Mention the word ‘edutainment’ to anyone who grew up during the mid 90s or early 2000s, and they’ll drearily call up memories of number crunching dressed up with cute cartoon characters. If you’re lucky, your interviewee might fondly recollect games like Age of Empires, Zoombinis, or the Super Solver series. The edutainment wave might have subsided since most gamers’ grade school years, but one team of Engineering students at the University of California, San Diego aims to redefine what it means to edutain students.
Enter CodeSpells. CodeSpells began as project conducted by Sarah Esper & Stephen Foster, two PhD students at UC San Diego who were searching for new ways to teach kids coding. They launched Kickstarter last year under the name ThoughtSTEM, which successfully raised $164,014. Now, the game has found home on Steam in Early Access form, where it will continue to be developed in collaboration with its community.
It’s not just for kids, either. CodeSpells invites prospective coders of all ages to experiment in its world.
A discussion of the game, lead by UCSD student Sarah Guthals, can be viewed below:
CodeSpells places players in the role of a wizard or witch who must use magical spells to solve in-game puzzles, like collecting pieces of bread in otherwise-unreachable locations. Spells in this game alter the state of the game world; they can do anything from moving solid objects around, to physically altering the landscape by using Earth magic.
What is unique about CodeSpells is that players must craft these spells by using a Java-based coding language. At any point in the game, players can access their spellbook and write strings of code that pertain to the tasks at hand. Unlike most edutainment games, CodeSpells does not take what Guthals described as a “chocolate-covered broccoli approach” to teaching. Instead, CodeSpells weaves traditional educational elements directly into the game world’s logic.
For example, a player might be tasked with lifting a boulder to reach a muffin floating in the air. That player would then enter the spellbook and write a string of code that will allow him or her to lift the boulder into an advantageous position to collect the muffin.
Guthals notes that CodeSpell’s game world provides a visual context to the teaching. Players can immediately see their problem solving skills manifest in the game world as the spell that they crafted themselves. It’s an empowering experience to put something that you created with your own hands and brain into practice, and then see it elicit real-time change in the game world. Especially if it makes you feel like a wizard.
CodeSpells uses the themes of the Fantasy genre to put an activity generally perceived as mundane – coding – in a much more fantastical light. This element goes a long way in letting students internalize their coding lessons, but the CodeSpells team also incorporates real-world learning into its lessons. Before playing CodeSpells, the UCSD students have their students write down spells on real paper. They then partake in what Guthals calls Pair Programming, where two kids will partner together to play CodeSpells. One student acts as the Driver, who is in charge of the mouse and keyboard. The other student takes on the role of the Navigator, who writes the code. Guthals says that this collaborative practice, along with the immersive qualities of writing fictional ‘spells’ as code, lets coding students better internalize their lessons. Moreover, it forces them to better articulate what they want to do (in the game world) through the language of coding, thus acting as a naturalizing process for the student.
The CodeSpells team, above all, wishes to add an A to the STEM educational paradigm – STEAM. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are joined by Art in CodeSpells. By channeling this philosophy, the game aims to break down stereotypes that typically repel kids from learning how to code. Computer science isn’t just drudge work in the world of CodeSpells. It can also be a realm for creative expression.
CodeSpells is currently in its Early Access stage, but you can visit its website here. You can also support the team by purchasing the early access here, and by providing feedback on the game’s official forums.