balancing engagement with content mastery remains a challenge. If students aren’t interested in the teacher-approved games, they won’t play them. Gee and other researchers note that games must be interesting and fun, while delivering educational content, for them to produce results.

In a productive GBL environment, learning and engagement operate hand-in-hand. One cannot succeed without the other.

As a result, educators will need to carefully evaluate games to make sure they both engage students and support the curriculum.

Get the entire white paper Introduction to Game Based Learning here!

Game based learning (GBL) offers proven benefits for student engagement and academic performance. But convincing some educators to include GBL resources in their curriculum can sometimes feel like a clash of the titans—the teen kind, not the ones who dared to defy the Olympian gods.

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James Paul Gee is often considered the godfather of Game Based Learning (GBL) thanks to his significant academic research on effective learning methods via video games. He wrote a paper called Good Video Games and Good Learning more than a decade ago that outlines 16 components critical to strong GBL. The essay can be found in his seminal book of the same title, now in its second edition.

16 Principles Of Good Video Game Based Learning

Here are the 16 principles of good video-game based learning outlined in his text.

1. 1) Identity: Players build a sense of identity throughout the video game, either through direct input or an on-screen character they inherit.
2. 2) Interaction: Communication occurs between the player and the game.
3. 3) Production: Gamers help produce the story through some form of interaction, such as solving a puzzle or completing a level.
4. 4) Risk Taking: Failing in a game holds few consequences in comparison to real life, empowering players to take risks.
5. 5) Customized: Games usually offer a level of customization so that users can play — and succeed — at their competency level.
6. 6) Agency: Players have control over the gaming environment.
7. 7) Well-Ordered Problems: The gaming environment contains problems that naturally lead into one another, allowing a player’s mastery to grow and evolve.
8. 8) Challenge and Consideration: Games offer a problem that challenges students’ assumed expertise.
9. 9) Just in Time or On Demand: Players receive information as they need it, not before, which teaches them patience and perseverance and improves critical-thinking abilities.
10. 10) Situated Meanings: Students learn new vocabulary words by experiencing them within game situations.
11. 11) Pleasantly Frustrating: The game should frustrate the student enough to challenge them but be easy enough that they believe and can overcome the problem(s) faced.
12. 12) System Thinking: Games make players think in a bigger picture, not just individual actions taken, helping them see how the pieces fit or can be fitted together.
13. 13) Explore, Think Laterally, Rethink Goals: Games force players to expand their situational knowledge and consider courses of action other than linear ones.
14. 14) Smart Tools and Distributed Knowledge: In-game tools help students understand the world. Through using them, they gain confidence to share their knowledge with others.
15. 15) Cross-Functional Teams: In multiplayer environments, players have different skills, forcing them to rely on each other—a needed soft skill for students.
16. 16) Performance before Competence: Competency occurs through taking action in the game, reversing the typical model in which students are required to learn before being allowed to act.

What do you think of James Paul Gee’s 16 Principles of Good Video Games and Good Learning? How might you incorporate them into your teaching style and curriculum?

Who doesn’t like a good movie or novel, especially when it features a super hero?!? But even though we love our heroes at Legends of Learning, sometimes we begrudgingly tip our hat to a story that carries incredible weight, particularly if it is in our sector. Ender’s Game is such a book (see Common Sense Media’s review), in spite of the author Orson Scott Card’s rather odd personal politics.

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Many educators hold notions about what constitutes an edgame. Some think it’s a game loosely based on the curriculum. Others believe edgames are quizzes, something to be downloaded from the iTunes store.

Still others suppose that edgames are commercial ones like Sid Meir’s Civilization, Minecraft, or Pokemon Go that are then tied to education goals. In other cases, the game may be a specific simulation, for example, the 1979 Revolution: Black Friday or The Body VR. Both serious games, one puts the player in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. The other takes a player on an Oculus tour of the human biological system.

The Experts Weigh In

“All of the above” is the correct answer. An Edgame can be a variety of things.

In his excellent book “Gamify Your Classroom,” Matthew Farber defines Jane McGonical’s definition of an Edgame. She believes that a game must have around four key factors:

• A Goal
• Rules
• A Feedback System
• Voluntary Participation

This definition would disqualify many of the electronic games currently used by educators. Matt Farber proceeds to have a conversation about the McGonical definition of games largely revolves around voluntary participation. He asks, “Does forcing kids to use a game for educational purposes destroy the intent of a game in essence violating the entire entertainment value of a game by turning it into work?”

Discover some examples of standards-aligned and engaging EdGames:  6th Grade Science Games for Your Classroom

James Paul Gee Responds

Farber’s search for an edgame definition unsurprisingly includes an interview with the godfather of game-based learning (GBL), James Paul Gee, someone we’ve discussed previously. We recently wrote up Professor James Paul Gee’s 16 Principles for Good Game-Based Learning.

But even though Professor Gee provides a lot of structure and regular commentary about what makes a good edgame, he dismisses many of the nuances needed to define one. For Gee, a game’s adherence to every aspect of defined games or every principle of game-based learning is irrelevant. What matters is that the game inspires learning.

Gee told Farber, “The issue is how do we get engagement by an affiliation, not whether we call it ‘play’ or a ‘game’ […] What we want to say is, ‘What’s the interactivity? What’s the engagement? What are the values?’”

EdGames Defined

In essence, good edgames or game-based learning platforms inspire children to learn. They involve students and capture their interest. As a result, they deliver exceptional educational value.

Most educators want supplementary curriculum tools that engage and help students master their studies. So whether a game is short or long, comical or serious, made for education or originally developed for commercial use is immaterial. To be an edgame for educators, it simply must meet the barometers of engagement and basic learning.

What do you think makes an edgame?