Hello. My name is Joe Cutting and my co-author is Jerry Activities and we're both from the University of UK and our
presentation is titled Learning by doing intrinsic Integration Direct Attention to increased learning in games.
So the principle of intrinsic integration of educational games holds that the best way of
increasing learning is to integrate the learning content with the core mechanics of the gameplay.
And this was originated by Habgood and Ainsworth, and what they did is they created this game called Zombie Division,
in which you learn games through the medium of killing zombies and in the integrated condition you kill zombies by doing performing division sums.
And in the known integrated condition you can still kill zombies, but you don't need to use division to do it.
And then at the end of each level you perform division sums as an exercise,
and they found that learning was increased in the integrated condition where the gameplay and the learning content were the same mechanism.
This was further explored by Echeverría who explored tighter integration at the level of individual game atoms,
which are the small mechanisms within the game, and he used the game to teach electrostatics.
And in this game you have to get the blue crystal on the left to the purple gold on the right using electrostatic forces.
And I found that learning was increased if he made explicit the electrostatic forces he was
trying to teach by showing them visual representations of the forces and how they combined,
and that then increased learning.
So intrinsic integration has been very influential and has lots of citations, particularly from Chi and chi play offers.
But how does it work? What's the mechanism behind it?
Well, it's got to a stage where intrinsic integration is so accepted that it's often used without saying why.
It's just seen as a general good thing that you should do.
But some people do say that it increases learning and engagement, but without saying how.
But you do then have a group of people who say that it increases motivation, which then increases learning.
And this is all fair enough,
because if you look at the actual title of the paper than the paper title suggests that it works by increasing motivation.
But that's not actually what Habgood and Ainsworth say if you read the paper more closely.
So the way that motivation is seen to increase learning is by increasing the time on task.
So if the game has increased your motivation to perform the task,
then you're more likely to spend more time on it and thus more likely to learn whatever you're trying to learn from the game.
But the time on the task was exactly the same in both Habgood,
Ainsworth's and Echeveria's studies time, the task was the same across all conditions, which doesn't fit with a motivational mechanism.
So as Habgood and Ainsworth say in the paper, other explanations are required to explain increased learning.
So the other explanation is that they consider other explanations based on either cognitive load or attention.
So how would they work? Well, cognitive load could motivate learning in games.
There's the very influential cognitive load theory of learning which has been applied, particularly in non-digital conditions.
And the way that that could work is that you have a fixed working memory capacity of your learners and that doesn't change.
So there's only a limited number of things that you can keep in your working memory,
and you can imagine that in an integrated game you've got the intrinsic load of the material which that you're trying to learn.
And then you've also got some extraneous load, which is the game elements that you also need to process.
And as long as those two combined are less than your fixed working memory capacity, then learning can happen.
But imagine in a non integrated game where the game material and the learning content are separate,
then you'd have the intrinsic load of the material and then the game into something else.
It's another thing. So these two both add up and then that may exceed your fixed working memory.
And then there's not enough spare memory left for learning. So that's what how cognitive load could affect intrinsic integration.
But there's another approach. So the task attention theory of game based learning posits that a tension could also motivate learning.
So how would that work?
Well, you're probably familiar with the phenomena of inattentional blindness, where you don't see things because your attention is on another task.
Well, in this classic.
experiment where you're watching people pass a basketball, because you're watching people pass the basketball.
You don't see somebody dressed as a gorilla walk through.
And this has been done with eye tracking to show where people are actually looking.
And what we found is that people actually looking directly at the gorilla,
but they still don't see it because it's not relevant to the tasks that they're performing.
So if you imagine an intrinsic integration in non integrated games, attention could be focussed solely on the task.
So the players are blind to the learning material.
So to test for motivation, cognitive load or attentional mechanisms, we ran a game study with two conditions.
So in the first condition, people play the game a bit like Pacman only rather than having power pills that you can eat,
which then let you chase the ghosts.
Each Pac-Man and Ghost had a little picture in it, and if the pictures match, then Pac-Man can eat the ghost with the matching picture.
And then in the non intrinsic condition, exactly the same game, exactly the same graphics, exactly the same gameplay.
Except that rather than eating ghosts with the same picture, Pac-Man can eat the ghost of the same colour.
And then the pictures change every 5 seconds.
So the players are shown 60 different ones, and then after the game they then test it on the pictures using a false choice recognition test.
And then they also fill in some questionnaires. So how do they get on?
Well, a lot more images were recognised in the integrated game than the non integrated game, so learning was much higher.
People learnt a lot more images and there's a large effect size between them.
Whereas if you look at difference in motivation, motivation question that no difference in motivation between conditions.
And then if we look at cognitive load and we use performance of the game as a proxy for cognitive load.
And once again, there's pretty much no difference in cognitive load between games.
So learning was higher in the integrated condition with no difference in motivation or cognitive load.
And in the non integrated condition, attention was directed away from the pictures because they're not needed for the game
task and in integrated condition learning increase by an attentional mechanism.
So is attention the only mechanism behind intrinsic integration? Well, no, probably motivation and cognitive load are also probably involved.
We designed our study just to look for an attentional mechanism and that's what we found.
But these other mechanisms are probably involved and there may be complex interactions between them and this is also applied to other forms of learning.
Well, as you're probably aware, there's lots of other forms of learning, and we just kind of tested a very basic form of recognition, though.
And so rather than thinking of the intrinsic integration directs attention to increase learning in games,
it's more accurate to say that non integrated games direct attention away from the content which then reduces learning.
So a lack of integration reduces recognition, which then reduces other forms of learning.
So a conclusion is that during gameplay attention is directed within the game onto features relevant to the game task.
And in intrinsic integration, the game task is integrated with the learning content.
So this increases learning of that content, and this can happen without changes in motivation or cognitive load.
But in real learning games, these are almost certainly a factor. And so a subject for future work and play the game online.
Try it yourself. Thank you.