By Derrick Cheung on September 14, 2019
In the past few years, games like Clash of Clans and Fortnite have exploded in popularity among school-aged children. These games, and many other free-to-play mobile and desktop games, employ strategies that incentivizes prolonged play-time and the use of real-world money to purchase in-game perks. Issues such as microtransactions have begun creeping into the public consciousness, as parents begin to realize the dangerously addictive nature of these game systems.
Dreamscape is a real-time strategy game designed to encourage reading in students between Grades 3-6. Like other strategy games, such as Clash of Clans and Starcraft, Dreamscape has players build up a base, by placing units and buildings down on a map. Similar to a strategy employed by free-to-play mobile games, there is a severe wait time associated with building these units, but instead of encouraging players to spend money to eliminate the wait time, Dreamscape gives the player a passage to read before posing a reading comprehension question. A correct answer speeds up time to allow units to be immediately built. In order to further incentivize using the reading quizzes to speed up the building process, students can battle their bases against other students.
Some advantages of Dreamscape include:
- It is free for teachers and for students. (Paid memberships are optional, and give unique “season” rewards similar to Fortnite’s battle-pass “seasons”.)
- There are web, iOS, and Android versions of the game app, all for free.
- Teachers can create classes
- On the teacher dashboard, the game gathers and presents data on student progress, including which skills students find challenging, individual student progress, the students’ current reading level, and changes in reading level over time.
- Students are unlikely to run out of passages/questions.
Some possible areas of improvement of Dreamscape include:
- For secondary teachers like me, I’d be interested to see if this style of mobile game will appeal to older students.
- Would like to see them expand options to include math or science based questions
For more information, visit the following links:
- The Dreamscape homepage
- An introductory video
- West Vancouver School District’s technology and innovation lead’s blog post
Hi,
I personally enjoyed this presentation very much. I have always been looking for games that help engage students in literacy learning. This is exactly the kind of tool that I was looking for in my classroom. I think I can answer at least in part, the reason why it is difficult to create similar games in subjects such as science and social studies. Apart from the afore mentioned difference of content, both subjects would require critical thinking skills that in turn leads to subject responses which is difficult to program. If you take note, even in Dreamscope the questions that students need to answer are quite superficial. If students needed for example, write a short response or an essay, Dreamscope would not have been able to program simply due to technical limits.
This is awesome. For the last couple of years I have seen my colleagues who teach math use Prodigy, wishing there was something for LA teachers, not realizing there was something out there already. I already have both my children on it, testing it out and I just posted it into my LA Google Classrooms to get students to test it out for me. I do like your idea about other subjects Silvia, but I think the biggest issue is that social studies is so different from region to region, even science is all over the place, although the concepts crossover easier than social studies. It would be be cool to have a game like you mentioned, where the teacher could go and choose the topics. The back end would be a lot of work, but I believe there would be a lot of buy in from teachers.
I think games bring great value in being able to tap into a student’s sense of achievement and even competitiveness.
Sometimes, it can be hard for students to understand why they’re being taught something / told to do something — this might hinder motivation. With gamification there’s a “point” to learning, and effort is made more visual (and rewarded!).
I thought that this was a clever idea. The first thought that came to my mind was when I play games. There are many times when the system “talks” to the player by having a character showing up and displaying text. You have the option of skipping or hitting “A” to make the messages fast forward. I am so into the game, that I do not have the time for reading the messages.
The Dreamscape actually “forces” you to read. I order to advance one has to read and complete certain tasks. It is a great way to incentivize kids to read. Maybe this can also be done for kids that are preparing for the SATs (English section)?
Can we do it for other subjects too? There are other games that aim at a specific subject. One of the math games out there is Prodigy. This game embeds math problems into the game questions so players can complete their mission by answering these. It is available for Grade 1~8. I wonder if there is a company that can plan this for every subject that is taught at school. Am I too ambitious?
Maybe is challenging for designers to actually merge educational content and game entertainment in order to produce a game similar to this one that might attract and be efficient for highschool kids.