Our model: Producing Educational Games for a $10 Computer

Playpower is an open-source community that supports the design of affordable, effective and fun educational media for underprivileged children around the world. We are currently developing a suite of educational games for a $10 educational computer.

The computer is so affordable because it is based on a 30 year-old 8-bit microprocessor technology that is now in the public domain; the computer is now produced by dozens of competing manufacturers, driving costs down. The 8-bit computer comes with a keyboard, mouse, game controllers, dozens of games, and uses a home television as a screen.

This computer is widely available for sale in dozens of developing countries, including India, Pakistan, Nicaragua and Brazil. The existing economy of scale creates an opportunity for a new model of ICT4D distribution, which we call a “Manufacturing Intervention.” In this distribution model, the completed Playpower games are given away to the manufacturers, who can “preload” the games with the computers they sell to distributors. In this manner, Playpower games can piggyback on the existing distribution network, which is already reaching millions of BOP (bottom of the pyramid) consumers.

This $10 8-bit computer is just the beginning. We believe that a wide range of technologies, including netbooks and smartphones, will soon be widely affordable to BOP consumers. As these devices already come preloaded with games like Solitaire and Snake, preloading educational games and media on these devices could effectively reach millions of children for a very low cost.

Where is the Educational Content?

While market forces will make ICT that is affordable to BOP consumers, it seems clear that low-cost computer manufacturers will not have the profit margins to invest in the creation of effective educational content. So, the question is, who will create the content? Perhaps more importantly, who will pay for the creation of the content? It won’t be the consumers, nor the device manufactures. We believe that government and private support is needed to create a shared, remixable global library of educational media.

Intellectual Property and Content Appropriation

The $10 computer uses the same microprocessor technology as the 8-bit Apple II computer. The Apple II (along with other low-cost 8-bit computers) introduced computing to millions of children in America, with 8-bit educational games like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. While these games have little commercial value, they would be valuable on our platform—unfortunately, their copyrights will not expire for another 50 years.

We strongly advocate the modification of international intellectual property laws to promote the availability of educational digital media content in developing contexts. Ironically, at a consumer and business level, intellectual property is often completely unprotected in developing contexts—but this is not improving the availability of educational media. We believe that Intellectual property laws and licenses should be enhanced to support the legal flow of information to places that need it most—those who are most unable to pay for it.

The Case for Public Support of Digital Educational Media

Even conservative political philosophies believe that governments should provide free and effective primary school education. This is one reason why a quality, free public school education is recognized by the United Nations as a Universal Human Right. Despite this fact, millions of children around the world are receiving an ineffective primary education in government schools. In addition to the life of ignorance and low-wages facing these children, a lack of education stalls economic and political development. Low-quality education may even effect global security: the low quality of public schools has driven the dramatic expansion of religious schools in places like Pakistan.

In contrast to teacher training, quality digital educational media can scale rapidly and at a very low cost. It can often be quickly modified for regional languages and curricula, particularly if the source code is available. Furthermore, digital educational content can be improved over time, through an iterative development process. This suggests that digital educational media could dramatically impact education in developing contexts.

Unfortunately, creating quality educational media is difficult, time consuming, and often requires expensive efficacy studies and iteration. As a result, commercial media companies do not have the incentive to participate in the production of quality educational media—particularly media that is focused on developing contexts. This suggests a clear need for the public support of educational media development, at a regional, national and even international level. In addition to governmental procurements, governments could also incentivize content development through tax credits for media that serves the public good. To make the case for public support, however, it is important that ICT4D researchers can generate solid evidence for the utility of digital educational media.

Playpower Research

While we strongly support digital educational media in schools, Playpower.org is focused on providing games that can serve the needs of families—specifically, families that might buy a $10 educational computer. Therefore, we have undertaken an extensive field research program in India to identify these needs and to understand the use of the 8-bit computer in low-income households. Surprisingly, this research has identified a range of low-cost computing technologies that are currently prevalent in low-income households ($100-$300 per month, per household).

Since cable TV is widespread, even in low-income households, we found many families that had televisions or set-top boxes that had built-in games, including educational games, which are played with a remote control. Other households had handheld video game systems with small screens, while others had “Toy Laptops” that contained a range of educational games. Of course, mobile phones are ubiquitous in low-income households, and are almost certainly the most common gaming platform. Playpower.org has an academic collaboration with Millee, an organization that is focused on developing English learning games for mobiles phones.

Value of Playing Video Games

Given that our 8-bit computer platform is primarily used for playing video games, we hope to investigate whether video games contribute or detract from our educational objectives. Our fieldwork indicates that many low-income children in urban India have played video games, either on a mobile phone, on the television, in an arcade, or even on a PC. Does this experience have any positive or negative effects?

There is the possibility that playing videogames can improve economic opportunities for low-income children. While further study is required, the logic of this claim is as follows: videogame play seems to generally increase a child’s interest in computers; this interest results in more exposure to computers and enhanced motivation to learn computer skills, which subsequently results in videogame-playing children developing more computer skills, relative to children who do not play videogames. These greater computer skills can directly lead to meaningful economic opportunities.

Join Us in Person

Sound plausible? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And if you’re in New York City this weekend, join us for a Playpower 8-Bit Game Design Workshop at NYU.

The workshop will be led by Playpower founder Derek Lomas, Playpower programmer Kishan Patel, 8-bit artist Don Miller, and NYU professor Chris Hoadley (host). We’re focusing on:

• Furthering the develop Playpower’s current suite of games (e.g., Hanuman Typing Warrior, Hanuman Quiz Adventure, Malaria Prevention prototype)
• Learning the basics of 8-bit game design
• Expanding Playpower’s growing volunteer network!

We’ll have a mix of artists, graphic designers, programmers, learning specialists and ICT4D experts. If you’re interested in attending, please fill out this form ASAP.

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Now, several years on, how as the field changed? What new tools are available for teachers to improve their curriculum delivery? For students to master it? And for administrators to understand better the links, if any, between ICT investments and educational outcomes?

What happened to Elonex One?

Please voice your opinion in the comments and add your favorite ICT device to our list, now an editable Google Doc:

• Low-Cost ICT List – Editable Draft Update.

Our goal is to have a comprehensive, up-to-date list by the end of this week for future publication on the infoDev website.

Do note that we do not expect this list to be exhaustive, it’s a Quick Guide after all, and we are purposely leaving off mobile phones, as well as the plethora of devices that could be used in education, for a more targeted list of hardware devices that are used in educational systems of the developing world.

We welcome your contribution to this endeavor in the comments or as your own Guest Post

1. effective education requires individualized instruction
2. technology can greatly assist teachers in individualizing instruction.

These ideas have led to this singular goal: create an effective system of individualized instruction that is affordable, replicable and scalable. In our attempts to accomplish this goal, we have focused on several key principles:

Focus on supporting the teacher in the classroom.

We can all point to many culprits for why children do not learn (parents, schools, society, lack of after-school programs, etc) but in the end of the day it is the teacher in the classroom that should have the primary responsibility for educating the students, and all efforts should revolve around supporting the teacher.

Furthermore, all of us technologists would be greatly served by humility about the potential of technology. Artificial intelligence is getting ever more powerful, but it still pales in comparison to human intelligence, empathy and creativity.

Our TeacherMate handheld computer system is designed to support the teacher. Even the name itself was chosen purposefully. Although the handheld devices are used by students, the units are just one component of a larger system to support teachers.

Support the existing curriculum.

We have made the effort to analyze the scope and sequence of all of the major reading and math basals, which allows teachers to easily coordinate activities on the TeacherMates to their paper-based curriculum.

Add no burden.

This should be the educational technologists credo akin to doctors “do no harm”. The failure of almost all educational technology initiatives can usually be traced to the additional burden placed on the teacher. Ideally, teachers’ burdens should be reduced by technology.

We believe we have achieved this not by one bold move, but rather by attention to a myriad of details. The art of a learning management system is to provide advanced users with powerful options and customizability, while offering a neophyte user a clean and simple interface.

Synching of devices needs to be automatic. And since all technology fails at various times, a system of workarounds that do not interrupt a teacher’s instruction is critical to success.

Affordability means dirt cheap.

Multiply anything by the number of students needed to be served, and costs soar quickly. We would be delighted to add a touch screen to our device, but we can create effective technology without it that enables more students to be served with the same budget.

Avoid reliance on major grants.

Governmental, foundation and other grants are manna from heaven, but you can’t rely on them to scale a sustainable project.

Start small.

Given the myriad of failures of ICT in education, it is imperative to do one thing well first, and then build on success. We are focused on K-2 basic education. And after twenty years, we still don’t have even this licked, imagine that.

Seth Weinberger is the Executive Director of Innovations for Learning
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Experience and active participation in the educational process are two elements that have revolutionized the traditional concept of teaching and learning over the course of the 20th century. The writings of, Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget and others have taken on renewed relevance for specialists attempting to explain and improve the quality of learning, with participatory interaction as the focal point for organizing the experiences of the participants in the learning process (Cooper et al., 1991).

Considering the importance when teaching math, of establishing bases for knowledge to arrive at learning more complex operations, we must make sure that all students acquire said bases. If the work is too easy or too difficult, students won’t get involved, and learning math will be a constant struggle throughout their entire education. With an entire class, where each student is different, teaching with consideration of individual rhythms can be a great challenge, however, it is crucial that each student feel constantly challenged in order to achieve success, considering gradual rhythms in each task, before he becomes frustrated, and abandons the challenge. (Sangster, 2006)

One Mouse Per Child

One Mouse per Child is oriented towards working simultaneously with an entire class using an interpersonal computer. In our case, this consists of a PC, a projector, and a mouse for each child participating in the activity. Experimentally we observed in a classroom that on a 1024 X 768 pixel projection, on a conventional 1,5 mt. x 1,5 mt. screen, up to 49 children could adequately work simultaneously in a classroom.

Each student must solve a series of exercises, which are generated according to the child performance through a set of pedagogical rules incorporated into the system. In the learning process the teacher has an active mediating role. A teacher (personal) mouse enables to directly intervene with each of the students’ learning process, according to what the teacher considers to be pedagogically convenient.

Our first experience was designed to support the teaching of arithmetic in the classroom (Nussbaum et al, 2010). The 65 rules that conforms the system are aligned with the math contents set out by Chile’s Ministry of Education for grades 1 to 4. Each child is shown an equation according to the teacher’s specifications, or consequent to his/her level, which in turn corresponds to a specific pedagogic rule.

The child must solve said equation and enter the answer in the specified zone. If the answer is correct, a new equation will appear, according to the pedagogic rule system; if it is incorrect, the equation will remain until the child solves it correctly according to the corresponding rule.

Classroom Usage Results

We have performed two exploratory studies. One was in a Santiago de Chile in a state-subsidized school placed in a low-income neighborhood, in a 3rd grade of 43 students (boys and girls, ranging between the ages of 8 and 10). Seven 30-minute sessions were carried out, twice a week.

We observed that there was a significant positive difference between the application of the test before and after the intervention, achieving a large effect size. To analyze the impact of the experience according to the children’s abilities, we divided the sample into the superior and inferior half, according to their results on the initial test and observed a significant improvement in the students with the lowest initial results, with a large effect size, concluding that the software proved most beneficial for the students with the lowest initial results.

This happens because the system adapts to the students’ needs, reinforcing the content they most need to work on, thus generating a personalized learning process, adapted to the needs of each student.

A second study was a multicultural experience where the aim was not to measure the pedagogic value of the system, but to prove whether students could adequately use the technology, regardless of differences in knowledge and technological abilities for students from such distanced socioeconomic realities as Chile and India. In relation to use efficiency, in Chile minimal problems in understanding on how to use the technology were observed, while in India, many of the students had never used a mouse before, and couldn’t handle it properly in the beginning.

Regarding learnability, the average of correct answers during the experience, in India, between the first and second sessions increased considerably (from 0.59 to 5.00 (average of correct answers per session)), stabilizing itself from then on, while in Chile there wasn’t a significant increase (7.05 to 7.6300 (average of correct answers per session)), which indicates that students had little technological difficulty at the beginning, reaching a quick balance when faced with the difficulty of the mathematical exercise.

Its Pedagogy not Technology

Our one Mouse per Child approach is curriculum oriented in the sense that one application covers Arithnmetics’, a second Fractions’, and a third, we are working on, focused on Reading/Writing. We are now also working on integrating it into Power Point. It has a different pedagogical approach than Mischief (Moraveji et al 2009), characterized by a collective feedback; in ours, feedback is individual since we manage the identity of each child.

This allows us to have N simultaneous Intelligent Tutoring Systems, where each child advances at their own pace in a lecture and within lectures (through persistence between lectures). While in Mischief reports are focused on the classroom behavior, our approach is additionally student oriented, also providing the teacher with tools to mediate the different kids that need it.

This experience showed us that it is possible to implement personal interactivity with teacher support through minimal equipment, i.e., a computer, a projector, and one mouse per student, in very diverse socio-economic conditions. If we take into consideration that this equipment is used daily by the students around an hour, that up to 10 different groups can share it per day, and that the equipment has a useful life of at least two years, the cost per student –considering a class of 49 – is roughly one dollar per student per year.

The aim of this extended abstract was to show how low cost technology can change the classroom practice allowing all students participate simultaneously at their own pace. We have to understand that the benefits of technology can be realized only through an effective learning and teaching strategy. Our main conclusion is that the problem to focus on is not a technological one but a pedagogical one.

Miguel Nussbaum is a Professor in the School of Engineering, Computer Science Department, at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

References

1. Cooper, J., & Others, A. (1991). Cooperative/Collaborative Learning: Research and Practice (Primarily) at the Collegiate Level, Parts I and II. Journal of Staff, Program, & Organization Development, 79(34), pp 143-148 and pp 239-252.
2. Cristián Infante, Juan Weitz, Tomás Reyes, Miguel Nussbaum, Florencia Gómez and Darinka Radovic (2010), Co-located Collaborative Learning Video Game with Single Display Groupware, Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2010, pp 177–195
3. Moraveji, N., Inkpen, K., Cutrell, E., and Balakrishnan, R. (2009). A mischief of mice: examining children’s performance in single display groupware systems with 1 to 32 mice. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 2157-2166.
4. M Nussbaum, C. Alcoholado, A. Tagle, F. Gomez, F. Denardin, H. Susaeta, M. Villalta, K. Toyama (2010), One Mouse per Child: Interpersonal Computer for Personal Formative Assessment, Submitted to Computers and Education
5. Paek, T., Agrawala, M., Basu, S., Drucker, S., Kristjansson, T., Logan, R., Toyama, K., and Wilson, A. 2004. Toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 06 – 10, 2004). CSCW ’04. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 266-269.

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This is actually a description of slate tablets in the early 1800′s, but it could aptly describe the technological revolution we are seeing in education today with low-cost ICT devices.

The rise of ICT devices

From single-purpose educational aids like the Teachermate to commercial netbooks that can be re-purposed for the classroom, information and communication technology is dropping in cost while increasing in functionality and robustness. Soon, these ICT devices will be like slates in the 1800′s – ubiquitous.

Netbooks – one type of low-cost ICT device for education

In 2008, infoDev at the World Bank complied a Quick guide to low-cost computing devices and initiatives for the developing world to try and record the most prominent or promising of these devices.

For June, the Educational Technology Debate will attempt to update and organize this list through two efforts:

1. The list itself is now available as an editable Google Doc – we invite you to review and contribute to it here: Low-Cost ICT List – Draft Update.
2. We’ll also highlight some of the more interesting initiatives on the list in weekly posts for your input and commentary

Our goal is to have a comprehensive, up-to-date list by the end of June for future publication on the infoDev website.

Do note that we do not expect this list to be exhaustive, it’s a Quick Guide after all, and we are purposely leaving off mobile phones, as well as the plethora of devices that could be used in education, for a more targeted list of hardware devices that are used in educational systems of the developing world.

We welcome your contribution to this endeavor in the comments or as your own Guest Post

Don’t miss a moment of the action!

Subscribe now and get the latest articles from Educational Technology Debate sent directly to your inbox.