One of the issues I’ve been struggling with as I try to imagine how I would develop game-inspired educational material is how to incorporate my teaching style into my work. The problem is: I’m a Constructivist with Socratic tendencies.
That first isn’t too big a problem. Sequential story-lessons are easily planned out and created, and mythocentric game design makes a compelling argument for letting story-lessons that don’t rely on each other serve as a “level” that the learner can explore at will before being allowed to move on to the next “level” and building on what they’ve learned in lower “levels”.
The second, however, is a bit more challenging. I tend to direct my students through questions, helping them to make their own connections and to see why they’re doing what they’re doing. When the teacher isn’t present, though, it’s hard to know what sequence of questions to set up to help facilitate that type of learning.
After reading Emily Short’s series on modeling conversation in interactive fiction, I thought I had it somewhat figured out: create a Guide NPC to ask more common or basic questions to guide learner between encounters and to help the learner think through the problem when they’ve made a mistake. The Guide NPC could even go so far as to offer a review if the learner is completely off-topic.
The more I thought about that, the more I felt myself getting turned around because I felt I was making too big an assumption with the basic or common questions. Then, a former student and I gather around a virtual whiteboard to see what was going wrong on a homework assignment, and I found a preliminary answer. As we talked, I found the probing and directing questions I nearly always ask, mainly because she was asking herself those questions with a preface of, “I know you’d ask me…”
The next problem to either resolve or let go is wait time. I use that to help feel out where a student is in understanding what they’re working on, but I can’t exactly give a fictional character that same instinct.
