Life inside an impossible Escher figure

When the M.C. Escher inspired puzzle video-game Monument Valley came out last year, I knew I had to check it out. The more so when it started getting rave reviews and winning awards. But with so many other things to hold my attention, I never managed to get round to it. The recent decision of the creators to make a version available for free prompted me to finally take a quick look. Not that it had been expensive. Rather, a tweet about the new free version happened to come when I had an hour or so of free time on my hands.

That free hour got immediately swallowed up, as did many more hours after that. I was hooked from the getgo.

Anyone who is intrigued by those impossible figures that Escher made famous, even those of you with little or no interest in puzzle (video-) games, will surely be captivated by Monument Valley, where the solution to many of the puzzles involves orienting the figure to create an illusion of a continuous object. For when the player views the object as continuous, characters in the game that traverse the figures can move along it. Impossible chasms that prevented a character’s progress suddenly disappear as you rotate the entire figure just the right way.

It’s not a learning game. I don’t see a player learning any new mathematics. But what it does is provide a rich, immersive experience of complex geometrical spaces from the inside. As a player, your task is to assist the princess on her quest, which involves finding her way through a fantasy world of Escher-like structures, the geometry of which you can sometimes change as you progress. By projecting yourself into the princess, you get a sense of what it would be like to live in such a world.

And a beautiful world it is. The creators, based in the UK and operating under the name UsTwo, have crafted a series of truly gorgeous fantasy worlds, which you encounter one after another. It is not so much a game as a collection of interactive pieces of art where you play with, and experience, geometric shapes.

In fact, it is the artistic creation that the developers bring to the work. The idea of taking Escher worlds and turning them into a puzzle game goes back to a 2007 video game called Echodrome, designed for the Sony Play Station 3 by the Japanese designer Jun Fujiki. By all accounts it was fiendishly difficult, and never broke out beyond a small group of hard-core puzzle aficionados.

Monument Valley shows the huge difference presentation can make. If you want to hold people’s attention, you often need to think carefully about the medium. The message on its own may not be enough. That holds in the math class or the math lecture hall as much as in a video game.

Regular readers of this MAA blog or my other blog profkeithdevlin.org will know that I have a long-standing interest in video games, particularly so as an educational medium, where I am professionally active as a player, a learning researcher, and an entrepreneur.

In fact, much of my career has involved looking for ways to use different media to make mathematics accessible to as many people as possible. I have authored many “popular mathematics books”, written for newspapers (MAA compilation of some of my articles here), worked on television programs (including A Mathematical Mystery Tour, BBC-tv 1984; Life by the Numbers, PBS 1998; and NUMB3RS, CBS, 2005-2008), and of course there is my regular Math Guy radio gig for NPR, which started in 1994. More recently, in 2012, I launched the first ever math MOOC on Coursera (the seventh session just ended). I even made a foray into using music, song, and dance, with the 2007 show Harmonius Equations. To me, video games are one more medium to carry mathematical content.

In fact, when it comes to K-12 mathematics, video games are in many ways the most effective medium we currently have to provide good math learning, as I tried to articulate in a book I wrote in 2011, and a presentation I gave at the big Teaching and Learning 2014 conference in Washington D.C. last year, a 20-min video summary of which is available here.

Until recently, there was relatively little research available to put any flesh onto educators’ beliefs/hopes/suspicions that video games could yield good math learning outcomes. That is starting to change. (Reports from two classroom studies, one of I was involved in, are due to be published in the International Journal of Serious Games this month. Preprints are available here and here.)

Certainly, the results obtained in those two papers raise more questions than they answer. (Moreover, pending further, and substantially larger, studies, the results themselves have to be viewed as tentative.) What we are seeing is that, for mathematics in the K-8 range, significant learning outcomes can be observed after a video-game intervention of as little as two hours play spread over a month or so. (Some measures show an increase of 20% over a comparison group.)

I’d seen reports earlier that made similar claims, and dismissed them as product- marketing masquerading as research. It was only when the first of the two particular studies I cited above came out in late 2014, carried out by Prof Jo Boaler’s research group at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, using my own math learning video game Wuzzit Trouble as the intervention, that I sat up and really took notice.

In fact, I did more than that. Together with a research colleague from Tampere University in Finland, Prof Kristian Kiili, who, like me, has founded a math-learning video game company, and who was spending the year at Stanford, we carried out our own study. (The second of the two papers I cited.) Kiili was developing a fractions learning game, Semideus, and wanted to see how well it could serve as an evaluation tool. So we repeated essentially the same study Boaler’s team had done, with Wuzzit Trouble as the intervention, but instead of a written pre- and post-test (which the Boaler team used), we used Semideus. The results were very similar to those obtained in the previous study. (With the added twist that this time we found transfer — in a game context — from the whole number arithmetic of Wuzzit Trouble to the fractional reasoning of Semideus.)

Something is going on, that’s for sure. But what? It did not take long to come up with a fairly long list of possible factors. Among the many things that a (well designed) math learning game can offer, all which are known to have a positive impact on learning, are:

• Breaking the Symbol Barrier – human-friendly representation (not the traditional abstract symbols of math textbooks).
• Focus on developing number sense and problem solving ability.
• High level of engagement.
• Instant feedback (both positive and negative).
• Steady flow of dopamine – known to have positive impact on memory formation and consolidation.
• Learning through failure – in a playful, safe environment.
• “Failure” treated – and regarded – as “not yet succeeded”.
• Constant sense of “I can do this on the next try.”
• Lots of repetition – but at the demand of the student/player.
• Student/player is in control.
• Student/player has ownership.
• Growth Mindset – good games encourage and develop this. (This is the important notion Carol Dweck is famous for.)
• Fluid intelligence (Gf) – games require and develop this. (Loosely speaking, this is the ability to hold several pieces of information in the mind at the same time and reason fluidly with them.)

I have written about many (not all) of these factors in my series of video game learning articles in my blog profkeithdevlin. (See also the many writings and videos on games and learning by Prof James Paul Gee.)

My current guess is that all of these factors, and likely others, are at play in those dramatic learning outcomes. The only way to find out for sure, of course, is to do more research. A lot more. Prof Kiili, now back in Finland, is already hard at work on that, as am I and some of my colleagues at Stanford. And we are by no means alone. The field is wide open. Stay tuned. (Even better, get involved.) Truly, it’s an exciting time to be involved in mathematics education.

Meanwhile, I have to sign off. Monument Valley is calling.

Hard fun – video games creep into the math classroom

This month’s musings were inspired by the appearance of Greg Toppo’s excellent new book The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. In it, Toppo, who is USA Today's national K-12 education writer, does an excellent job of not only surveying the current scene in educational video games, he also exhibits a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, the educational potential of well designed video games. I have gone on record as saying it will likely turn out to be the most influential book on the role of video games in education since James Paul Gee’s 2003 classic What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

Like it or loath it, video games are slowly finding their way into the nation’s math classes, as teachers and parents increasingly see video games as a valuable educational resource. For instance, according to a recently published survey designed by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, 55% of teachers report having their students play video games at least once a week, with 47% of teachers saying low-performing students benefited most from the use of games. (Games and Learning, 2015)

Well-designed educational video games offer meaningful learning experiences based on principles of situated learning, exploration, immediate feedback, and collaboration. The power of experiential learning in engaging contexts that have meaning for learners has been demonstrated in several studies (e.g. Lave, 1988; Nunes et al, 1993, Shute & Ventura 2013).

But when it comes to education, not all games are equal. Of the many mathematics education video games (or gamified apps) available today (Apple’s App Store lists over 20,000), the majority focus on traditional drill to develop mastery of basic skills, particularly automatic recall of fundamental facts such as the multiplication tables. They require repetition under time pressure. Such games make no attempt to teach mathematics, to explore mathematical concepts, or to help students learn how to use mathematical thinking to solve real world problems. Their purpose is purely to make repetitive drill more palatable to students.

The proliferation of such games is in large part a consequence of the mathematics education many Americans have experienced: teacher and textbook instruction emphasizing isolated facts, procedures, memorization, and speed.

So widespread is this educational model in the US, that many American parents, teachers, and game developers think that this is the nature of mathematics, a perception that can result in underdeveloped mathematical proficiency. (See, for example, Boaler 2002; Boaler 2008; or Fosnot & Dolk 2001.)

While command of basic computation skills was a valuable asset to previous generations, in an era where fast, accurate computation is cheaply and readily available (in our pockets and briefcases, and on our desks), the crucial ability has shifted to what is often called mathematical proficiency: the ability to solve a novel problem that requires creative, multi-step reasoning, making appropriate use of computational technology as and when required.

The National Research Council’s recognized this significant change in the nation’s mathematical needs in its seminal 2001 recommendations for the future of US K-12 mathematics education, which laid out the case for the promotion of mathematical problem solving ability, built on number sense. Number sense involves being mathematically proficient with numbers and computations. It moves beyond the basics to developing a deep understanding about properties of numbers, and thinking flexibly about operations with numbers.

The last few years have seen the emergence of a tiny handful of video games designed to meet the educational requirements laid out by the National Research Council. Games such as Mind Research Institute’s K-5 focused Jiji games, Motion Math, DragonBox, Refraction, Slice Fractions, and my own Wuzzit Trouble. These games represent mathematics in a fashion native to the game medium (not the “symbolic” representations developed for the static page). They present the player with conceptually deep, complex problem solving tasks wrapped up in a game mechanic.

As such, these games leverage the representational power of personal computers and touch-screen devices to provide students with a means to interact with mathematical concepts in a direct fashion, not mediated through a symbolic representation, thereby facilitating exploration and learning through interactive problem solving.

In this context, it is worth reminding ourselves that the dominance of the printed symbol in the systemic mathematics education world is itself a product of the then-available technology, namely the invention of printing press in the 15th Century. Modern devices allow us to greatly expand on the symbolic interface, which for many people is a known barrier to mathematics learning (Nunes et al 1993, Devlin 2011).

References
Boaler, Experiencing school mathematics: Traditional and reform approaches to teaching and their impact on student learning, Revised and Expanded Edition. Mahwah, N.J. : L. Erlbaum, 2002.

Boaler, “Promoting ‘relational equity’ and high mathematics achievement through an innovative mixed‐ability approach,” British Educational Research Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 167–194, Apr. 2008.

Fosnot & Dolk, Young Mathematicians at Work: Constructing Number Sense, Addition, and Subtraction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.

Devlin, Mathematics education for a new era: video games as a medium for learning. CRC Press, 2011.

Games and Learning report, 2015. http://www.gamesandlearning.org/2014/06/09/teachers-on-using-games-in-class/#

Lave, 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (Learning in Doing), Cambridge University Press.

National Research Council, Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics. Washington, DC: National Academies Press: National Academy Press, 2001, pp. 1–462.

Nunes, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1993. Street Mathematics and School Mathematics, Cambridge University Press.

Pope, Boaler, & Milgram 2015. “Wuzzit Trouble: The Influence of a Digital Math Game on Student Number Sense”, submitted to International Journal of Serious Games.

Shute & Ventura, 2013. Stealth Assessment: Measuring and Supporting Learning in Video Games, MIT Press.

How do you find good math learning apps?

There are approximately 20,000 math learning apps available on the App Store (classified as such by their creators). Google Play does not provide the corresponding figure for Android apps, but presumably there are a lot there as well.

Most of those apps do little more than provide repetitive practice of very basic skills, primarily about numbers. They are essentially just animated flash cards.

How can a parent, or a teacher, decide which apps are likely to benefit their child, or their students? I’ll come back to that later.

First, let me say that there is not necessarily anything wrong with an app that is essentially just an animated flash card – unless parents buy them (or just download them, as the majority are free) thinking that putting them on their children’s iPad or whatever is all they need to do to improve their performance in math.

In the days when the gateway to mathematics, and indeed much of everyday life, lay in mastering the multiplication tables and memorizing a few formulas for calculating areas and volumes, mastery of the basic number facts was indeed enough to start with. So it’s a pity those fun learning apps were not available back then. They would have made the acquisition of those fundamental facts and skills so much easier and far more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, the very digital technologies that have put those learning apps into eager young hands have also provided tools that have rendered procedural mastery of those basic skills all but irrelevant.

In today’s world, we use cheap, ubiquitous devices to do our calculations. It’s no longer important that all members of society have procedural mastery of basic arithmetic. What is required is the ability to make effective use of those digital devices, and what that depends upon is a good understanding of number – what is often referred to as number sense.

Roughly speaking, having number sense means being proficient with quantities and operations with numbers. A person with number sense is able to represent number concepts with models, words and diagrams, to communicate numerical ideas, and solve problems involving numbers. She or he can flexibly compose and decompose numbers for computation and solving problems. They can evaluate the reasonableness of solutions to numerical problems, and make connections between multiple solution methods. They can communicate their number sense verbally and in writing. They notice and explore number patterns, make connections and conjectures, and communicate their thinking to others. Number sense goes beyond solving word problems and memorizing basic facts and procedures. It involves engaging in numbers and operations in ways that develop a deep understanding of the content, which provides a firm foundation for mathematical success. In particular, a strong background in number sense sets the stage for later success in algebra and other parts of mathematics.

If that last paragraph sounds like something that emerged from a committee of mathematics education experts, it is because in essence it did. You find language like that in the National Research Council’s 2000 report Adding it Up, (which you can download for free from the National Academies Press) and in the preamble to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, which emphasize the development of number sense in young children.

For sure, you cannot have number sense without being able to solve an arithmetic problem and get the right answer. What has changed is that it is no longer important to solve that problem by the fastest method, or by a standard method that leaves a paper audit trail that others can check. Our calculating devices do those for us.

Much more important in today’s world is to be able to reason about the numbers in a problem from first principles, in a way that embodies the internal structure of the numbers. For as humans, we need to be able to operate when and where that calculator cannot: namely, when we are faced with a novel problem the real world has thrown up at us.

It was a lack of recognition that the world has changed fundamentally that led the consequently-Internet-famous “Jack’s Dad” to pen his satirical “letter to his son” that went viral on social media earlier this year. (See the next link below.)

Actually, Jack’s dad is an electronics engineer, so he was certainly aware of how much today’s world was different from the days of his own childhood. Unfortunately, as someone outside the world of education, he had just not connected the dots to understand what changes in education were required in order to properly prepare today’s kids to live, not just in our present world, but in the world they will help shape from it.

One of the best summaries of the issues behind that social media firestorm that I came across was the April 6 response to Jack’s Dad written by the math education blogger Christopher Danielson.

Danielson’s observations about different kinds of expertise rang very true to me. Having devoted the first part of my mathematics career to mathematical research, it was my appointment to serve on the Mathematical Sciences Education Board in 2000, and the close contact with leading experts in mathematics teaching that resulted, that brought home to me just how little I knew about how people learn mathematics, and how (consequently) we should teach it.

Put plainly, having a PhD in mathematics and a string of published research is absolutely nothing like enough background to speak with authority about K-12 mathematics learning. People like me can provide good advice on mathematical content; but not on mathematics teaching. That requires different knowledge and expertise.

My own university, Stanford, famous for its very high standards in research, apparently recognizes this when it comes to hiring new faculty in Education. While I cannot speak with authority for the School of Education’s policies, I have observed that no one gets appointed to the faculty who has not spent several years in K-12 teaching. (In addition to having done and published first class research!) Whether or not K-12 experience is official hiring policy, it certainly plays out that way, and it seems to me to be a sensible criterion to demand.

Going back to the standard algorithms and Jack’s Dad, a few months after his first post, on October 8, Danielson posted another excellent blog on the degree to which the position occupied by the standard arithmetic algorithms (in actual fact, there are many variations, so there is no such thing as “the standard algorithms) has changed in the educational landscape – from being the main focus as a method for daily use, to an interesting and historically important example of a set of highly efficient paper-and-pencil algorithms that quite literally changed the world. Their significance was a consequence of the dominant information storage and communication technology of the time: flat, static writing surfaces such as parchment, blackboards, and paper. (I describe that story in my book The Man of Numbers.)

I will note, in passing, that Danielson’s October post indicates that some math learning apps may in fact do harm to a child’s mathematics learning, an observation that should be coupled with my earlier remarks about choosing basic skills educational apps.

What put these thoughts onto my front burner recently were some discussions I was having with members of the Scientific Advisory Board for my educational technology startup company BrainQuake.

If you check out our company’s Team page, you will find we have recruited a number of world renown experts in mathematics education. Now you may think they are just there for marketing purposes – website name dropping. But you would be wrong. Each one is there because they bring very valuable, very specific expertise to the table.

To someone not an expert in mathematics learning, the arithmetic puzzles in our launch app, Wuzzit Trouble, may look as though they are just a series of problems we generated in an essentially random fashion, following the simple rule that the numbers should get "harder" the further a player goes in the game. But that is not the case. In a mathematics learning game, the mathematics ramp is just as critical as the level design of the game, and both require a lot of expertise to get it right.

(Interestingly, another name on our website, John Romero, is a world expert in level design – the ramping in game-play – but he joined forces with us only after we had brought out Wuzzit Trouble, so you will only see the results of his genius in future products we bring out.)

Which brings me back to my promise to provide advice on how to select good learning apps. It’s probably not a foolproof method, but a quick and easy way is to check out the website of the creators, and see who they have advising them on the learning side.

There is always the danger that some of the names are there for little more than window dressing, but the majority of education experts (indeed, experts in any domain) are not likely to lend their name to an enterprise they do not believe in. So the presence of names of distinguished mathematics educators should give you a lot of confidence in the product.

More to the point, the absence of such names should be taken as a serious warning. Quite frankly, it is not possible to design and build an educationally sound and effective learning app without a lot of expert input.

And I mean a lot of expert input. I bring years of my own expertise to BrainQuake, but Wuzzit Trouble would not have been anything like as educationally successful as it has, if it had just been me on the mathematics side.

There is your quick-and-easy quality check. If you use it, you will find that list of 20,000 apps suddenly shrinks down to a significantly smaller number. Fortunately, that number is not zero. There are some great math learning apps out there. You just have to choose wisely.