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The Challenge in Creating Games for Education:

Aligning Mental Models With Game Models
ARTICLE in CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES MAY 2011
Impact Factor: 3.26 DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00160.x

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CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

The Challenge in Creating Games for Education:

Aligning Mental Models With Game Models
Andy Boyan and John L. Sherry
Michigan State University

ABSTRACTRecently,

there has been a great deal of

interest in the use of video games for education because
of the high level of engagement of players. This article
blends research on game engagement from the media flow
perspective with current pedagogical theory to advance 2
core design principles for a model educational game
design: model matching and layering.

KEYWORDSeducational

media; video games; strategic

thinking; cognitive skills; flow; mass communication

Scholars from several disciplines have convincingly advocated

the merits of video games as a pedagogical tool (e.g., Gee, 2007;
Greenfield, 2009; Ritterfeld, Cody, & Vorderer, 2009; Squire &
Jenkins, 2004). We present one approach to thinking about
humangame interaction research and educational game design.
For many children, enjoyment in video game play results from
the challenge of learning the rules and affordances (qualities
such as the ability to fly, jump, etc., that allow a player to engage
in actions) of a games world (Sherry, Lucas, Greenberg, & Lachlan, 2006), because taking on game challenges can result in a
highly rewarding mental state known as flow (Sherry, 2004;
Weber, Tamborini, Kantor, & Westcott-Baker, 2009). Thus, a
prime opportunity for engaged learning exists in the core mechanism for game enjoyment: challenge. If designers were to place
formal educational content (e.g., cell physiology rules and affordances) in a game world as the challenge, players would be more
likely to experience flow and master the content.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to

John L. Sherry, Department of Communication, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824; e-mail: jsherry@msu.edu.
2011 The Authors
Child Development Perspectives 2011 The Society for Research in Child Development

HOW DO GAMERS CONSTRUE GAMES?

Research has shown that the most popular motivation for video
game play is the challenge of solving cognitive puzzles (Raney,
Smith, & Baker, 2006; Sherry, Lucas, et al., 2006; Vorderer,
Hartmann, & Klimmt, 2003). Of the six video game uses and
gratifications that Sherry, Lucas, et al. (2006) developed in focus
groups and surveys, challenge was the top reason for playing
video games among the college students, eleventh graders, and
fifth graders. Participants stated that they play to experience the
mastery of overcoming a difficult level and to push themselves to
beat the game. Games allow players to experience mastery
through cognitive effort (Grodal, 2000).
Game challenges consist of numerous obstacles and hindrances to achieving the games preordained goal. Although
challenges may appear potentially frustrating, engaging the challenges can result in a highly pleasurable altered state that
Csikszentmihalyi (1990) first labeled flow. Individuals in a flow
state experience highly focused concentration leading to a loss of
time and self-awareness, a sense of seamless control between
thought and action, and an intrinsic reward for play. Media flow
theory (Sherry, 2004) asserts that flow is achievable if the
demands of a particular media product (such as a video game)
are at or slightly beyond the ability of the user. While in the flow
state, players experience a profound sense of accomplishment in
defeating the games obstacles, as well as neurophysiological
rewards resulting from intensely focused attention, particularly
striatal opioid peptide release resulting in pleasurable feelings of
reward (Weber, Tamborini, Kantor, & Westcott-Baker, 2009).
Challenges in games appear in either manifest or intrinsic
form. Manifest challenges are the obvious enemies or tasks that
the player must overcome to win. For example, in a typical
actionadventure game, the player must beat a series of enemies
to traverse a series of worlds. Intrinsic challenges involve the
necessity of learning the unique allowances, limits, rules, and
strategy of a particular game. This learning allows the player
control over the game environment (its world) and characters

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Challenge and Educational Games

to adequately navigate and interact in the game world. In order

to overcome the manifest challenge, the gamer must first master
the intrinsic challenges. To master the intrinsic challenges, the
gamer must create a mental model of the intrinsic obstacles in
the game world that is similar or identical to the true computer
game model. This learning is highly active, complex, and
learner centered (Gee, 2007). Taking up the intrinsic challenges
of the game is most likely to result in the flow state (Sherry,
2004). This provides the first core design principle from media
flow theory:
Core Design Principle 1: Because game-related learning is targeted
at intrinsic challenges, educational content should be part of the
intrinsic challenges of the game.

Successful play requires that players have a variety of skills

to master intrinsic challenges. These consist of game-related
abilities that facilitate interaction with and interpretation of the
game environment. We can divide these skills into three key
areas (there may be others): kinetic learning and skills to operate the interface (e.g., eyehand coordination to work controllers), strategic thinking ability to solve complex puzzles (e.g.,
resource allocation, planning, scientific method), and a variety
of cognitive skills that facilitate interaction with the game world
(e.g., three-dimensional mental rotation, targeting). When game
play demands skills that are sufficient to meet its challenges,
gamers are likely to enter into a highly pleasurable flow state.
Research suggests that game play can enhance these skills.
Hence,
Core Design Principle 2: A well-designed game teaches more than
content; games should contain opportunities for kinetic, work habit,
strategic, and cognitive skill learning.

CORE DESIGN PRINCIPLE 1: CREATE MENTAL

MODELS

Experienced game players know that they must explore and test
the game world in order to achieve manifest goals such as beating a level or ultimately winning the game (Yee, 2006). The
process of learning the game environment is a process of creating a mental model of the game that is similar or identical to
the programmed computer model of the game. Researchers in
fields as varied as developmental psychology (e.g., Flavell,
1996; Piaget, 1985), cognitive psychology (e.g., Barrouillet &
Grosset, 2007; Johnson-Laird, 1983), communication science
(e.g., Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, & Dillman Carpentier, 2002), and educational research (Anderson, Spiro, &
Montague, 1977) agree that people create mental models as
shorthand for understanding human experience. Roskos-Ewoldsen et al. (2002) defined mental models as a cognitive representation of situations in real or imaginary worlds (including
space and time), the entities found in the situation (and the
states those entities are in), the interrelationships between the

83

various entities and the situation (including causality and intentionality), and events that occur in that situation (p. 223). Entities are discrete objects or concepts that are distinct from one
another via any number of characteristics and are relationally
structured via three things: (a) shared characteristics that are
called causal relationships, (b) the spatial information connecting entities, and (c) costs of alternative outcomes of entities in
given relationships (Handley & Feeney, 2007). A causal relationship occurs when there is a relationship between the occurrence of some variation of one variable . . . and the occurrence
of variations of another variable . . . in the same setting (Crano
& Brewer, 2002, p. 178). Spatial information is the location status and measurement of distance from one entity to another.
The costs of alternative outcomes refer to an evaluation of what
conditions might exist if the conditions in the current state were
different.
Similarly, game models are the structure of the relationships
among discrete elements, called game mechanics, that make
up the play of a given game (e.g., Bates, 2004; Bethke, 2003;
Bjork, Lundgren, & Holopainen, 2003; Clanton, 1998; Salen &
Zimmerman, 2004; Sellers, 2006; Squire, Barnett, Grant, &
Higginbotham, 2004). Loosely, game mechanics refers to game
rules, game environmental conditions, and allowable player
actions in pursuit of play, or the parameters that enable the
player to engage the specific challenges that digital games
provide (Eigen & Winkler, 1981; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004).
Categories of game mechanics include the physical properties
imposed on the structure of the virtual world, as well as the
actions that a player can cause the character or avatar to take.
These actions are most often related to character movement,
vulnerability to threat, sense knowledge, and interaction (e.g.,
speaking, shooting, fighting). Each of these character mechanics
has parameters that delimit a particular ability. Similar to
mental models, game mechanics are related to each other
through causal relationships, spatial information connecting
entities, and costs of alternative outcomes of entities in given
relationships.
As players interact with the game, they create a mental model
that accounts for the games intrinsic challenges in order to overcome the manifest challenges. They use a trial and error process,
comparable to the scientific method, to hone their mental model
of the programmed game model rules. Experienced players enter
a new game space assuming that they must learn the rules of the
environment and the ways of interacting and that failure is inevitable for ultimate progress. As players test the limits of the world
and the character, they must figure out how to optimize resources
that provide the ability to overcome manifest obstacles. To do so,
experienced gamers will form a theory (e.g., the physics of the
game world are similar to those of the real world) and test the
theory to failure. Because testing to failure is so important to
game play, most games are designed with multiple player lifes
(sic) and the ability to play the game over and over until achieving mastery.

Child Development Perspectives, Volume 5, Number 2, 2011, Pages 8287

84

Andy Boyan and John L. Sherry

Progress through game stages requires that players understand

increasingly complex game elements. However, the learned
mechanics of a game rarely change from level to level. Instead,
players build on obtained knowledge in their quest to master
more difficult obstacles. In the educational literature, building
new understanding based on prior knowledge is known as scaffolding (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).
The model-matching process provides a point of entree for
using video games as an educational tool. Intrinsic challenges
engage and reward players, making the games appealing. If the
intrinsic challenges in the game model contain the educational
content it is trying to teach, the process of normal game play
becomes an engaging process of creating a mental model of the
educational content via the game model. For example, a game
might model the complex, dynamic relationships among entities
(organelles) in a cell. To complete the manifest challenge, the
player would need to learn the abilities of the organelles and
how they relate to each other. Because the process of model
matching is cognitively active, relies on prior building knowledge, requires reflection on possible strategies to solve the
game, and uses a common model across a number of different
levels, designers can effectively build modern pedagogical practices such as active learning, scaffolding, metacognition, and
transfer into the game-playing process (Gee, 2007). In fact, programmers already use principles of learning in many commercial entertainment video games to foster expedient and efficient
learning of game mechanics (Gee, 2007; Schaffer, 2006). It is
not clear from research whether the game content would need
to be blatant (e.g., The Cell Game) or if it would be possible
to model the entities and relationships in a game with a different theme (e.g., The Dating Game or The Car Driving
Game), then transfer them to biological knowledge, perhaps by
the teacher.
DESIGN PRINCIPLE 2: TEACH MORE THAN CONTENT

When they approached the challenge of designing educational

television programming, the researchers at the Childrens Television Workshop learned that they could layer multiple types of
educational outcomes within a single program segment (Lesser,
1974). For example, a Sesame Street segment in which Bert and
Ernie argue over bottle caps could feature symbolic processes
(counting bottle caps), cognitive organization (sorting them
according to color), and social self (illustrating how to resolve
conflict). Intrinsic challenges of games provide the possibility of
a variety of additional types of learning. Research has emerged
showing that games can aid learning in several areas: kinesthetic
learning and skills to operate the interface (e.g., eyehand coordination to work controllers), strategic thinking ability to solve
complex puzzles (e.g., resource allocation, planning, scientific
method), and a variety of cognitive skills that facilitate interaction with the game world (e.g., three-dimensional mental
rotation, targeting, etc.).

Kinesthetic Skills
A number of studies have demonstrated that video game play
can assist in the development of kinesthetic skills, such as eye
hand coordination. Griffith, Voloschin, Gibb, and Bailey (1983)
found that gamers had superior eyehand coordination to nongamers, although amount of time spent playing games did not
appear to matter. Similarly, another cross-sectional study (Rosser
et al., 2007) indicated that surgeons who are experienced gamers
have significantly better laparoscopic surgical skills. Experiments manipulating video game training have supported this
finding (Rosenberg, Landsittel, & Averch, 2005; Schlickum,
Hedman, Enochsson, Kjellin, & Fellander-Tsai, 2009). These
findings confirm an earlier study (Gagnon, 1985) that found that
video game practice increased eyehand coordination, particularly for female subjects.
Strategic Thinking
A number of studies have demonstrated that video games effect
strategic thinking (Blumberg & Ismailer, 2009). Blumberg,
Rosenthal, and Randall (2008) found that game players use a
variety of strategies for negotiating game challenges. Importantly,
they found that gamers focus shifted from content features (e.g.,
game mechanics, background knowledge) to strategic features
(e.g., impasse recognition, insight) as playtime continued. This
finding is consistent with basic game design rules that advise
introducing minimal challenges at the beginning and building
difficulty in complexity as the game proceeds. In one series of
experiments, Paredes-Olay, Abad, Gamez, and Rosas (2002)
tested whether strategies taught to gamers prior to play would
transfer to actual game play situations. Their college-aged subjects were able to transfer the provided optimal game strategy
to game play despite a number of experimentally manipulated
distractions. These findings suggest that players of educational
games can benefit from a mix of traditional education (strategy
tutorial) and game play.
Day, Arthur, and Gettman (2001) later found that the type of
knowledge structures players used while playing games mediated
the relationship between general cognitive ability and game performance. Specifically, subjects using the predetermined
expert knowledge structure for the game performed significantly better than those who did not. Blumberg and Sokol (2004)
found that players approach games differently in terms of goals
and strategies. They classified these strategies as internal (e.g.,
reading instructions) and external (e.g., asking a friend for help)
and found that frequent and older players were more likely to
use internal strategies than their younger and less experienced
counterparts. Hence, more experienced players tended to be
more self-reliant in their gaming strategy.
Cognitive Skills
A large amount of research has examined the cognitive skills
required for and resulting from game play (Sherry & Dibble,
2009; Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, Kraut, & Gross, 2001). As

Child Development Perspectives, Volume 5, Number 2, 2011, Pages 8287

Challenge and Educational Games

early as 1984, Greenfield asserted that games could play an

important role in cognitive development. Subsequently, McClurg
and Chaille (1987) showed increased mental rotation ability after
6 weeks (12 sessions) of game play in samples of fifth-, seventh-,
and ninth-grade students. Subrahmanyam and Greenfield (1994)
replicated this finding in a sample of fifth graders who showed a
significant increase in spatial ability from pretest scores after
three sessions of playing a game that required spatial skills. In
the same journal issue, Okagaki and Frensch (1994) reported
improved mental rotation ability after 6 hr of game play in a college sample. Similarly, other researchers have shown improvement in spatial ability after game play (De Lisi & Cammarano,
1996; De Lisi & Wolford, 2002; Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007;
Okagaki & Frensch, 1994). Additionally, several researchers
have shown that individuals who are high in spatial rotational
ability are more likely to choose games that require mental rotation skill (Lucas & Sherry, 2004; Sherry & Dibble, 2009) and
perform better at them (Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008; Greenfield, Brannon, & Lohr, 1994; Moffat, Hampson,
& Hatzipantelis, 1998; Quaiser-Pohl, Geiser, & Lehmann, 2006;
Sherry, Rosaen, Bowman, & Huh, 2006).
Researchers have also explored other areas of cognitive skills
that relate to game play such as visual attention (Green & Bavelier, 2003, 2006a); iconic versus verbal representation of processes (Greenfield, Camaioni, et al., 1994); attention, memory,
and executive control (Boot et al., 2008); object location ability,
verbal fluency, and targeting (Sherry, Rosaen, et al., 2006); and
short-term memory skills (Green & Bavelier, 2006b).
Can video game play improve a constellation of cognitive
skills, rather than simply one at a time? Bowman and Boyan
(2008) found that success in a first-person shooter was a function
of a subset of cognitive skills including targeting, mental rotation, and handeye coordination, suggesting that players use
more than one cognitive skill during game play. Basak, Boot,
Voss, and Kramer (2008) provide evidence that games can help
develop more than one skill. After 7 weeks of playing a strategy
game, a sample of older adults showed improvement in both
executive control tasks and visiospatial skills over a control
group. Like the producers at Childrens Television Workshop,
educational game designers may be able to increase impact by
layering skill learning in addition to content learning.
CONCLUSION

The approach we provide here argues for two specific types of

learning outcomes resulting from video game play: the creation
of mental models of educational content and the development of
a variety of skills. Designers can build these outcomes into
intrinsic challenges within games, which are the engaging and
rewarding component of game play. If designers build game
models that mirror educational content and provide a variety of
opportunities for skill development, gamers can learn content
and develop thinking skills while playing highly engaging games.

85

This approach leverages current pedagogical best practices

including probing, scaffolding, prior knowledge application, and
practice, as well as capitalizing on the mechanism makes games
engaging.
At this point, many questions remain. Will mental models
developed during game play transfer to the real world? What role
will teachers need to play in transfer? Do manifest challenges
matter? And, of course, how do these answers vary by age?
Research is needed to understand the value of thinking skills
learned during game play. For example, will improvement of
mental rotation ability make it easier to learn dissimilar content
such as geometry? How will the development of strategic thinking skills effect learning of science?
In the late 1960s, the Childrens Television Workshop discovered production techniques to teach effectively children via
television; these basic techniques continue to inform production
of educational television today. We need a similar approach
toward video games. Unfortunately, todays funding climate
favors game demonstration projects that do not allow experimental manipulation of game elements to isolate basic game
learning design principles. Research needs to focus on more
fundamental questions of learning and transfer resulting from
video games.
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