Today, approximately 50% of kindergartners in the United States are from families with one or more risk factors for school failure. Lack of school readiness for children from disadvantaged backgrounds due to social, physical, or economic factors is related to inadequate language, literacy, and early math experiences in early childhood. Schools in Oakland California, with students’ diverse socioeconomic background, face such challenges.

Game-Based Learning is a promising new approach to education that combines Information Technology with advances in New Media. Berkeley's Center for New Media (BCNM) is uniquely positioned to investigate the ways that electronic games will change social and individual learning experiences in the 21st Century. Researchers will establish a new research initiative on Game-Based Learning for pre-K school readiness and lifelong learning. Faculty will be able to develop pilot projects, write proposals, and pursue funding at the national level, in particular the US Congressional Digital Promise: Digital Promise seeks to transform America’s education, pre-K school readiness, and lifelong learning through the development and use of revolutionary advanced information technologies.

Electronic games engage players in fictitious scenarios where they learn to respond to complex stimuli with sophisticated behaviors and strategies. Playing games is always a learning process. In video games. game designers have developed rich, media-specific methods for engaging and retaining the interest of players over hundreds of play hours. During this time, players develop a mastery of the game’s challenges. Players transfer this mastery to subsequent non-gaming situations in many ways. The idea to associate game dynamics with learning content is not new, as every game aims to teach something. However, with the emergence of networked online games, the potential for reaching underserved communities with highly adaptive and engaging learning materials at a very low cost is vast, and must be fully explored. Once we know more about which design strategies yield optimal learning experiences, we can publish these strategies and help address our society’s increasing need for both the breadth and quality of learning experiences at lower costs.

2009 Update:



The goal of Track FX is to design and research a low-cost intervention and assessment tool in the treatment of Fragile X syndrome, a hereditary mental illness. The tool has the format of a casual interactive game that can be played online as well as on cell phones. The game is built on the well-studied mental task of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). TrackFX features detailed game assessments for statistical analysis, as well as adaptive gameplay that adjusts to a players level of competence. The research team determined a lowest age threshold for MOT gameplay at about 30 months, and is currently establishing a normal and a pathological learning curve. Further studies may include effects of drugs on learning curves.

Gameplay is a tool of engagement. Many gameplay patterns involve cognitive tasks which reveal much about a player’s mental activity. Gameplay levels produce progressively increasing challenges for players. As players master such levels, they learn to master the underlying cognitive tasks. One such task, Multiple Object Tracking, drives games such as PacMan, and the classic shell game.

While MOT is used in lab settings for cognitive assessments, the games designed for labs often have only rudimentary gameplay value. Subjects play them because they have been asked to participate in a study, not because they want to play for fun. On the other hand, commercial games are not designed with gameplay assessment in mind, and the data they do produce often is rendered inaccessible to researchers by corporate practices.

Our team, which includes two child psychologists, one designer, one new media artist, believes that this gap can be filled by designing an engaging and entertaining game which also produces gameplay data that meets requirements for statistical analysis.

We also set out to make the game available to the youngest possible players for the least cost with the goal to reach disadvantaged inner-city and rural populations.

Our casual computer game, TrackFX, features three game elements: leaves, ladybugs and spiders. The leaves are identical occluders, which cover up either the ladybug targets (T), or the spiders (D), which operate as distractors. The game is played either on a touchscreen device such as the IPhone or on a screen and mouse computer interface.

The player’s task is find as many ladybugs (T) as possible, while avoiding spiders (S).

All the user-generated gameplay data is continually uploaded to the game server.