When I speak and consult about games and education, I regularly use Amplify Learning’s games as examples. The games are fantastic. Often with one glance, teachers, administrators, policy makers, curriculum designers, and parents understand why I advocate for game based learning.
One of my favorites is Amplify’s SimCell, a role playing game in which the gamer controls a nanobot repairing a single cell from the inside--learning the vocabulary and structure of cellular biology. Every science teacher in the room instantly raises his or her hand and asks, where can I get that game? The problem is, they can’t. It is packaged as part of Amplify’s digital curriculum, sold to schools for use on iPads or the proprietary orange Amplify Tablet.
Fortunately, that may change soon. Amplify just released their first direct-to-consumer learning game. It is a slick puzzle platformer called Twelve A Dozen that combines a moody high-contrast dystopian aesthetic with game mechanics which challenge players to master the basic operations of algebra.
Last year, when Amplify announced their game portfolio, CEO Joel Klein said, “Our games are like nothing you’ve ever seen. We’re not designing homework here. These games will improve learning not because kids have to play them in school, but because they want to play them in their own free time.” Unlike the other big players in the game-based learning space, Amplify’s strategy has always been to capture kids’ free time rather than build games for the classroom. What if children came home from school and chose to play games that were not only awesomely entertaining, but also educational? Could Amplify get students to choose learning games over Call Of Duty? To turn gaming time into learning time? To blur the line between education and entertainment? If they can just capture ten percent of the time middle schoolers currently spend playing video games, that would be impressive.
To accomplish this goal, Justin Leites, vice president for games at Amplify, looked for talent among well known commercial game developers. He looked for designers who had both a passion for making great educational games and exceptional game design skill. “The designers who are working with us are a rare breed,” he said in 2013, “extraordinarily talented in the craft of making great games and passionate about finding new ways to help kids learn.”
Leites’ strategy seems to have worked. Amplify’s games are consistently some of the best learning games on the market. For Twelve A Dozen, he turned to Bossa Studios, the UK indie studio best known for Surgeon Simulator.
“My original vision for the game was to create something physical - a place where players can control a number and interact with the environment in a plausible way (well, plausible for a universe of numbers),” said Imre Jele, co-founder and Creator-in-Chief of Bossa Studios who created the original idea and design for the game. “Twelve a Dozen takes place in a fantastic universe inhabited by numbers who live like us - they have dreams and fears, flaws and hopefully a sense of humour. This universe of numbers had to look recognisable, yet strikingly different from ours.” It does.
“Great game design has a personality to it.” Justin Leites said when he and I spoke about the game. I had been fiddling with Twelve A Dozen for a few hours and asked him about the aesthetic. He explained that he never thinks of a textbook as having an author, that they always feel like they’ve been written by committee. Games, on the other hand, bring you into the world of some developer's imagination. And that world needs to be “a pleasant place to be.”
Certainly, if the goal is to create a game that middle schoolers want to play during their free time, the immersive quality of the game needs to be a primary consideration. The world of Twelve A Dozen is “a world that has its own logic, the logic of algebra.” The game avatar needs to solve a series of algebraic problems to be able to open doorways and move forward. However, there’s no time clock restricting the amount of time the player has to solve the problem. Instead, the game encourages kids to experiment freely, without pressure. After all, if there were a time clock it would just be a slick animated quiz and not much of a learning game. Instead, you can see Twelve A Dozen’s commitment to the exploratory nature of learning through play rather than high stakes competition.
The inclusion of a rewind button is another great element. The avatar never dies. Instead, when you make the wrong move the avatar just kind of hovers before judgment, forcing the player to press the rewind button and try again. In this way, Twelve A Dozen creates the space for learning through iteration, through ongoing trial and error, rather than rigid and judgmental assessment.
There’s a “cycle of play at every puzzle. First you need to figure out a solution to overcome a challenge ahead, for example you might need to jump high up to reach a ledge,” explains Jele. “To do so you need to change your face-value to something with the digit 9 in it to get the power of double jump.” Players need to evaluate the “available resources in the environment; operators and numbers, and use those to create a number with a 9 in it, let that be 9, 19 or 99.”
Check out the trailer for Twelve A Dozen.
Consumers love educational tablet games and I think they’ll love Twelve A Dozen. I called Joel Klein to find out what inspired Amplify to explore this new direct-to-consumer strategy. He told me that folks keep asking for these games and that Amplify wants to be responsive. Presumably, wider distribution of Amplify branded games will also expose more people to the quality of Amplify’s learning content and lead to increased institutional sales. After all, parents and individual teachers are often the early adopters of edtech that eventually trickles into full districts.
The game is priced at $4.99 (iOS). Everyone I’ve spoken to at Amplify was sure to emphasize that there’s absolutely zero in-app purchasing or advertising. They have to keep saying so: as a subsidiary of News Corp, Amplify continues to fight an uphill battle to prove that they have pure intentions.
I’ll admit, like many educators, I was initially skeptical of Amplify. The very notion of a commercial media company selling for-profit educational content seems imherently problematic. But we should have the same worries about pretty much every textbook company and every publisher that sells books through in-school book fairs. Until the world changes drastically, I’m keeping an opened mind. Besides, the more I get know the folks at Amplify who are working hard with admirable conviction to improve learning outcomes, and the more I engage with their truly exceptional educational content, the more my cynicism dwindles. Done responsibly, it may in fact be a good thing to blur the line between education and entertainment.
All week, I watched both of my sons (seven and nine years old) excited to enter and re-enter a world of algebra, and I felt increasingly optimistic about the future of education. The game is fun, which is not surprising. Jele explains that he approached creating the game “considering engagement and fun as a multiplier effect rather than a distraction.”
All good learning games are fun. But contrary to popular belief, they don’t make learning fun, they show students and children that academic content exists to enrich their experience in the world and is, therefore, innately fun. “In the end, the answer is simple,” says Jele. “If the game is not fun, players won't play it and all potential educational value is lost. But make them stick around and their engagement multiplies the effect of every single drop of educational content.”
