Before every child is left behind:

How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education

David Williamson Shaffer*

James Paul Gee*

University of Wisconsin-Madison
and
Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory

7500 words

*Authorship is co-equal and authors are arbitrarily listed in reverse alphabetical order.

Send correspondence to:

David Williamson Shaffer*

Department of Educational Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1025 West Johnson Street, Room 1065
Madison, WI 53706
[email protected]
608 265 4602
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The Crisis

In his recent bestseller The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman [1] argues that the United

States is facing a looming crisis—a crisis with the potential to wreck havoc on the old and the

young, on rich and poor alike. Freedman talks about this new crisis mostly in terms of foreign

policy and global economics—what nation states, governments, businesses and workers must do

to adapt to the changing world of the beginning of the 21st Century.

But this crisis is not just a crisis of economics or politics. At its core, this is a crisis in

education—a crisis in education unlike any we’ve seen before. Because the coming crisis is a

crisis of learning, and it is a crisis that we will have to face in school, at home, in workplaces and

in communities.

The coming crisis is this: Young people in the United States today are being prepared—in

school and at home—for “commodity jobs” in a world that will, very soon, only reward people

who can do “innovative work” and punish those who can’t.

What do we mean by “commodity jobs” and “innovative work”? Let’s start with the

literal notion of a commodity. A commodity is a standardized product or service available to a

mass audience at a reasonable price. The “old capitalism”—the capitalism of industry,

manufacturing, assembly lines, and large corporations heavy with middle managers—the

capitalism of the post World War II world—a capitalism that was vastly successful in producing

a massive middle-class in the United States—was built on the production and sale of

commodities [2, 3].

However, in a world where the science and technology necessary to produce and sell

commodities efficiently has spread across the globe, the competition to produce wealth through

commodities is fierce as never before. The work of building wealth through the production of
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commodities has moved, by and large, to the lowest cost centers in the world, places with more

trained workers willing to work for lower wages, places like China and India with a huge and

increasingly well-trained workforce.

The result is that countries like the United States—countries with higher wages—can no

longer compete on the basis of making and selling commodities [2, 3]. Their competitive edge

increasingly comes from how well they produce products, services, and technologies that are

new… special… non-standard—and thus not easily produced across the globe by competitors.

The value of these innovative products, services, and technologies does not reside primarily in

the material out of which they are made. Nor does value reside primarily in the labor by which

these products are made or through which these services are provided. Value—what the modern

economy will pay for—resides primarily in knowledge: knowledge about innovative design of

new products, services, and technologies, but also knowledge about new forms of social

interactions and relationships [4-7].

All of this is old news, not a new crisis. Surely everyone knows by now that a great many

American jobs have been outsourced overseas in the last two decades. Old manufacturing towns

across the country—places like Flint, Michigan—have been devastated in a crisis that began

some time ago and is still well under way today. We read about proposed solutions to this crisis

in the news and hear them in political campaigns all the time.

So what is this new crisis? And what is new about it? How does this new crisis go beyond

the old crisis of lost jobs? To answer this, let’s turn to the idea of a “commodity job.” A

commodity job is any job that because of technologies like computers and the Internet, can be

done wherever trained workers will work for less. A commodity job is thus any job—whether a
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call-center operator, engineer, or computer programmer—that can be done more cheaply and just

as efficiently outside of the United States.

The simple fact is that India, to take just one salient example, has call-center operators,

engineers, and computer scientists as well or better trained as those in the U.S. and willing to

work for less in India than their counterparts are here [8]. And in a connected world—a world

where even real-time face-to-face interactions can be done across time zones via video

conferencing—it doesn’t matter anymore where people are [6, 9]. Time differences can even be

an advantage since, for example, Indian radiologists can read American X-rays while American

doctors and patients sleep at night

Notice that it doesn’t matter whether a job has low or high status. Whether stitching

dolls’ bodies or reading X-rays, a job is a commodity job if it can be easily outsourced. And it is

easily outsourced if it requires only standard and standardized skills. Even jobs taking drive-

through orders at local McDonalds have been outsourced overseas [1]. You can be speaking to

someone in China while sitting in your car in Nebraska, waiting for your order to be delivered to

the cooks via a fast connection between Guangzhou and Omaha. Your medical condition may

well have been diagnosed by a doctor in Bangalore looking at test results online. For routine

medical care in the not-too-distant future you may well speak to a doctor located almost anyplace

in the world via a camera on the Internet with a computer ready to test your blood pressure or

your blood sugar level.

The fact is that people are smart everywhere in the world, and China and India and many

other countries are chock full of people smart enough to be seamstresses and scientists,

receptionists and radiologists. It is a mistake—a potentially disastrous mistake—to think of job

loss in America as only about the old manufacturing jobs. Many of those are gone already—and
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the assembly lines that are left are high tech, anyway. Now the scientific, medical, technological,

and engineering job are starting to go too [10].

Commodity jobs are moving overseas, and if this was the whole story, we would still be

talking about the old crisis, though about a new wrinkle in it: namely, the loss of highly skilled,

as opposed to manufacturing, jobs. To survive this old crisis, new wrinkles and all, the United

States has had to move up the “value chain” and produce more people who can do work that is

centered on innovation and creativity, not reproduction of standard and standardized skills,

whether the standard skills of a call-center operator, a chemist, or a computer scientist. By and

large this has led to calls for the United States to trade on flexibility, innovation, and breaking

the mold, things on which we have heretofore prided ourselves historically [1, 11, 12].

But now here comes the trouble. The looming crisis is that counties like India and China

are not content simply to remain the commodity servants of the U.S. economy. And why should

they be? They are now moving up the value chain themselves to produce people who can

innovate. People who view their work not in terms of standard skills, but in terms of new ideas

and new relationships. Countries with growing economies are gearing up their universities and

their entrepreneurial centers to produce innovative work and innovative workers. Foreign

students who once flocked to U.S. universities seeking advanced degrees are, more and more,

staying at home or going elsewhere [13]. Many countries now fully intend to compete with our

university system—heretofore the best in the world—to produce the world’s innovators.

Of course, this not an inherently bad thing: when other countries compete to enrich their

citizens the world is a better and fairer place. But what it means is that the United States has to

work and to learn smarter. Much smarter.

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Schooling and De-Innovation

The problem is that, in the face of this looming crisis, we are doing just the opposite, and

as a result the picture is actually worse—much worse—than it appears. We have slashed funding

for institutions like the National Science Foundation, an institution that could spearhead a new

effort to produce innovative scientists and engineers. With our testing and accountability regime,

we have ensured that our schools are better equipped than ever to produce commodity workers,

but not innovative ones.

Yes, our government and our schools have made a noble effort to leave no child behind,

to focus on so-called “at risk” children and ensure, through standardized testing, that all children

make adequate yearly progress. And this is all to the good. But standardized testing—and the

regime we have put in place to raise test scores—produces standardized skills. Skills that are a

dime-a-dozen across the world. A country like China may have a huge population in relative

poverty and unprepared to compete for high-tech jobs. But China has over 300 million skilled

and educated workers, more than the entire population of the United States, rich and poor

combined [1]. India may have the world’s largest underclass, but it will also soon have the

world’s largest middle class [8].

The simple fact is that our standards-driven curriculum, especially in our urban schools,

is not preparing children to be innovators at the highest technical levels—the levels that will pay

off most in our modern, high-tech, science-driven, global economy. Inspired by the goal of

leaving no child behind in basic skills, we are leaving all of our children, rich and poor, well

behind in the new global competition for innovative work. Instead, we are busy preparing them

for commodity jobs, most of which will be long gone by the time they finish school.
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Taking reading, for example. No one can deny that we should make sure all children, rich

and poor, learn to decode print as early as possible. Everyone needs to be able to turn letters on a

page into words they can understand. Indeed, we know this is crucial to success in school and

later in life, and we have been making admirable progress in this area under the current system of

reading tests. In one sense this is a positive step, since under some progressive educational

agendas, young children experienced the “culture” of reading, but too many of them—

particularly poorer children—did not learn basic reading skills.

Make no mistake: all kids need to learn to read. But the future of counties like the United

States doesn’t depend on how many children, rich or poor, gain basic skills. It depends on how

many children will be able to handle the complex and technical languages, symbol systems, and

practices needed for success at the highest levels of the value chain—the “languages” of higher-

order mathematics, complex technologies, systems design, graphic design, communication, and

the hard sciences. How many of today’s school children in our public schools, rich or poor, are

getting ready to master these at the highest levels? Not just to master them, but to be able to

innovate in them? In the digital media- and entertainment-centered world of today and tomorrow,

innovation takes place not just in science and technology, but in art, and psychology, and

communications. Innovation crosses the boundaries of the traditional disciplines of schooling,

and the jobs of the future will be in fields like graphic design where art and science meet.

Preparing for innovation

The foundation for innovation has to be laid from the start. Mastery of complex technical

languages (whether the language of chemistry or of graphic design), complex symbol systems

(whether non-linear mathematics or neural networks), and complex practices (whether

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engineering of workplaces or ecosystems) does not start in college. It starts in kindergarten and

before. It is a problem not just for our high schools, colleges, and graduate programs, but for our

elementary schools as well. Just as it is best to start learning a foreign language early—better to

start learning Russian as a second language at home early in life if you are to really master it—so

today’s technical languages, symbol systems, and practices demand learning that begins early in

life and is sustained over the long haul [14, 15].

A number of economically well off people in the United States and elsewhere across the

globe already realize this. They use modern technologies in their homes to introduce their

children early on to technical languages, skills, and knowledge—to create and support “islands

of expertise” in sophisticated thinking [16, 17]. These islands may be rooted in dinosaurs,

mythology, computers, science, or art, but their real import is the preparation they give these

children for life-long learning as they face the ever increasing demands of complex language,

symbols, and practices at higher and higher levels of schooling.

When parents interact with their children about these islands of expertise, they use

complex language. They introduce children to resources such as books, media, and other

technologies. And they engage children in ways of talking, thinking, and working that are

technical, specialized, and “academic.” They prepare their children for later learning, and help

them feel that “people like us” are good at learning complex, technical, and specialized things.

For example, consider what it means when this mother speaks to her four-year-old child

about a toy replica of a dinosaur egg at home [17]:

That’s what it says, see look egg, egg … Replica of a dinosaur egg. From the Oviraptor.

Do you have a . . . You have an oviraptor on your game! You know the egg game on your
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computer? That’s what it is, an oviraptor. And that’s from the Cretaceous period. And

that was a really, really long time ago.

This mother is speaking “school-based” technical language to the child, not just the

vernacular. She is referring to a collection of books and computer games and other resources that

are the foundation of the child’s island of expertise in dinosaurs. She is engaging the child with

early preparation for later acquisition of academic and specialized language tied to content in

science, technology, and visual communication.

Some parents like this mother have children in schools that build on this “home work”

and sustain it, engaging children with complex and deep learning from the outset, preparing them

for future learning that gets ever-more complex, technical, and centered in the content of science,

mathematics, computers, engineering, and art [15]. All too often, however, our public schools are

doing no such thing.

We know they aren’t because we know that more and more we are faced with a persistent

“fourth-grade slump” [18, 19]. What happens is this: A child appears to be making adequate

progress in reading and the “basics” early on. Then, all of a sudden, starting in fourth grade or so,

he cannot read and learn well in school when faced with complex content. The problem is that

fed on a steady diet of standardized reading and standardized tests, the child has learned to

translate letters into words and sounds, but he simply doesn’t know enough words, especially

words connected to school content areas, to keep up! And once a child has fallen behind in this

way, things just get worse as the language and thinking demands become more complex,

technical, and specialized in middle school, high school, college and beyond. What we get, in the

end, is lots of kids in middle school who can decode but can’t read the complex language of their
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textbooks. But today it is not nearly good enough to be able just to read that textbook—you have

to be able to produce and not just consume, to make knowledge and not just receive it.

It is, in fact, too late, way too late, to begin your preparation for innovative work even in

fourth grade, but all too often even privileged parents, let alone poor ones, are facing public

school systems with a narrow focus on test scores, the basics, and helping “at risk” children

succeed in ways that will only prepare them for disappearing commodity jobs.

The new equity gap

The looming crisis—our surrender in the face of the coming competition for innovative

work—is aided and abetted by a new, nearly totally ignored equity gap. A number of people, in

both the popular press and in academia, have argued that children’s popular culture today is more

complex than ever before [15, 20, 21]. It demands complex thinking, technical language, and

sophisticated problem solving skills. Take a look at the language on a Yu-Gi-Oh card or Yu-Gi-

Oh web site, for example. It is often more complex—more technical—than the language children

using the cards see in their school books or hear in their classrooms. Or consider the complex

problem-solving and decision-making required to play a video game like Age of Mythology, a

real-time strategy game with over 300 commands—a game played successfully by many seven-

year-olds, though not always by their parents!

Modern video games—games like Age of Mythology—often come with the software by

which they are made, so that players can “mod” (modify) the game, creating their own scenarios

and maps. Often players trade these scenarios and maps with other players via the web. When

children have parents who help turn Age of Mythology into an island of expertise, tying it to

books, Internet sites, museums, and media about mythology, cultures, and geography, their
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children pick up a wide range of complex language, content, and connections that serve as

preparation for future learning of a highly complex and deep sort. When children are encouraged

to learn the technologies with which to modify video games and interact with others about them

by creating web sites and new content, they pick up the beginnings of value-added technical

skills, preparing them for the long march up the value chain towards innovative work.

But what about the children who do not have these opportunities, opportunities now

readily available to, and sometimes put to good use by, privileged families? Can they get this in

school? Can they get this sort of modern learning system, directed towards preparation for future

innovative work, in school? Not in a lot of the public schools we’ve seen. Today’s popular

culture has great potential to be recruited into such high value learning systems. But this doesn’t

happen all by itself. Kids need a network of parents, teachers, and other mentors to use popular

culture as a tool for long-term growth into complex thinking, complex language, complex

content, and innovative work.

In other words, this ability to leverage modern technologies and popular culture for

learning is creating a new and massive equity crisis, a crisis not mitigated by—and perhaps even

compounded by—today’s technologically impoverished schools. So the looming crisis—our

surrender to the challenge of preparing public school children for innovative work—is going to

hit the poor harder than the rich. But that’s cold comfort, since everyone will get to suffer amply

unless something is done.

So the looming crisis is that the rest of the world is racing ahead to move up the value

chain. Other countries are moving from attracting commodity jobs to fostering an education

system and a social system that will create and sustain innovative work on their home ground in

a wired world. In the end, countries like China and India may attract innovative work and even
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innovative workers from places like the United States. If we don’t change our schools and

society to prepare children for innovation, we will have to beg innovators from other countries to

immigrate to the United States. Indeed, in many cases this is already happening. Students from

Asia already dominate in numbers and talent many of the technical departments in our graduate

schools, while American young people opt for what they perceive as fast riches in areas like law

and business.

Beyond “progressive reform” and “back to the basics”

The solution to this crisis is not in our schools alone. We must transform learning in and

out of schools for children and adults. But schools play a critical role, and the time to tinker with

them, as we have done for decades, is fast coming to an end. We need wholesale change. And the

change we need is neither liberal nor conservative. Both have, with the best of intentions, done

too much already to contribute to the looming crisis, rather than to solve it.

Liberals have too often advocated pedagogies that immerse children in rich activities and

focus on the learners’ own goals and backgrounds. This is empowering, but for many children it

hides the “rules of the game”: the skills, values, assessments, and willingness to work hard that

learners must recognize and master to succeed in a world that no longer rewards commodity

jobs. Some children, often from privileged homes, pick up the rules of the game at home and use

liberal schooling as fruitful and empowering practice ground. But not everyone is so fortunate.

Conservatives have too often advocated pedagogies that stress telling learners what they

need to know and then skilling-and-drilling them on factual knowledge: the kind of knowledge

standardized tests usually test. If you teach students to pass paper and pencil tests—surprise,

surprise—they often improve their scores on standardized assessments. But decades of research
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have shown that students fed on a steady diet of facts and isolated skills cannot apply what they

know to real world problems. Hardly a recipe for building expertise and innovation.

We are only going to speak to the looming crisis when we get out of thinking that liberal

or conservative pedagogies are our only choices. One solution to our crisis—and one way to get

out of the liberal-conservative bind—is an approach to learning that we call “epistemic games”

[22]. We don’t say this is, by any means, the sole solution to our new crisis, but it is one example

of the types of solutions that are required. Epistemic games are about having students do things

that matter in the world by immersing them in rigorous professional practices of innovation [23].

In this approach, students do things that have meaning to them and to society, supported all along

the way by structure, and lots of it—structure that leads to expertise, professional-like skills, and

an ability to innovate. So we have the immersion dear to liberal pedagogies and the structure

dear to conservative ones.

The word “games” may come as something of a shock here. But let’s hold off a bit

dealing with that shock. We’ll answer the question “Why games?” in a minute, but first let’s get

to what “epistemic” means, because in some ways that’s the crux of the matter. The point is that

these are not just any old games. These are, first and foremost, knowledge games.

Epistemic Frames

We must begin to foster rigorous learning for innovative work. But the problem is that

innovative work is by definition something that can not be standardized. It is the domain of

innovative practitioners, people who are sometimes referred to as “reflective practitioners” or

more simply, as “professionals”. By professionals we don’t necessarily mean people who work

in the traditional professions, such as medicine, law, and engineering, but rather anyone who
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does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the

cutting edge of their expertise. Innovative practitioners work in domains with a high degree of

uncertainty, domains that therefore require discretion and judgment. In innovative work, no two

problems are quite the same, and no set of rules—or even routinized experience and expertise—

can determine what an innovative practitioner should do next.

Innovative work can’t be standardized, but, nonetheless, the people who do innovative

work are not simply “doing whatever they want.” Innovative practitioners use the knowledge,

skills, and ways of thinking of some professional community (in the broad sense of professional).

Learning to innovate always involves becoming part of some group of people with a common

repertoire of knowledge about and ways of addressing problems in the world. What’s more, these

professional communities already know a lot about how to make innovative practitioners. If they

didn’t, the communities would die out. So communities of innovative practice—professionals in

the broad sense of the term—can tell us a lot about how to help students prepare for innovative

work [23].

When people become members of a community, they start to think and act in particular

ways. They develop the skills of the community. They start to care about things that matter to the

community. They start to see themselves as members of the community, and to think about

things in ways that other members of the community do. All of this is only to say that a

community has a local culture [24], and becoming a member of the community means

developing that culture’s distinctive ways of doing things, of valuing things, and of knowing

things.

We call a community’s distinctive ways of doing, valuing, and knowing it’s epistemic

frame [16]. We use this term because an epistemic frame “frames” the way someone thinks about
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the world—like putting on a pair of colored glasses. For example, lawyers act like lawyers,

identify themselves as lawyers, are interested in legal issues, and know about the law. These

skills, affiliations, habits, and understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a

particular way. Acting and valuing and talking and reading and writing like a lawyer are made

possible by thinking like a lawyer. The same is true for doctors, but for a different way of

thinking—and for master carpenters, graphic designers, and so on, each with a different

epistemic frame.

The key step in developing the epistemic frame of most communities of innovation is in

some form of professional practicum [25, 26]. Professional practica are environments in which a

learner acts in a supervised setting and then reflects on the results of his or her action with peers

and mentors. Skills and knowledge become more and more closely tied together as the student

learns to see the world using the epistemic frame of the community. Think of internship and

residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, or the design studio for architects.

So now here’s the good news—the first good news we’ve had about our education system

in quite some time: The very same technologies that are making it possible to outsource

commodity jobs make it possible for students of all ages to prepare for innovative work.

Which brings us to the question “Why games?” Doctors know how to create more

doctors; lawyers know how to create more lawyers; master carpenters know how to produce

more carpenters; graphic artists know how to produce more graphic artists and the same is true

for a host of other socially and economically important innovative practices. And now today new

technologies connected to computer games, video games, and simulations—as well as handheld

computing devices and the Internet—can let students learn to innovate by participating in

simulations of professional practica [16, 22, 23, 27]. The technologies that are sending away jobs
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for people with standardized skills measured on standardized tests are very the tools that can help

students learn to think outside the box the way the pros do.

Contemporary video games are profoundly engaging and motivating to young people.

They keep the gamer focused for hours at a time. Rigorous learning requires lots of time and lots

of engagement and motivation [21]. But aren’t games fun and learning work? Well, actually, no

[22]. Skilled professionals (in the broad sense of the term) draw deep pleasure from what they

know and do. That is what keeps them challenging themselves at the cutting and ever growing

edge of their competence. Innovation is fundamentally playful, but far from driving away rigor,

such pleasure and playfulness drives the practitioner towards greater challenges and higher

standards of accomplishment.

In other words, epistemic games are games that let players learn to work and, thus, to

think as innovative professionals. Epistemic games are games that let students develop the

epistemic frames of innovation. Epistemic games are fun, but they are fun because they are about

innovation and mastery of complex domains. Epistemic games are about knowledge, but they are

about knowledge in action—about making knowledge, applying knowledge, and sharing

knowledge. Epistemic games are rigorous, motivating, and complex because that’s what

characterizes the practices of innovation upon which they are modeled.

Epistemic Games

We’ve argued that the only way to prepare students for a world that values innovative

work (and punishes standardized skills) is to move beyond both traditional progressive reforms

and back to basics approaches. The key is to understand how new technologies make it possible

to develop post-progressive pedagogies of practice [23] that are neither liberal nor conservative
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in the traditional pedagogical sense. Computer and video games can let students learn using the

techniques of communities of innovation—ways of learning that stress immersion in a practice,

supported by structures that lead to expertise, professional-like skills, and innovative thinking.

Epistemic games are thus one way to solve the innovation crisis.

To illustrate what we mean by an epistemic game we’ll describe Madison 2200 [28], a

computer-based game in which high school students work as urban planners to redesign a

downtown pedestrian mall popular with young people in their city. Urban planning is a great

example of innovative work. Urban planners take a central role in keeping urban systems in

balance, developing land use plans that meet the social, economic, and physical needs of

communities. Urban planning requires deep understanding of both social and scientific issues.

Urban planners use sophisticated technologies to solve complex problems, including geographic

information systems (GIS) that make it possible for planners to ask creative “what if” questions

and get feedback to inform their work. Learning to think and work like an urban planner involves

learning to use GIS models and other tools to solve complex real-world problems in which

science, society, economics, and technology intersect.

We developed Madison 2200 as part of a summer enrichment program for “at risk”

students. In our first test, eleven high school seniors worked with a graduate student for ten hours

over two weekend days playing this urban planning role-playing game. The players had no prior

experience with urban planning. At the start of the game, students received a project directive

from the mayor, addressed to them as city planners, to create a detailed re-design of the local

pedestrian mall. An information packet included a city budget plan and letters from concerned

citizens about issues such as crime, revenue, jobs, waste, traffic, and affordable housing—just

the kind of materials and issues that real urban planners use, and that urban planning students see
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as part of their training in college and graduate school. The players watched a video about the

pedestrian mall featuring interviews with people about the street’s redevelopment, then

conducted a site assessment for themselves, just the way real planners and planning students do.

Next, players began to work in teams to develop a land use plan with an interactive GIS

model of the downtown area that let them assess the ramifications of proposed land use changes.

For example, if a player was interested in raising the number of jobs, she might choose to place a

new retail business in the downtown area (see Figure 1). The model would show whether that

proposal would raise or lower the number of jobs predicted for the neighborhood. However, the

model would also show how other issues were affected by the same land use choice, thus leaving

players to make a decision about the overall impact (and therefore the utility) of alternative land

use proposals. After completing a land use plan, players created a revised downtown map and

presented their plans to a representative from the city planning office.

In other words, this was a game that students played by the rules of urban planning. They

were redesigning their city, but they weren’t just doing whatever they pleased. Their choices

were constrained by the science of urban planning: by the economic, social, and physical realities

of life in a city. And their actions were structured—highly structured—by the practices of urban

planning. They learned to read and interpret documents the way urban planners do. They learned

to conduct a site assessment. They learned to create a land use plan. They learned how to make a

project presentation. And they had to learn to put these skills together, in the way urban planners

do, to create a convincing proposal for the development and renewal of their city. The structure

that supported learning these skills and abilities was built into the design of the game, and

supported by adults who held the players accountable to professional standards of excellence.
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Possible choices
C1 commercial
ET entertainment
FF fast food
FFD fine dining
HR housing
PP parking
RM retail, misc (a)
SM services, misc

(b) (c)

Figure 1. A player makes a land use change in the GIS model (a). The change is reflected

numerically (b), and spatially on a map of the downtown area (c).

As a result of playing by the rules of urban planning, students learned to think like urban

planners. When we interviewed players before and after the game, those conversations showed

that players had begun to understand the complex issues and systems involved in urban planning

in new ways, and perhaps more important, that they were able to apply their understanding to

solve new kinds of problems. After playing the game, for example, all of the students saw how

the game had changed the way they think about cities. One student said: “I really noticed how

[urban planners] have … to think about how the crime rate might go up—or the pollution or

waste—depending on choices.” Another said about walking on the same streets she had traversed

before the workshop: “You notice things, like, that’s why they build a house there, or that’s why

they build a park there.” Players' thinking about the science of urban planning became 72% more

complex, and considered, on average 20% more factors that impact city planning, as measured in

concept maps completed before and after the game. These changes were dramatic enough to be

statistically significant despite the small size of the sample in this first test of the game. More

important, it was working and thinking as urban planners that helped these students think in new
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ways about the world around them. After playing the game, they consistently referred to the

urban planning model and urban planning practices when talking about economic and social

issues.

A game like Madison 2200 is a rich, immersive experience, to be sure, but it is not just a

game in which kids “play around.” It is a game in which players learn to work (and thus to think)

as urban planners, and we can imagine (and in some cases are starting to build) games in which

students learn to think like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, journalists, and other

innovative practitioners. For example, in the game Digital Zoo [29], players work as mechanical

and biomechanical engineers to design virtual structures and creatures—the kinds of things you

might see in a computer-animated movie from a major studio. Players learn the engineering

design process, keep design notebooks, and make presentations to clients, just the way real

engineers and engineering students do. Not surprisingly they also learn about things like physics

and biology: things like the center of mass, and the period of waves, and how muscle pairs

function in multi-legged locomotion. In one after school program in which we tested Digital Zoo,

players’ use of scientific justification to answer textbook science problems went up 600% on

average after playing the game. Oh yes, and did we mention that these biomechanical engineers

creating innovative virtual creatures and learning biology and physics are mostly in 6th and 7th

grade?

In other words, with epistemic games students don’t have to wait to begin their education for

innovation until college, or graduate school, or their entry into the work force. In these games,

learning to think like innovative professionals prepares students for innovative work. These

games are based the ways in which professional practica create the epistemic frame of innovative

practices. That means doing particular things in particular ways, and being assessed relative to a
 20

particular set of external norms. It means coming to think about problems and care about issues

in particular ways.

By playing these games students begin their apprenticeship in innovative thinking—learning

to think using a variety of epistemic frames, to see the world and solve problems in multiple

ways. These games are part of the solution to the crisis in innovation because to compete in a

global economy we don’t need kids with basic skills. We need engineers who also know how to

think like graphic designers; doctors who also know how to think like computer programmers;

urban planners who have a deep understanding of the law; teachers who understand the practices

of innovation; and politicians who have a deep understanding of and respect for the process of

innovation across a wide range of professional communities.

To be clear: epistemic games are not necessarily games that are played strictly for pleasure—

but then pleasure isn’t what makes a game a game in the first place. Pleasure is the by-product of

good game design and good game play. Play is the world someone enters when he or she wants

or needs to resolve in imaginary form desires that can not be immediately gratified. In play, we

participate in a simulation of a world we want to inhabit, and an epistemic game is play that

gives learners access to a particular form of innovative thinking. When it succeeds, it is fun, not

because fun is the immediate goal, but because taking on a new set of values are an essential part

of an epistemic frame, and thus of an epistemic game [22].

Epistemic games like Madison 2200 are also about facts, and lots of them. Students playing

Madison 2200 had to learn a complex set of zoning codes, and to understand what they meant

and how to use them. They had to figure out the relationships among complex variables such as

the crime rate, housing stock, land values, tax revenue, waste, transportation, and pollution. But

this information was not merely inert facts. In the context of the game, it was knowledge in
 21

action and knowledge in context. It was part of a form of innovative thinking—and thus the kind

of learning that students need to prepare for innovative work.

You may have noticed that in describing Madison 2200 and Digital Zoo we talked about

“summer enrichment programs” and “after school programs”. That’s because schools, as

currently organized, make it difficult to prepare students for innovation through epistemic games.

Teachers can’t spare the time from getting students ready for the next standardized test, and, not

surprisingly, innovation is difficult to accomplish in 40 minute chunks of time, spread from room

to room and subject to subject throughout the day. So to develop and test epistemic games we

look outside of schools, to places where children have time to think and work in depth with and

about complex problems—and where the adults who structure that hard work can focus on

students’ innovative thinking rather than on their performance on tests of basic skills.

But schools could be about epistemic games rather than assessment games—and solving the

innovation crisis in our educational system through epistemic games would also address other

crises that plague our schools: crises that have received more publicity in recent years. For

example, research has shown for some time now that even students who pass typical school tests

cannot actually apply their knowledge to solve problems. Students can write Newton’s Laws of

Motion down on a piece of paper but still cannot use them to answer even a simple problem like

“If you flip a coin into the air, how many forces are acting on it at the top of its trajectory?”—a

problem that can be solved, of course, using Newton’s Laws of Motion. This disconnect between

stored knowledge and applied knowledge simply doesn’t happen in epistemic games. It doesn’t

happen because epistemic games are based on making and applying knowledge. Instead of

learning facts, information, and theories first and then trying to apply them, the facts,
 22

information, and theories are learned and remembered because they were needed to play the

game successfully.

We’ve already mentioned the “fourth-grade slump.” Thirty years of research has shown that

many children who pass reading tests in the early grades cannot learn content later on when the

emphasis shifts in school from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” [18, 30]. The fourth grade

slump happens when children are not well prepared for the increasing linguistic and cognitive

demands of the complex forms of language, symbolic representations, and thinking demanded by

academic content areas like mathematics, science, and history. Epistemic games speak directly to

the fourth-grade slump by using the complex forms of language, symbolic representation, and

thinking that are needed to learn complex content. Learners learn to read, talk, and act within a

domain of professional practice. For learners like the “at risk” players of Madison 2200 and

Digital Zoo—learners who may be behind not just in reading but in reading to master complex

content—this may be the best, and perhaps the only, way for them to catch up with the global

competition.

Why Johnny can’t innovate

If epistemic games are a path to success in the face of a crisis of innovation, what we’re

doing in many schools today is nothing short of the road to disaster. Rather than having students

play epistemic games like Madison 2200 and Digital Zoo, school systems around the country are

cutting classes in art and music and computers to make room for more basic reading and

mathematics instruction.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” arguing that phonics was

the one true way to teach reading [31]. Fifty years later, this is the new gospel of our schools.
 23

Pedagogical conservatives applaud. Progressives lament. And we say that Johnny—and Johnny’s

parents, and teachers, and our society as a whole—has bigger things to worry about. The

problem is that schools fixated on teaching everyone to read are ignoring a far more serious

problem: that our students won’t have the skills they need for life in a connected world and

global economy.

This crisis—and make no mistake, it will be a crisis when we start to see the

consequences of the pedagogical choices we’re making today—this crisis is a problem of

teaching to the lowest common denominator. Schools must stop being primarily about making

sure that “at risk” children acquire basic literacy and innumeracy skills. That is a noble goal, to

be sure, and all kids do need to acquire those skills. But in today’s world—much less in the

competitive world of tomorrow—it is, quite simply, not enough. It is not enough for our

children, and not enough for our economic survival, if schools are only about providing a basic

level of standardized skills for jobs that no longer exist. Schools have to start being about

bringing everybody up—up to the challenge of long-term preparation for innovative work.

Otherwise, America simply will not have enough innovative people to compete in the world right

around the corner. Or perhaps we will just give up. After all, we can always compete by taking

back the commodity jobs as the rest of the world outsources their low paid work to us.

The crisis of teaching to the lowest common denominator is also a crisis of equity. If our

schools surrender to the challenge of preparing children for innovative work, the burden will fall

disproportionately on the poor. If our body politic will not invest the energy, resources, and

creativity in rebuilding our educational system to prepare students to be innovators, then well-off

parents will surely make up the difference for their kids, and the withering of public education on

which democratic citizenship rests will be all but complete.

 24

The alternative is to mobilize the power of new technologies to change the way we think

about education. The same technologies that outsource commodity jobs create a rich and

innovative popular culture. The same technologies that place a premium on innovative practices

make those practices accessible to students as never before. The same technologies that make the

industrial practices of industrial schools largely irrelevant in preparing students for productive

and satisfying economic and cultural lives make it possible to invent a new way of organizing

our educational system.

Epistemic games of all kinds make it possible for students of all ages to learn by working

as innovators. In playing epistemic games, students learn basic skills, to be sure. They learn the

“facts” and “content” that we currently reward. But in epistemic games students learn facts and

content in the context of innovative ways of thinking and working. They learn in a way that

sticks, because they learn in the process of doing things that matter.

Epistemic games thus give educators an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived

from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution—a

new model of learning for a digital culture and a global economy.

And the sad irony is that if Johnny can’t learn to innovate, it will be because we weren’t

willing to innovate. It will be because we were not willing to reinvest in Johnny’s education by

thinking about learning in new ways.

 25

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